Journey of Worship

Posts Tagged ‘sunday setlists’

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we did our annual Vacation Bible School for kids from Monday through Friday. The theme this year was ‘Released: God has the power to set you free’ and focused on stories from Peter’s life in the book of Acts. For the last few years, our children’s ministry has developed their own programs instead of buying something.

This year, instead of doing a closing program type thing on Friday evening (after everyone was tired and worn out from the week), we decided to focus the theme of our Sunday service on the VBS theme. We invited families to come and planned a picnic and games for afterwards. We hoped this would be a great way to engage parents and also to engage the bigger church family with VBS.

We did a lot of our normal things with some VBS specific elements. Read the rest of this entry »

This was the final week of our summer series “Blockbuster Messages”. Over the past many weeks, we’ve been looking at the various messages presented in our society primarily through movies and how those messages contrast with the truth of God. We’ve asked the question, “Is Truth impacting culture, or is culture impacting Truth?”

Our final Sunday dealt with the movie “Up” and the ideas of making the most of life while also not being afraid of beginning new adventures. This was a timely message for our church as we are entering into a season of transition with the departure of our senior pastor. It is a new season that God is leading us in, and we don’t want to be afraid or miss out on what He is going to do. Our Bible passages included Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, and Matthew 4:18-20; 14:25-36; 28:16-20. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re continuing in our “Blockbuster Messages” series. After the craziness of the previous weekend (July 3/4 – July 4th is a BIG deal in our community and everything going on presented some challenges), it was good to be back to a more relatively normal Sunday schedule.

This past week, our senior pastor began his annual vacation/study leave weeks that he takes each July. That means that I got to speak this past week, and our youth pastor will do so next week.

We didn’t focus on the message from a particular movie this week, but instead took some time to teach about how we live as Christ-followers without being impacted by the messages of the world. We wanted to help people understand how to process and filter the messages on their own since there won’t always be someone standing up to explain how the message of a movie/show either conflicts or lines up with Scripture. It was a good midpoint to take in the series. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

We again gathered in our “Do You Believe” series as we remembered Palm Sunday and began the journey through Holy Week that will bring us to the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday. Today, we were in John 18 and began looking at the extensive injustices done to the One who is the rightful King of our lives and the world. The contrast between the celebration during Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on a donkey and the injustices done to Him by those same people is stark.

Part of wrestling with question of “do we believe Jesus is who He says He is” is also coming to grips with all that He went through and why He did it when He didn’t deserve it. An innocent man who proclaimed and revealed the Kingdom of God sentenced and punished.

We began our time together with welcome, announcement, greeting, and a reminder of upcoming opportunities to be involved with short term missions over the next months. Read the rest of this entry »

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), Read the rest of this entry »

We began our second series of the year this past Sunday called “be People of Prayer.” If you are the observant-type, you may notice that the title and look is similar. This is by design, as the previous series (Be People of the Word) and this one (Be People of Prayer) are designed to work together. We’ll be taking the next four weeks looking at some different aspects of prayer and helping people to begin to establish or continue a pattern of prayer.

The first week was focused on looking again at the example of Jesus and the time He spent in prayer. We looked at Mark 1:35-39, Luke 6:12-13, and Luke 22:39-46 as Jesus prayed often, He prayed hard, and He prayed through. Click for more info and video! Read the rest of this entry »