by 70x7 | January 29th, 2009
This report will be shared with those worship leaders who enjoy reading the “Sunday Setlists” blog carnival hosted by Fred McKinnon. If you’d like to see what worship teams all over the country are doing on Sunday, follow this link:
http://www.fredmckinnon.com/myblog/2009/01/25/sunday-setlists-27/
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Pastor Bill was getting settled into his new office at Central Highlands when I called him last week. Almost everything was unpacked and put in place. His former church in Warren, Pennsylvania is 165 miles from our church in Elizabeth, Pennsylvania. It takes three hours and twenty minutes to make the drive, but for somebody relocating from the frozen tundra of Northern PA to the “Mon Valley,” it’s got to feel like a million miles away. Even though our new pastor is originally from the Kittanning area (58 miles from Elizabeth) it’s probably going to take some time for him to get acclimated. Our church staff is eager to make our new pastor and his family feel at home, and they are a great bunch of people. If anybody can smooth the transition for Pastor Bill, it’s our Central Highlands staff! I would guess that his only real areas of immediate concern revolve around the quirky and sometimes unpredictable Saturday night worship leader he inherited!
In our phone conversation, I found out that the message for the weekend was going to center around the baptism of Jesus and what it means for us. Since he was going to preach out of the book of Mark, chapter one, I was given an opportunity to introduce a song to our congregation that I had written a number of years ago while leading worship at St. Andrew Lutheran Church in Moon Township. It’s called “PREPARE THE WAY,” and it’s a lot of fun to sing. I uploaded a live recording of it to our Soundclick page. Some day I’ll get around to recording it in studio. Here’s the link:
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_songInfo.cfm?bandID=4666&songID=7288247
Here’s how the rest of the Saturday Night service looked:
* COME AND FILL ME UP
* GRACE LIKE RAIN
* HOW GREAT IS OUR GOD
* HERE I AM TO WORSHIP
Spirit-led prayer
* THE LORD’S PRAYER (written by Eric Park)
VIDEO - AMAZING GRACE
Offering received
SERMON
* PREPARE THE WAY (written by B.J. Collins)
* WHITE AS SNOW
Communion
Closing prayer
* BY YOUR SIDE (Hillsong)
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On Sunday morning at Homestead Park UMC, Pastor Rich continued his “Radical Christianity” series and preached on “Radical Obedience.” We marched with Joshua around the walls of Jericho, heard about some God-sized victories, and our worship team broke out the war drums on some of my favorite songs. Here’s what it looked like:
In our traditional 8:15 service, our organist and singers lead the congregation in the singing of “Victory In Jesus,” and “I Have Decided To Follow Jesus” to start the service. We ended it once again with “Trust And Obey” for the second week in a row.
At the 9:30 and 11:00 services, the band turned up the volume a little bit. We opened with “Hear My Cry” as a prelude. It was the first time the congregation had been introduced to that old favorite of mine, and it was a powerful prelude to worship. In the worship segment, we started with my own arrangement of “The Battle Belongs To The Lord” featuring some big, loud floor toms and bass guitar. This was followed by “Victory Chant,” and by the time those two songs were over, the people were pretty fired up. We followed those two with “Shout To The Lord” and “How Great Is Our God,” which has a special anointing on it every time we sing it at Homestead Park. After the sermon, everyone was back on their feet and fired up again as we ended with the Casting Crowns song, “Glory.” The folks responded well to “Glory” and there was a big applause at the end of the service. I love it when we send them home excited!
This Sunday (February 1) ought to be interesting. The Pittsburgh Steelers are playing in the Super Bowl on Sunday night, and Pastor Rich told everybody to wear their black and gold to church. I’m going to have to take some pictures and just tell everybody I know outside of our city that EVERYBODY ALWAYS dresses for church like that in Pittsburgh!