Sunday, February 18 Recap

This morning we finished up our 3-week series “Revive Us” with a service focused on seeking God’s face.. I thought Earl’s message was so bang on with the idea of seeking God’s face and turning from wicked ways being directions rather than destinations..

Sunday, February 18, 2007 – “Revive Us”
2 Chronicles 7:14
Let Everything That Has Breath – Matt Redman
Indescribable – Laura Story (recorded by Chris Tomlin)

Give Us Clean Hands – Charlie Hall

Today was a great example of not being afraid of changing what you’re doing when it’s not working. In our first service, there were a couple of elements that made the service feel very choppy – you’ll see that we didn’t have any one extended worship package so we were already playing a little short-handed. The Hosanna/Famous One combo led in to communion and the Turn Your Eyes/How Marvelous combo was played as communion was served, so that was really our longest package of music during the service.

As I said in my recap last week, our two services are identical in content and although we certainly don’t think of our 9:00 service as a dress rehearsal, it does allow us to see if there are any kinks that need to be worked out before our 11:00 service. This week we had two kinks.

The first was that our worship leader* prayed after the first set of two songs. After praying, we did our typical “meet & greet” and then moved in to our announcements/offering/prayer section. Having her pray after two pretty driving songs caused us to lose a bit of momentum early in the service. Don’t criticize me because we prayed less in our 11:00 service – there was still a good chunk of prayer that we included later on. :)

The second change we made was right at the end of the announcements. We usually have one of our staff members come and give our announcements (I’ll do another post someday about our announcement selection process) and while that is happening our ushers take up our offering. Because we only had a couple things to announce this week, the offering was still going when the worship team came back in with “Hosanna”. In our service planning, we had asked our announcements guy to ask the congregation to stand when he was finished – and you can imagine what happened next.

People were standing. The offering was only half-done. The band is playing and asking people to sing. People aren’t sure if they should sing, pass the plate, give their offering or just stop. They were pretty confused. But the moment passed – and thankfully it always does! :)

So there you go. Two small changes we made after our 9:00 service that really helped the flow of our service and helped people to focus on the worship, on the fellowship and on the word.

*We have three worship teams at our church who play on a rotation basis and each team has a different leader although I play on all three teams – I lead one, play piano on a second and guitar on the third. The leaders of the other two teams also sing on a second team.