Worship Textfessional – February 24, 2008

It’s been too long since I’ve done one of these – gathering my thoughts around Sunday morning was one of my two main objectives when I began blogging (connecting with other worship leaders is the other) so I need to get back on track with doing regular prefessionals and confessionals.

We had a great morning on Sunday here at OBC. It was a nice change from the week before, I’ll only say that much! Here was our service outline from Sunday -

Sunday, February 24, 2008 – “Act One”
Scene Seven – You’re Crazy
Call To Worship – Apostles’ Creed
Your Grace Is Enough – Chris Tomlin – F
Beautiful One – Tim Hughes – C
Meet & Greet/Offering/Announcements/Prayer
Colossians 1:15-16
In Christ Alone – Stuart Townend & Keith Getty – D -> E
Mighty To Save – Ben Fielding & Reuben Morgan – A
Message
Saviour King – Mia Fieldes & Marty Sampson – E

Two things I want to highlight this week:

1. Call To Worship – Apostles’ Creed
   We don’t typically do a scripted call to worship at the beginning of our service. We may read a passage of scripture or just encourage people to focus their thoughts on God as we begin but this weekend we were very intentional about calling people to really consider what was about to happen. We wanted to remind them that when the church gathers for worship it is time that is set apart from the rest of the week – we gather to give God praise for who He is and what He’s done, we gather to hear from His word and we gather to encourage one another.

   I gave some context to the Apostles’ Creed and then we read it together. It is a great statement of the foundations of our faith and is very symbolic of joining together with the church around the world and throughout history. Doing this together set a really nice tone for our service and gave people a chance to just take a breath and focus their thoughts as we began our service.

2. Click Tracks
   This was our third week of using click tracks and the band pulled it off beautifully. I bought tracks and charts for Beautiful One and Mighty To Save from PraiseCharts.com and we had a great time with the tech team working on our communication and transitions from song to song. The loops added some really nice texture to the song and gave us a very full sound. Because we don’t use clicks and loops for our whole set there was some nice variety in our arrangements this week.

   I did some editing with Mighty To Save and pulled out the 6 bar guitar/drum intro – it didn’t really set the song up well where it fell in the service and the intro was very long. We came in with the whole band right on the intro to the verse which worked really well.We will definitely continue to use clicks and I’m excited to see what other possibilities this is going to open up for our bands.

If you read the words of the songs and the passages from the service (Colossians 1 and Acts 17) you probably get the sense that our morning was very much focused on Christ. Earl talked about the importance of knowing our story, knowing the story of others, knowing the story of God and knowing how all three of those stories intersect. We are at a time in the life of our church where interacting with people outside of our church is a huge thing and we are trying to equip and encourage people to be able to do that in a way that is natural and God-honouring.

At the end of both services we had people come forward if they were willing to make a commitment to find those connection points with other people and to remind them that the “unknown god” they are searching for is real, alive and waiting for them.