Worship Textfessional – April 27, 2008

Sunday was the first of a two-week focus on our regional and global outreach efforts at OBC. It was pretty nice to start this series coming right out of the Impact week of our identity series and overall our morning was pretty good. It was one of those services where there are lots of small pieces that needed to fit together really well as a whole for the thing to come off as one connected experience rather than a disjointed series of parts.

This is what our morning looked like -

Hosanna – Paul Baloche – E
Open The Eyes Of My Heart – Paul Baloche – E
Mighty To Save – Hillsong – A
Q&A w/ YFC staff
Offering/Announcements
Prayer
God Of This City – Bluetree/Tomlin – Bb
Q&A Panel – single moms ministry
Message – “Greater Things” – John 14
God Of This City

Okay – so let me give some context to a few things so that this make sense.

1. We wanted to highlight regional ministry efforts that our church is already involved in. I’ve posted before (1 | 2) about our new ministry to single moms and on Sunday we did a Q&A panel with two people from our church who have been involved in the work of the ministry as well as a single mom who has been impacted by people in our church who have participated in the ministry. The moms who spoke are not members of our church and at least one of them had never been out on a Sunday morning before. It was pretty exciting to see their willingness to share with our congregation how they have been blessed by what people have done for them.
2. God Of This City – We wanted to use this song as a setup and closer to the message and the lyrics fit perfectly with the theme of our service. We sent out one of our photographers to take photos of our region this week and I put together a background video of those photos to be played the first time the song was done. That first time I intro’d the song and just did it on my own with acoustic – I sat on a stool and had the photos playing on the screen behind me with the words. The second time we did the song we had the whole band playing, leading the congregation – and we also used the click/loop track from PraiseCharts.
3. The whole push of the sevice was that God has called us to do “greater things” based on John 14. Earl nailed it and I’m excited to see what kind of response will come from Sunday. We recognize that we have been setting the bar high for people but I think it’s been a good wake up call for some in our church – if they’re going to call OBC their church home then there has to be an active “living out” of their faith in our region and in our world.

Overall the morning went very well. We had some tech issues in each service but nothing that we weren’t able to overcome. We have good people who know what they’re doing and know how to handle glitches.

It was also very exciting to hear about the work that our church is involved in. It didn’t come off at all as us tooting our own horn and was really just an opportunity to remind people that God has called us to have significant impact in our region – to do “greater things” than what has already been done in the past.

Next Sunday we’re talking about our global outreach efforts and I cannot wait for that!!