Worship Confessional – May 25, 2008

After a couple of weeks away from the blog for a variety of reasons I’m ready to get back on the horse. Let’s start with a quick recap of how things went at OBC yesterday morning.

We’re in the second week of a new series called “Rest Area” where we are intentionally taking time away from the busy things and just resting in the presence and the character of God. Last week was focused on Psalm 55 – our natural desire to run away and hide when we are faced with trouble – and this week was all about Psalm 1 – what it means to be like the tree with deep roots.

Here’s what our service looked like -

Reign In Me – Brenton Brown – A
Holy Is The Lord – Chris Tomlin – G
Here I Am To Worship – Tim Hughes – E
Offering/Announcements
Video – Down To The River
Saviour King – Mia Fieldes & Marty Sampson – E
Wonder Of Your Cross – Robin Mark – G
Message – “Transplanted”
Amazing Grace – Trad/Tomlin – E

Two things to talk about this week -

1. Our typical setup Sunday morning is to have a full band – acoustic guitar, piano, bass, drums, singers – but the “vibe” of this series really lends itself to changing things up. For the first set of three songs I was up on stage by myself with my guitar which was a nice change to what we normally do. By changing up what people are used to it communicated that we were intentionally trying to make them pay attention to what was different.
   We also changed our lighting – as much as we could. We meet in a gym and our options for lighting are only on or off with about 30 switches controlling different sections of lighting. We worked out which lights could be turned off and which could be left on to create a darker environment in our room but still light enough that you could see people around you.
   The combination of the change in lighting and the change in how the music was presented was pretty effective and allowed us to again communicate the idea of resting in God’s presence as we were meeting together.
2. The video we used was a nice little element. I introduced our service by talking about the biblical metaphor of a river representing the presence of God (Genesis 2, Ezekiel 47 and Revelation 22) and that we know that when we meet together that God is in our midst. Sunday morning is an opportunity for us to rest in the river of God – to be refreshed and renewed by His spirit. I knew that I wanted a video element to support the river metaphor because it would also come up again in Earl’s message on Psalm 1. I spent some time thinking about songs and remembered the Alison Krauss song from the “O Brother Where Art Thou” soundtrack, “Down To The River”. I then went hunting for the right video and found one over at SermonSpice.com that would work nicely. With a little editing of the video and audio we had a final product that worked really well.
   So if you’re looking for a video to use in a service and you can’t find the right video/audio combo as a pre-produced video, sometimes you can put your own together with just a little bit of work and get a very useful finished product that will really help your service. It worked really well for us and helped to continue the “river” theme that we had running through the whole morning.

All in all it was a really good morning. When the band came up for that middle section and the closer it was a nice change from what we had done before so people really responded. I’m hoping that the rest of the weeks of this series will continue to allow people to rest in the presence of God not just on Sunday morning but through the week as well.