Worship Pre-Fessional – Sunday, December 30, 2007

We’ve just finished our rehearsal for tomorrow’s service and it looks like it’s going to be a good one. We’ve done this a couple times before where we’ve broken up the teaching and worship/response times in to several sections. Usually on the Sunday right after Christmas we do a “year in review” service where we give people a chance to express their thanks to God for the things He has done in the past year. We do this “open mic” style and although we’re always nervous about what people might say, the focus is usually on what God has done (rather than what someone in our church has done) and people leave feeling encouraged and praising God.

Sunday, December 30, 2007 – “A Psalm Of Praise”
Our God Saves – Brenton Brown & Paul Baloche – C
Everlasting God – Brenton Brown – A
Announcements/Offering/Prayer
Teaching Segment #1 – Psalms of Lament
Psalm 13 – Brian Doerksen – D
When The Tears Fall – Tim Hughes – D
Teaching Segment #2 – Psalms of Praise
Praise The Name Of Jesus – Roy Hicks Jr – D->E
Unchanging – Chris Tomlin – E
Holy, Holy, Holy – Dykes & Heber – D
Teaching Segment #3 – Psalms of Thanks
Open Mic
Forever – Chris Tomlin – G

I’m a big fan of doing these kinds of services – Nancy Beach calls it “leveraging the arts” to support the message. Basically the idea is that Earl will speak for 5-10 minutes to set up the section as a whole then we’ll use silence, music and words as our response to what we’ve heard.

Because we know that not everyone in our congregation is necessarily in a season of praise, we want to move our people through a time of lament. It’s not something that we do enough in our own church and something the church as a whole doesn’t do enough. We’ll try not to move too quickly through that time, either, giving people a time of silence to respond to Psalm 22 on their own and then do two songs that will help people remember that it’s okay to cry out to God when it seems He’s far away.

We’ll do a section of praise, as well, and encourage people in our congregation to call out aspects of God’s character that they are praising Him for. Whether it’s His mercy, faithfulness, grace, love, whatever – there are different parts of who God is that are affecting people in different ways this week. I’m excited about doing this tomorrow.

The last section will be our open mic time and we’ll focus on giving God thanks for the incredible things that He’s done in the life of our church and in our individual lives as well. We’re only doing one service (instead of two) this week and we’ll have a good time of refreshments and socializing afterwards. That should be fun.