Sunday, July 29 Recap

Sunday was good. We’ve finished our “Like This” series in 1 Thessalonians and we’ll be starting our new series looking at the life of David this coming week. On Sunday we had a guest come and preach. Darryl Dash is the senior pastor at Richview Baptist Church in Toronto and is a good friend of ours. He came and preached a message on “Restoring Worship” from Ezra 3.

The service planning process was a little different – mostly over email and with less interaction between me and the speaker, obviously. Normally over the course of planning a service I will meet with our pastor several times to make sure that we’re on the same page for Sunday morning. I’m planning on doing a post soon about our service planning process and will be looking for some feedback from other people who have insight in that area.

Anyways, here’s what we put together.

Sunday, July 29, 2007 – “Restoring Worship”
Ezra 3:1-11
Ancient of Days – Gary Sadler & Jamie Harvill
Forever – Chris Tomlin

What the Lord Has Done – Reuben Morgan
Be Thou My Vision – Dennis & Nan Allen
Heart of Worship – Matt Redman

Message

Give Us Clean Hands – Charlie Hall

“Heart of Worship” isn’t a song that we’d typically do on a Sunday morning (in fact I don’t think we’ve done it in the almost-two years that I’ve been here) but it made alot of sense as the first bookend, if you will, to the message. Our worship leader set the song up really nicely to encourage people to think about the song as we were preparing for the message – just the idea that worship is more than singing and we may occasionally need to rethink how and why we are worshipping.

“Give Us Clean Hands” was a really nice closer to the service and provided another good bookend to Darryl’s message.

At the end of our service we did a little Q&A and prayed for a team of 4 students and 2 adults who are leaving today (their plane takes off in about 2 1/2 hours) for Japan where they will be partnering with some missionaries we support over there. It’s been neat to have missionaries either visiting or being sent from our church interviewed durng our service the past four Sundays – a missionary we support in Rome, one in Central America, a family from our church going to Pakistan and now this team going to Japan.