Pulse – Sunday, April 13

Two of our core values at OBC are passionate worship and relentless prayer. Those happen on Sunday morning, they happen in individual ministries, they happen in peoples’ lives and we also put together specific events where we can give more attention and more focus to those two things. That’s the idea behind Pulse.

We started doing Pulse a couple of years ago and we’ve done it different every time – we’ve done 24 hours of prayer, we’ve done prayer stations in our building over the course of a week, we’ve done regional worship gatherings, we’ve done public readings of scripture, lots of different things. For Sunday night we decided to do a worship concert-type event with an extended time of prayer in the middle.

We brought in Dan Macaulay and his band to lead us in worship – we have very talented people in our church who are more than capable of leading events like this but it was nice to bring in someone “special” to lead us in worship. It gave a bit of a unique flavour to the evening and also allowed all of our worship ministry folks to participate.

Dan & his wife had just returned from Nashville where he was tracking some new songs with Nathan Nockels and it was very exciting to hear about the things that are in store for Dan and his ministry. Very exciting!

So last night looked like this -

7:00 Welcome/intro/explain the night
7:05 Dan & band lead us in worship
8:00 Pray
8:40 Dan & band close with worship
9:00 Done

Now I don’t know if you church is used to doing hour-long sections of worship or 40-minute sections of prayer but our folks are not! It was a great chance to do something different, push some boundaries and comfort zones and really communicate to people that these things are important.

Dan did a great job leading us in songs that were familiar to our church and also teaching us a couple of his originals. Doing an event like this usually draws people who are looking for an event like this (make sense?) so it didn’t take much to get people engaged in the worship.

For our time of prayer together, we did a few different things. We prayed corporately (I read a “pastoral prayer” and gave people a chance to pray on their own at different spots), we did some silent prayer of confession and for specific life needs and then I read a corporate prayer of confession. We then had people move into small groups and prayer for some needs in the life of our church, our region and our world. That went for about 20 minutes, I came back up to close in prayer and then threw back to the band for our closing worship.

It was a good night. We had a good opportunity to come together and pray collectively for things that are really on our hearts. We are confident that God heard our prayers and is acting on our behalf – so now we wait, we watch and we continue to pray.