Worship Confessional – Sunday, July 27, 2008

We’re a couple days removed from Sunday morning but there are still lots of moments that are very clear in my mind so this should be a fun confessional to write up. This Sunday wasn’t part of a series but instead we had a member of our church teach through Ezekiel 47 and his message was incredible. He spoke on the idea of going deeper in our relationship with God and from the conversations I’ve had with people in the last few days the words hit home in our congregation and there is some real life change happening. That is always exciting to see!

Here’s what our service looked like -

Call to Worship
Reign In Me – Brenton Brown – C
He Reigns – Newsboys – E
Our God Reigns – A
Offering/Announcements
You Shine – Brian Doerksen – E
How Awesome Is Our God – Chris Vacher & Craig Douglas – D
Forever – Chris Tomlin – G
Message – Ezekiel 47
Step By Step – Rich Mullins – G

Yeah so even just writing out what we did on Sunday is bringing back some good memories. Overall we did some things very well on Sunday so I’ll post those – maybe they’ll be helpful for you.

1. We called our people to worship and set the tone very early. If you are smarter than the average bear you can figure out that there is a nice theme tying the first three songs together. I found some verses that talked about the reign of God and opened our service with them – Psalm 93:1, Lamentations 5:19, Revelation 19:6 – and then gave a quick bit of context and read a few verses from 1 Chronicles 16. Trying these verses to the first package of songs was nice – it was a fairly easy way to create some continuity and focus peoples’ attention on one specific attribute of the nature of God’s character.
2. We tried a new key for a song that is familiar. “How Awesome” is a song that I wrote with a good friend of mine – we’ve sung the song several times at our church and this week we decided to kick it up a full key just because it was coming later in the service when voices would be warmed up and ready to go. We tried it in C in rehearsal but it just wasn’t flying the way it should – I got our musicians to take it up to D and it brought the song right where it needed to be. The chorus “sang out” a lot more and it really felt like the verses were sitting in the right spot. We kept it in D for Sunday morning and that was the right call.
3. Instead of asking a new(er) leader to lead the whole service he just focused on the music. This is a new strategy for us and will eventually be the model for training new leaders in our worship ministry. Rather than giving the whole service to the leader – songs, transitions, meet & greet, prayer, etc etc – I just asked our leader to focus on leading the congregation in worship through song and that I would take care of the other elements – call to worship, transition lines, introducing what is next, etc etc. By taking those things away from him I think he was able to give more mental energy to his role rather than spending brainpower trying to remember when he was supposed to ask people to greet each other or introduce the speaker, etc etc. I LOVED doing this and I can see us bringing up new leaders slowly by giving them partial responsibility on a Sunday morning rather than asking them to lead the service as a whole right off the bat.

So there you go – 3 things that might help you out. This Sunday we start a series through the book of Jonah and I am super-pumped for that.