Worship Confessional – February 15, 2008

This is week number six of our series on marriage called “Marriage Matters” and after five weeks focused on God’s design for marriage and the roles of husbands and wives in marriage we decided to take a bit of a turn and focus on celebrating singleness today. That may seem odd for a marriage series but we know that 1/3 of the people here on Sunday morning are either single and not yet married or single again after divorce or being widowed. Learning how to live in a way that honours God while being single is just as vital as it is while being married.

Like every week in this series we have done a personal Q&A during the series – other weeks it’s been couples who have been married a looooong time (as in 50+ years!!) but this week we did a Q&A time with a great woman from our church who was widowed 12 years ago after being married for 41 years. She has experienced singleness before marriage, over four decades of marriage and now an extended time of singleness again. Her life is a great testimony that marriage is not the be all and end all of our relational lives.

For our time of worship, we didn’t really do anything thematic but just spend some time focusing on giving God worship for who He is and what He’s done – as well as celebrating the really unique fact that corporate worship has to happen in community. We are not in our own little worlds doing our worship time – for the church to worship best in every way, it must happen in community.

Here’s what our morning looked like -

Call to Worship

O Lord, open our lips
and our mouth will proclaim your praise.
O God, come quickly to save us.
O Lord, come quickly to help us.
Glory to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning is now
and shall be for ever. Amen.

Doxology – Traditional – G
Forever – Chris Tomlin – G
Responsive Reading

The Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.
Let us rejoice and shout for joy,
giving God the glory.

Glory to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning is now
and shall be for ever. Amen.

Salvation Belongs To Our God – Adrian Howard & Pat Turner – A
Adoramus Te

We adore Thee, O Christ, And we bless Thee,
Who by the holy cross have redeemed the world,
Who have suffered for us! Lord, have mercy upon us!

Lead Me To The Cross – Hillsong United – E
Message – “Celebrating Singleness”
Your Grace Is Enough – Matt Maher – G

So nothing way out of whack – I know not everyone is used to doing responsive readings but they are a regular part of what we do here. Starting of our service with a reading was a good way for me to remind people that this is a communal event – it’s not a performance from the stage, it’s not your own personal worship time with God – we are here together! Leading from that to the Doxology and Forever set up the service really nicely.

I’ll talk about the Adoramus Te for a bit because it’s probably the thing that is the most unique for people who are reading. It is a poem or song of worship that is typically read or sung during a stations of the cross celebration on Good Friday.

Here are the words in Latin -

Adoramus Te, Christe, et benedicimus Tibi,
Quia per sanctam crucem Tuam redemisti mundum,
Domine, miserere nobis!

And in English -

We adore Thee, O Christ, And we bless Thee,
Who by the holy cross have redeemed the world,
Who have suffered for us! Lord, have mercy upon us!

Beautiful! I found a really nice recording of the Adoramus Te being sung by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge on iTunes. The link is here if you’d like to listen. We put the English words up on the screen, played the song and asked people to focus on the words as they listened – praying and thanking God that He has redeemed the world through the cross. Very cool moment!

There you go. Make sure you hit Fred’s site and check out all the other stories of what’s been happening at churches all over the place today.