Worship Confessional – December 14, 2008

This past Sunday was the second week of a three-week series that we’re calling “Great Expectations” – looking at the Old Testament passages mentioned in the first part of Matthew. Last week was the Isaiah 7 prophecy and this week was the Micah 5 passage, focused on Bethlehem as the birthplace of the Messiah.

Overall the morning was a bit of a challenge to construct – we had four main sections to our service and in the beginning there wasn’t a good flor (for me) between each of them. Our morning was basically going to contain some opening worship, a section related to Advent, communion and then our teaching. The biggest disconnect for me was moving people from Advent to communion – not the most natural transition.

I spent some time talking with my pastor and we landed on the idea of walking people through Philippians 2 – a passage that talks about the birth of Christ, the death of Christ and the importance of humility in both of those events. The beautiful part of this is that humility was the main thematic thread of our whole service so I used the Phil 2 passage as my guide for putting the morning together. I also found a video from WorshipHouseMedia.com that helped make the advent -> communion transition.

Here’s what our morning looked like - 

Great Expectations – December 14, 2008
Holy Is The Lord – G
Holy, Holy, Holy – C
Advent
Reading – Philippians 2:1-7
O Little Town of Bethlehem – E
We Fall Down – E
Offering (Christmas Version) – E
Video – A Child Is Born
Communion – Philippians 2:8-10
Message – Great Things Come In Small Packages

Okay – a few things to hilight from our morning together - 

1. Holiness to Humility – Originally I had the Philippians 2 reading happening right at the top of the service but we decided to move it later to make a real nice contrast between the two songs focused on the holiness of God and the passage and songs focused on the humility of Christ. That was a good decision.
2. Christmas songs - I always find it tough to program Sunday morning using Christmas songs. My assumption is that the songs have become so familiar that people do not engage with them on any kind of level – it just becomes a bunch of words that we sing. This may or may not be true but what we were able to do on Sunday was place a song that I would normally never choose (“O Little Town”) in context both thematically and scripturally. We did 3 verses of that song, transitioned to “We Fall Down” and then moved back to the fourth verse of “O Little Town” – thanks to my friend Paul for that idea! 
3.  Transitions are important - spend time thinking and talking through how you’re going to move through different sections of your service. Don’t assume that people will always (or ever!) get it. This was one of our more “choreographed” services because I wanted to make sure that people understood what we were trying to do. In the end, our morning was very focused around the theme of humility and all of the elements pointed towards that. What could have been a very disjointed, disconnected time ended up being very cohesive.