Worship Textfessional – March 23, 2008 – Easter Sunday

So if there’s a Super Bowl in church world, yesterday was it. Like I told our team at rehearsal, every Sunday is important but Easter Sunday has added significance. It’s a unique opportunity to focus on celebrating the resurrection and it’s also an incredible opportunity to communicate the story of the gospel to people who are willing to listen in a way that they may not be the other 51 Sundays of the year.

We decided to focus on three things for Easter morning -  worship, word and testimony. Really that’s what we do every week but we wanted to communicate the significance of the resurrection in each of those ways and give people a real opportunity to celebrate in each of those ways.

Here’s our service outline -

Sunday, March 23, 2008 – Easter Sunday
Why It Matters – The Resurrection
Pre-Service – Our God Saves & Happy Day
Because He Lives video & chorus – Bill Gaither (what??!!) – G
Welcome/Intro/Offering
Resurrection video
All The Earth – Paul Baloche – E
Everlasting God – Brenton Brown & Ken Riley – A
Scripture – John 20:1-9
Mighty To Save chorus & bridge – Reuben Morgan & Ben Fielding – G
Message – 1 Peter 1:3-5
In Christ Alone – Stuart Townend & Keith Getty – D -> E
Baptisms!
How Great Is Our God – Chris Tomlin – A
How Great Thou Art chorus – Stuart Hine – A

Okay this is going to be a bit longer than usual but it’s my blog and so that’s how I’m going to roll. “How I’m going to roll” is a phrase that I’ve never said in real life but it works on the blog. Okay.

We did two songs as pre-service music to set the tone. We used clicktracks from Praise Charts for “Our God Saves” and “Happy Day” and the band pulled those off beautifully. We had an issue in our first service with the click for “Our God Saves” but our tech guys were on the ball – shut the click down and brought it back in for the intro of “Happy Day”. Nice work, Peter!

Right when we hit the ending of “Happy Day” we ran the “Because He Lives” video – the volume was up nice and high to get everyone’s attention. Right on the last note of the video the whole band came in playing the song in the same key (G, if you’re wondering) and we did the chorus in the same kind of feel that the video had just been doing. If you’ve been around here for a while you’ll know that “Because He Lives” is not really (okay, not at all!) my kind of song but by just doing the chorus and because of the feel we chose, it worked really well as a great opener for the service.

From there I welcomed everyone and threw to a spoken word video to get people focused on the resurrection. My only issue with Bluefish is that they put their logo at the end of the video. Sure their videos are cheap but I’d rather pay more and not have the logo at the end. I don’t know if I violated the license or not but I edited the logo out and just had the audio running under a black screen at the end. Sorry guys, you’ve got my money (at the price you set) so I’m not advertising your company to my congregation.

Our worship set out of the video was very high energy and the congregation was really engaged. “All The Earth” and “Everlasting God” are two favourites for our church so people were really singing out. I love being able to back off the mic to let the congregation carry the melody when they’re really comfortable with a song – I was able to do that several times in both services yesterday. We closed that set by reading the resurrection account from John and then doing the chorus and bridge of “Mighty To Save” – I set up the bridge by just saying that instead of the words being focused on us (we should be the ones to shine our light and let the whole world see) that we were singing the words as a prayer to God, that he would shine His light that the whole world would see that Jesus is the risen King. I’m not sure if it had an impact on how people engaged with the song but it was a bit of a teachable moment so I took it.

Earl’s message was short but very sweet. Focused on the power and hope that we have because of the resurrection. Because of the spike in attendance we know that there are people who simply think the Jesus story is a nice little thing to hear at Christmas and Easter but doesn’t really have much impact beyond that. I love the way that Earl is able to communicate truth that can be understood and applied by people at various points along their spiritual journey. One thing he told the congregation was that a man in the later stages of his life came to Earl before the first service and told him that he had given his life to Christ earlier this week – talk about celebrating the living hope we have in Christ! Using “In Christ Alone” as a transition between the message and baptisms was beautiful.

The real hilight on Sunday was the baptisms. At our church we do it like this -

• baptizer and baptizee come in to the tank
• baptizee  is introduced and reads a one-page testimony of who they were, who they are and why there are being baptized
• family or close friend reads a few verses for that person and gives a short word of encouragement
• baptizee is dunked
• congregation erupts in applause

So on Sunday we repeated that process seven times over the two services. Incredible. It is always amazing to hear the unique stories of how God has worked in the lives of each of those people and to know that He is using those stories to impact people who are listening. We baptized a husband and wife as well as three high school girls, one of whom came to faith through the other two and had her not-yet-Christian family there to hear her testimony and witness her baptism. Awesome.

We closed the service with an arrangement of “How Great Is Our God” and “How Great Thou Art” that blew the roof off the place. Nothing spectacularly ingenious with the music but two very familiar songs combined together with the spirit of the rest of the service and people were just ready to explode. We did verse1/chorus/verse2/chorus/chorus/bridge/bridge of HGIOG and then launched into the chorus of HGTA and it was on. Back to the chorus of HGIOG and ending with an accappella chorus of HGTA was pretty much the perfect ending to our morning together.

So there you go. Longer than normal. Sorry again. Bonus points if you made it this far. I need to start doing these on video but my computer decided this week that it doesn’t like video editing.