Worshiping Together: 5/16/10

This week we continued in our series “Improving Our Serve.” We took a look at what it means to have fruitful service that is empowered by Christ and not out of our own self. Our basis was a number of lessons that can be learned from the Christ’s teaching about the vine and branches in John 15:1-8.

Our time of worship through music drew our attention to the sufficiency of what Christ has already done and that in Him and Him alone is everything we need for life and godliness. We don’t serve to earn or maintain our salvation, for that is found in Christ alone. When we have a right perspective, our life and service flows out of Christ and we find joy and song in the complete work of Christ in us for the Father’s glory.

As with other weeks in this month, we had some special elements, but everything seemed to work together as we worshiped this past Sunday.We began our time together with welcome and announcements. One of the things we do as we greet is to remind each other that worship flows from a thankful heart. One way we reinforce that is to encourage people to share something with one another they are thankful for as they greet.

Our call to worship was a short piece focused on the theme mentioned above and built from some different scriptures including Acts 4:12 and part of a song of Moses found in Exodus 15:2. We sang Our God Saves (Baloche/Brown), In Christ Alone (Townend/Gerry), and Let It Be Said of Us (Fry). Just before the last song, I read a selection of Scriptures, and invited people to meditate/pray/confess/worship as God lead them in response to the Scriptures. The theme of the passages was focused on the type of worshiper God desires, how sin affects worship, and that we have an advocate in Jesus.

After that, we took a moment to highlight the Benevolent Ministry/Fund and then moved into the offering time. During offering, one of our young ladies who is a college student did a special music on guitar and sang. She did Hillsong’s Desert Song.

We then got to see our series character Skip give us a special announcement (video will be posted later), and moved into the message. During the message we used one of the video from the folks at Deidox about a young lady named Lindsay who works as a middle school teacher in New York City. Her story talks about how she impacts her students because of her relationship and strength from Christ. Be sure to check out their stories. They are great.

Following the message, we sang together our theme song for the series, God of This City. People really seem to be connecting with the message of this song.

After the song, we then invited people to consider how they might connect and serve as a part of our Body for the glory of the Lord. Each year we do something called “Ministry Expo” to expose people to ministry opportunities. For the last few years, we have included it as part of the service to try and engage more people. We found that if we offer it just between services, many people choose not to engage. This year, we made another change to our approach. As we considered all the different options, we realized it may be a little overwhelming to some people to have so many choices and not know where to start. So we are doing two. In the spring, we focused on internal church ministries, and in the fall we will focus on externally focused ministries. These tweaks seem to be good.

Things seem to go a lot smoother and less stressful than last week. I wasn’t sure all the songs flowed together as well as I might have liked, but had some people mention how much the song selection this week meant to them in hearing from God. Goes to show how much I know sometimes.

If you were there, it would be great to hear your thoughts/comments.

Thanks for stopping by. To find out how other churches worshiped together this week, check out Sunday Setlists at The Worship Community.