Worshiping Together: 3/21/10

As we continue in our Easter series, “Do You Believe?”, this week we were in John 17. Our senior pastor preached a message called “The True Lord’s Prayer” as we asked if people believed that Jesus is One with the Father. As we looked at what Jesus’ prayer in John 17 revealed about Himself and about the Father, we sang of His glory and celebrated transformed hearts together through baptism.

The service began as normal with welcome and announcements as reminded people about the many events coming up in connection with Holy Week like Palm Sunday, our Maundy Thursday Passover Remembrance, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. We also reminded people about summer camps and heard about one of our regional camps, Yellowstone Alliance Adventures.

In our call to worship (written by our intern), we took a moment to remind people what it means when we talk about God’s glory in worship and the act of glorifying Him. We like to take these opportunities every so often for “worship nuggets” to help people be on the same page and understand what we are doing together.

Our opening songs included Jesus Saves (Cottrell/Moffitt), Glorious (Baloche/Brown), and Praise the Father, Praise the Son (Tomlin/Cash). We’ve been working on Jesus Saves to have it ready to be sung well on Easter Sunday. Between Glorious and Praise the Father, Praise the Son, we paused for a time of Scripture (Ephesians 2:13-18) and prayer.

Following we moved to the offering and came back again to the believe/proof theme we’ve been using with this video from Igniter Media.

Following the message, we showed this brief video from BlueFish TV, to set up (and allow for transition) for the time of baptism.

Each time we do baptism, we include an insert that mirrors the content on our website to help people remember and understand the purpose and symbolism of baptism. As each person comes, they have the option of sharing a brief story (usually teens and adults do this), and then someone usually comes to share a brief word of spiritual encouragement before the person is baptized. It can sometimes be challenging to have baptisms in both services, but we were fortunate to 5 people in our first service and 5 in our second service. I always think it’s great to be able to have events like this in both services so that everyone can participate. People always enjoy hearing the stories, too.

We ended the morning by singing Mighty to Save (Morgan/Fielding) together. I ended up tagging a couple of choruses of How Great Is Our God, too. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

Our team did a great job, and we had one of our newer drummers (a high school student) playing this week. He did a great job, even though he was a little nervous.

Thanks for stopping by. To read about other worship experiences in churches all over from this past Sunday, check out Sunday Setlists at The Worship Community.