Check out more of this week's set lists at Fred McKinnon's blog.
Centerpoint Church 3/8/09
Opening Set
-You, You Are God - C to D - (Walker Beach)
-My Savior, My God - D - (Aaron Shust)
-Surrender - G - (Marc James)
Closing Song
-The Heart Of Worship - D - (Matt Redman)
Musically, we had a really great morning today. It took a while for folks to straggle in (both for rehearsal and for church), but I honestly expected that with the time change and all.
This was the second week in our Lenten series, and this morning's message was called "I'm Giving Up My Church For Lent" - we talked about the consumer church mentality that is so present in our culture and what it means to really give the church back to God (since it was never really ours to begin with!) It was a challenging message and one that I'm sure some folks had a little trouble with, but I thought it was great. It's so easy to forget that our preferences have very little, if anything, to do with the way we worship God!
We opened the service this morning with a video piece called "Drive Through Church" that we tracked down on the internet - it shows several people pulling into a drive through and "ordering" their worship experience for that day. From the video clip, we kicked straight into "You, You Are God". The transition was not quite as smooth as I had hoped it would be, but it didn't seem to slow anybody down. Once we got started, the flow was really great this morning. I got lucky with that. We were able to play the whole set fairly seamlessly because the keys worked together so well. It helped contribute to a really great time of worship.
We closed in a different way than usual. We knew back at our initial planning meeting that we wanted to use "The Heart Of Worship" in this service, but as I got to thinking about it this week, I really didn't want to play it in the "usual way". The lyrics are so great:
"When the music fades, all is stripped away, and I simply come... I'll bring you more than a song, for a song in itself is not what You have required"
The vast majority of churches, though (including ours) play this song with a lot of dramatic builds and falls and quite a bit of musical production. That rubbed me as contrary to the ideas that we were trying to present this morning, so I gave the band the tune off, and we sang it against nothing but a Rhodes patch. I barely even used my mic... just to get verses started, etc. For the most part, I just accompanied and let the body sing together. And sing they did! It was a very cool moment.
