Journey of Worship

We began a new mini-series this week called “Generous Living.” Each November we take some time to focus on stewardship and missions. Our desire is not to “encourage” people to simply give more money to the church or to missions work, but to help them consider and grow in the joy of generosity in how they spend their time, what they invest in, how they respond to people in need, and what they do with financial resources.

It’s not an easy topic always, or one that people want to be reminded of, but it is one that I think is at the core of what it means to be a Christ-follower in any time period. We’ll be spending time in the book of Matthew and 2 Corinthians as we seek to grow and excel in the grace of giving.

Service Flow:

Pre-Service video about some of the missions work of the CMA
Because of Your Love (Baloche/Brown)
Welcome/Announcements/Greeting
Prayer
Message with video clip from National Treasure
Call to Response (Matthew 13:44-46)
Lord, You Have My Heart (Smith)
You Gave Your Life Away (Scott/Baloche)
Communion
Jesus Paid It All (Hall/Nifong/Grape)
Offering
Your Name (Baloche/Packiam)
Dismiss (Romans 11:33-36)

The focus of this week’s message was what we called “The Treasure Principle” found in Matthew 6. Basically, what you treasure is where your heart is. The thrust was to help people first of all consider what they treasure and pursue in life, and then to draw attention to the treasure of all treasures – Jesus Christ. We used a clip from the beginning of the first National Treasure movie where they are talking about stealing the Declaration of Independence in the pursuit of the great treasure.

We had a couple of different things happen in the service. During the greeting time we had veterans stand in recognition of Veteran’s Day and then invited people to go and shake a veteran’s hand as part of our greeting time. We felt this was a great way to recognize the say thanks in a tangible way.

We also did the message portion early because we wanted the later part of the service to be a big response time to the idea of Jesus Christ as the greatest treasure worth living for. We began by referencing a couple of short parables that Jesus used to describe the value of pursuing the Kingdom and then began to sing songs to draw our hearts and minds to Christ and His sacrifice. As we moved into communion, we wanted that to be a time to express surrender and to also be the climax of the service.

After considering some different ways to do communion, we felt it would be appropriate and symbolic to actually have people come forward to receive communion. Just as Jesus walked the path to the cross in surrender to the will of the Father, we wanted people to resonate with that expression. We set the communion table up so it stuck out from the front of the platform and during the song “You Gave Your Life Away” we brought a large cross out and set it up at the front of the sanctuary by the table. People then came down the aisle to receive the bread and juice toward the cross. It was a great expression, and many folks really appreciated the different expression.

We then ended by worshipping through giving and singing. We also introduced the song “Because of Your Love” at the beginning of the service. Based on an idea I had read on another blog (don’t remember who), we sent out a link by email to people to watch Paul Baloche singing the song with the hope that it would help the learning process.

If you were there, I would love to hear your thoughts or what impacted you.

To read about services at other churches, check out the other posts at Sunday Setlists by Fred McKinnon.

Thanks!

Related posts:

1. Sunday Setlist: 7/12/09
2. Sunday Setlist: 5/10/09
3. Sunday Setlist: 6/14/09