The Sunday kicked off the final series of our current senior pastor. As I’ve mentioned before, we are entering into a time of transition in the life of Cody CMA. Over these next few weeks, he’ll be wrapping up ministry here and preparing the church with some biblical counsel for the next season of life.
The metaphor of the hand-off comes from relay races where one runner has to hand a baton off to the next runner to keep the race going. It has to be done correctly so that the team is not disqualified and so they don’t loose precious time in a tight race. When done correctly, it is a thing of beauty that just happens. When done poorly, everyone’s attention is drawn to it and the price can be high.
This past Sunday, we spent time in the book of Philippians talking about gratefulness and thanksgiving. Our service focused on calling people to gratitude and thanksgiving in a number of ways. We began with welcome, announcements, and our greeting time.
Our call to worship was a responsive call to worship using a litany of thanksgiving that I think came from the Book of Common Prayer. It consisted of a number of statements, with the congregation responding “We thank You, Lord.” We then moved into songs that reinforced this themes and also began preparing us for communion that would come later. The songs included Because of Your Love (Baloche/Brown), Your Grace Is Enough (Maher), and Once Again (Redman). We had a time of prayer and confession before Once Again.
We then moved to the offering. During the offering we showed a short video piece that again reinforced the idea of thanksgiving and gratefulness from Igniter Media called “Thank You, God.” You can watch it below.
We then moved to the sermon. This was the first of three that will be given as a ministry wrap up by our senior pastor. He focused on Philippians 1:3-11, Philippians 2:12-18, and Philippians 3:12-16 and the idea that long term teamwork pays off.
Following the message, we had a time for people to say what they were thankful or grateful for our loud.
We then celebrated communion together and closed by singing Great Is Thy Faithfulness (Runyan) and with Psalm 117.
It was a good morning together. It was a busy weekend in the life of our church due to a major wedding event. As a result, our only time of rehearsal was Sunday morning before Sunday School. Our team did a great job this weekend coming prepared and working hard in a limited amount of time. It’s great to be able to serve with capable and reliable people.
Otherwise, there’s not much to report. It was good to be able to again draw people back to the importance of gratitude and thanksgiving at a time other than Thanksgiving.
Thanks for stopping by. To see what other churches did, be sure to check out the Sunday Setlists at The Worship Community.
