Worship Text-fessional – Sunday, August 19, 2007
Alright – I’m on a roll! Two posts in a row!
This week we had one of our bass players, John, lead the service. This is the second time he’s led our Sunday morning and the first time was awesome too!
Sunday, August 19, 2007 – “After God’s Own Heart”
You Shine – Brian Doerksen
Lord Reign In Me – Brenton Brown
Announcements, etc
Go! Students
Better Is One Day – Matt Redman
Your Love Oh Lord – Third Day
Message
Psalm 13 – Brian Doerksen
So this week was interesting. We went through our regular planning process, met as a pastor team to work out all the details and then Saturday morning (which is when we do our full rehearsals) my senior pastor came to me with the idea of totally changing how we were going to do the response section of the service. Instead of doing a medley of “How Great Is Our God” and “How Great Thou Art” (which we’re actually doing to do this week) he had the idea of using a song that would be new to our congregation but would really communicate the core of his message – even when we’re living life in the cave, we need to trust in God’s unfailing love.
There’s a song on Brian Doerksen’s “Live In Europe” CD based on Psalm 13 and we really thought it would work great. BUT there was only about 30 minutes for me to learn the song, teach it to the band and then figure out how we were going to present it. What we decided to do was to have me come at the end of the message, play the verse a couple of times as Earl led people through the text of the Psalm. As he prayed to close that section, the whole band came up, we did the verse again leading to the chorus – big contrast in feel, lyrics, everything – and had the congregation join us.
It was pretty powerful – several people came up to me right after the service and commented on the impact of that moment.
So – lessons? Although we try to be very pro-active in our planning and we spend lots of time thinking, praying, planning and re-thinking our song selection, service flow, placement of worship elements, etc etc sometimes there is just a great idea that comes to us last-minute and we have to run with it. I’m glad we did.
