Worship Textfessional – Christmas Eve – December 24, 2007

After a nice little blog holiday, I’m back on the train.

Here’s what we had lined up for Christmas Eve. This is a big event in our town and our building was pretty full for both services. Lots of visitors, family and friends and it’s a great opportunity to tell the Christmas story in a really simple way and have people slow down and think about it for a few minutes before they go back to the craziness of this time of year.

Monday, December 24, 2007 – “The Surprising Story Of Christmas”
Welcome
Isaiah 9
Joy To The World
Hark The Herald Angels Sing
O Come All Ye Faithful
Luke 1:26-38
What Child Is This
Luke 2:8-20
Angels We Have Heard On High
Matthew 2:1-2, 9-11
“Expectations, Rumours, Responses”
Poem – “God Is With Us”
Immanuel – Michael Card
Message – “The Surprising Story Of Christmas”
O Holy Night
Silent Night

Our focus on Christmas Eve was to look at the responses of Mary, the shepherds and the Magi to God just showing up in their lives. Obviously the push being to encourage people to think about what their response would be. We sang Christmas songs and had people read some of the passages that told the story.

• The “Expectations, Rumours, Responses” thing was a bit of a monologue that I wrote with someone from our church who presented it coming out of the Matthew 2 reading. The basic idea is that we wanted to place her in the story so she read the verses and then talked about how she had heard the story for the first time from a friend of her father’s who had met these men as they entered Bethlehem. It went over really well and set up the more introspective part of the service.

• The poem “God Is With Us” is from a thing Don Chapman put together. You can get it from his WorshipIdeas.com site but you need to register and then purchase the Christmas service he’s put together.

• “Immanuel” is a bit of a tradition for us. No, we don’t do it like the recording – no oboes or string quartet! :) One of our worship leaders loves to do this song and he pulled it off incredibly – especially at the first service! It was fantastic.

The service closed with a woman from our church who is a classically-trained opera singer doing “O Holy Night” – I think this will also become a tradition for us at Christmastime. She has an incredibly powerful voice and is a great performer. That led beautifully in to “Silent Night” which we do every year as our close. There are candles on chairs as people come in and then we light them during the intro of this song. I love being on stage for the end of the service – we have the best view!!

All in all, the service was great. I had lots of positive comments from people and it seemed like it was an actual worship experience – not just a bunch of Christmas songs all jammed together with a nice little message. I’m glad we took the time we did to think about how this fit with our run of Sunday morning services leading up to the 24th. Everything worked together really well.

I know I’m a little late but how was your Christmas?