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It isn’t necessarily often that I leave church on a Sunday afternoon baffled at what God did in our services that weekend… but that’s exactly how I left this week.

Don’t get me wrong, I am well aware that God’s presence always leaves amazement in it’s wake, and I know that His presence is promised each and every time we gather. This weekend, though, the Worship Design team through a curve ball at the congregation, and it seemed to help ignite a passion for worship that we didn’t necessarily anticipate.

Setlist:

The Happy Song - Martin Smith

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You Are the One - Lincoln Brewster, Paul Baloche

Holy, Holy - Nathan Fellingham

How Can I Keep from Singing - Chris Tomlin, Ed Cash, Matt Redman

Be Glorified - Chris Tomllin, Louie Giglio

 

So, we’ve been talking about getting uncomfortable in our faith for the past several weeks, and this week our Associate Pastor Keith Scarborough tackled the idea of facades. The American Church is, honestly, pretty terrible when it comes to this—we’ve come to think that being a Christian comes with an obligatory happy face that we have to wear anytime we’re in public… especially in the company of other Christians. We somehow have convinced ourselves that what’s most important when we step into church is that everyone else there knows how holy we are… how perfect our family is… how well we’re keeping it all together. So regardless of what’s happened before we walk in the doors, we put on our masks and the pretending begins. Appropriately, we sang ‘Stained Glass Masquerade’ by Casting Crowns and Pastor Keith drilled the point home in his message.

The quirky part of the service was this: we only did one song up front, ‘The Happy Song,’ and then we sang the Casting Crowns tune. We juxtaposed the two, making sure to call out the idea that the happiness we had just sung about was not a conditional, situational happiness but rather an internal joy that’s anchored on the gift of salvation we’ve received from Jesus Christ. Anyway, we went straight into the message after ‘Stained Glass…’ and then started our worship set during Communion. We did our slower tunes first and ramped up to ‘How Can I Keep…’ and ‘Be Glorified.’ By the time we were done, the energy in the room was truly electric. We definitely need to do that more often.

The last service of the weekend, in fact, was when the coolest thing happened: I had told the congregation to stay seated through Communion and the Offering and that I’d ask them to stand later as we rolled into the faster tunes in our set. Two or three people decided that they just couldn’t help it, and stood up with hands raised during ‘Holy, Holy…’ next thing I knew I looked up and the entire congregation was on their feet, unprompted. You probably had to be there, but trust me, it was very cool.

Anyway, we’ll be looking for opportunities to do the ‘ramp up’ thing again soon, I’m sure. If you’ve never tried it at your church, I recommend you give it a shot. Something beautiful happened today, and I was glad I was able to be a part of it.

Many blessings! See you next week…