As always, this post is part of Fred McKinnon's Sunday Set Lists project.  Check out more sets at Fred's blog!

CenterPoint Church 12/6/09

Opening Set
    -More Than Ever - G - Robbie Reider, Allan Fuller
    -Marvelous Light - A - Charlie Hall
    -Amazed - D - Jared Anderson

Closing Song
    -Today - A-B - Brian Doerkson

We started our Christmas series yesterday.  This year's series is about the various journeys connected with the Christmas story in the Bible, and how they relate to our own faith journey.  Cool stuff.  Yesterday we talked about "Departures" based on Mary's journey to Elizabeth's house after her visit from the angel.  We also used a clip from "The Polar Express" which worked very well.

Even though we were starting Christmas stuff (and the trees are up now and such), I stayed away from Christmas music yesterday.  I've written about this before (although I can't find the specific post offhand), but I think the carol's place in our services this time of year is greatly over-exaggerated in a lot of churches.  Not that they don't have their place, but creating entire services of carols just because it's December has never made a lot of sense to me.  We'll do some next week and ramp up to Christmas Eve, which will be a very traditional, carol based service.  I realize it wouldn't work everywhere, but it works for us.  That said, the music went very well yesterday morning, despite a somewhat unusual rehearsal.  When we hit the last couple choruses of "Amazed", I was almost overwhelmed by the sound of the congregation singing... really an amazing experience.

One other thing that was really cool about yesterday... our church hosts Young Life groups for two high schools throughout the week, and we invited them to attend yesterday... a couple of the leaders shared their testimony with us, and we had a bunch of extra high school kids hanging out for worship.  It was a great opportunity for the two groups to worship together (since we share space, but very rarely cross paths with each other).