Worship Textfessional – March 2, 2008

I know there are some of you who are really tracking with worship confessionals so I apologize that it’s taken me a few days to do this one. Over the weekend we were dealing with one sick daughter, then two, then my wife got it and now the bug has made its way over to me. Not very fun. Thankfully the worst of it hasn’t hit two of us at the same time but it has definitely made for a long, slow week.

Ok. This past Sunday was pretty good. Our senior pastor was away so we brought in a friend of his who works for our denomination. Although we are a baptist church we aren’t tied very closely to our denomination and people who come from a “big B baptist” background often aren’t sure what to make of our church. Having said that, it was good to hear from someone who is involved with churches in our region and to have someone from the denomination come to let us know some of the things that they do for and with us was a good thing.

We are almost finished our series in Acts and this week was all about focus in the face of frustration. We were looking at the story of Paul’s trial and the accusations and limitations he faced while knowing that God had called him to continue preaching in the face of these adversities. The part of his discussion with King Agrippa which is recorded for us is priceless -

Then Agrippa said to Paul, “Do you think that in such a short time you can persuade me to be a Christian?”

Paul replied, “Short time or long—I pray God that not only you but all who are listening to me today may become what I am, except for these chains.”

Acts 26:28-29

Here’s our setlist -

Sunday, March 2, 2008 – “Act One”
Scene Eight – Staying Focused in Frustration
Doxology with new lyrics – Traditional, Thomas Ken & Thomas Miller – G
Forever
Meet & Greet/Offering/Announcements/Prayer
Be Thou My Vision – D -> E
Enough – Chris Tomlin – G
Tis So Sweet To Trust In Jesus – G
Message

Overall the morning went pretty well. We had planned to close with “Never Let Go” but because of the length of the message we dropped it both services. Instead we just closed by giving people the chance to forward for prayer. Two things to highlight from this week -

1. Like I told you last week, we’re trying to be more intentional with our call to worship off the top of the service. We opened the service with “Doxology” (including some awesome new lyrics from Gateway) and between every verse we did either a responsive reading or just read a block of scripture. It went like this -

Psalm 100 (Responsive)

Praise God from Whom all blessings flow
Praise Him all creatures here below
Praise Him above ye heavenly hosts
Praise Father Son and Holy Ghost

Jude 1:24-25

Let earth and heavenly saints proclaim
The power and might of His great name
Let us exalt on bended knee
Praise God the holy Trinity

1 Timothy 1:17

Praise to the King His throne transcends
His crown and Kingdom never ends
Now and throughout eternity
I’ll praise the One Who died for me

Psalm 136:1-7

Those passages flowed really well with each of the verses and gave us an opportunity to ease in to worship that morning, if that makes sense. By using a combination of speaking and singing it got people warmed up a little bit before we went right into full out singing. After reading the verses from Ps. 136 we moved right in to “Forever” and that was a good transition.

2. If you’ve seen many of my confessionals you know that we include a pretty wide range of songs in our services – you’d probably call our worship “blended” but sometimes that has a bit of a negative connotation and in our case it is very positive and makes alot of sense. As a worship leader who is also a musician, one of my responsibilities is taking songs and making them work not just as a song of worship but also as a song of music (are there any other kinds??). So when we came to “Tis So Sweet” in rehearsal this week one of the things we had to tackle was the little transition from the verse to the chorus. For people who are used to singing this song you know that there is really only a two beat count between the last line of the verse and the first line of the chorus -

Just to rest upon His promise/and to know “Thus saith the Lord”/ (count 1 on “Lord” then count 2)
Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him

Musically, that doesn’t really make sense for people who aren’t overly familiar with the song. For most people it’s much more comfortable to sing -

Just to rest upon His promise/and to know “Thus saith the Lord”/ (count 1 on “Lord” then count 2, 3, 4)
Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him

Instead of a short 2 count we give a full 4 count which leads really nicely to the chorus. That’s one of those things that will let you do hymns that have great lyrics, great melodies, great depth to them but musically are from a completely different era. Hope that helps.

So yeah, good morning at OBC. It’s been fun reading other confessionals and seeing what people did this weekend at your church. Have you posted a confessional?