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Sweet.

That’s the one word I’d use to sum up our 9/11 services at SSCC yesterday.

We opened with the Latin-groove “Glorious” by Martha Munnizzi.  Always a tough one for the band and vocals to pull off (this song has the craziest key changes I’ve ever seen).

Kicking off the congregational singing was “Hosanna” (Baloche/Brown).  After this opening song we were seated and watched a 3:00 minute video reflecting on 9/11 ten years ago.  Afterwards, our pastor spoke briefly about what has changed in our lives since then, and how restless the world has become.  Reading the famous quote by St. Augustine “I am restless until I rest in You – we performed as a special, Audrey Assad’s “Restless“.

This flowed into congregational singing of “Come Thou Fount“.  Our closer was “Amazing Grace/My Chains Are Gone” as a gospel response song.

That’s a recap of the songs this week.  As always, I’m posting this as a part of the weekly “Sunday Setlists” event hosted over at TheWorshipCommunity.Com.

Hey Gang,

For all of you worship leaders … when was the last time you got off the platform?  For all you church goers – when was the last time you saw your leader off-stage?

I’ve been off the platform for the past two Sundays at SSCC.

Two Sundays ago my wife and I took the weekend (sans kids, thanks to my mom!) and went away to celebrate our 13th wedding anniversary together.  I tuned into our worship services via our SSCCLive.Com internet broadcast and enjoyed seeing my friend Russ Hutto lead the worship.  You could say I was truly “off” that Sunday, except for about 15 minutes of emailing and texting when our scheduled drummer for the youth service was a no-show.

Yesterday I was back at work, but off the stage.  My friend Shannon Lewis led worship for us. (read his recap of the service and the setlist on his blog) It’s so funny to hear how many people come up and say “you’re off today”?

I believe that as leaders, we have a responsibility to raise up and empower other leaders.  As we work to duplicate ourselves and multiply our efforts we have to step aside and let other leaders flourish.

This Sunday, Shannon’s leading in our main sanctuary gave me the ability to do several things:

1.  give him a chance to lead and bless our congregation with his gifts (we all lead differently, and the diversity is good)
2.  gave me a chance to mingle more with our people as they came in and connect with them relationally
3.  gave me a chance to worship in the congregation and get the much-needed perspective of what that’s like
4.  gave me the chance to observe the culture of worship in each of our venues (Tiny Town, Kid Jam Clubhouse, Youth Rooftop)

Being off the stage brings so much perspective.  From the congregation I can see how the audio mix is sounding (great job, Ben!), I can observe how people are engaging, how our lighting feels when it’s adjusted in the room, what other distractions may be occurring that we miss from the stage, etc.

Some of you are in a church where you have nobody else to lead worship.  It’s you, or it’s a CD.  I’d like to encourage you to really pray and ask God to bring in more leaders.  Ask the Holy Spirit to give you eyes to see who on your team may be that next leader.  Begin to mentor them.  Take the “you lead with me, I lead with you, you lead” approach.

My goal is to be completely off-platform 2-3 times per quarter.  I typically adhere to that unless I have a very specific reason for not doing it.

How about you?

(this recap is a part of the “Sunday Setlists” event hosted by TheWorshipCommunity.Com each week)

Here’s a recap from St. Simons Community Church for this Sunday, August 7, 2011.  As always, this setlist recap is a part of the weekly “Sunday Setlists” event that happens over at TheWorshipCommunity.Com.

Today I enjoyed welcoming our two newest additions to the praise team – Beth Cox (vocals) and her husband, Allan (trumpet).  It was awesome having them serving together.

Our walk-in was an older favorite, “Love the Lord“.  We did the bulk of our praise and worship right at the beginning of the service today as we had a packed Sunday with 50+ minutes of teaching/speaking time.

The opening set included Come Thou Fount, Jesus Saves, and I Exalt Thee.

One thing that was cool during “I Exalt Thee” was as our band backed off and just let the people sing out, we had our tech team actually RAISE the house lights up a bit – the idea was that our darker, more intimate setting was for personal worship, and as we began to change from “I Exalt Thee” to “we exalt Thee”, it became a corporate cry and I wanted our congregation to not only hear one another, but also SEE on another.

I honestly can say that in both services I could hear a noticeable difference as we did that.

Our closer was “I Will Never Be”, a beautiful old Hillsong ballad.  The teaching time went well past our cutoff, so we essentially sang this as people dismissed.

Tomorrow night (Monday) I’m headed down with my wife and our Tech Director (and his wife) to see Hillsong United in Jacksonville, FL.  Should be a cool time!

Hey Everybody,

Today was a sweet service at SSCC.  It was what we call a “stand-alone” Sunday, meaning the sermon was not part of an ongoing series.  Our Family Pastor, Mark Fritchman, spoke on parenting, and did a great job.  I’ve been doing a lot of new music and had lots of energy put into our previous Night of Worship.  Because of that, and the reality that our Tech Director was away (let’s try to keep rehearsal simple) and my wife was away (I’m Mr. Mom all weekend!), I opted for a Sunday where our songs were familiar to the congregation and the band.

Our walk-in song was “Praise the Name of Jesus” by Ken Mullis.  This is a super-fun song to play.  It’s a blues swing with great lyrics.  From our quick greeting we dove directly into “For All You’ve Done” by Hillsong, which is an ongoing favorite at our church for the past four years.

After announcements we did a 2-song set in G, starting with Don Poythress’ version of “The Doxology” followed by “Agnus Dei”.  I really enjoyed this segment and once again, we slowed things down a bit and just lingered at the end of Doxology for a time of reflection and prayer.

Our closing song was “Revelation Song”.  Honestly, I was feeling awkward about it – we usually try to pull our sermon and closing together and that wasn’t the case this week.  I wasn’t really interested in going to the handful of convicting-parent songs, so when he finished the sermon, the changing of gears to “ok, let’s sing one last song and worship” felt strange.

The strangeness faded after about 10 seconds.  The people began to sing and the room was filled with worship.  I’m reminded that we don’t have to meticulously plan every song and lyric to support the sermon.  Worship doesn’t have to be a response to a sermon – it’s just a response to God, period.

And that’s my recap for this Sunday, July 31.  As always, I’m posting this as a part of the “Sunday Setlists” event hosted by TheWorshipCommunity.Com each week.  To view our planning document, visit PlanningCenterOnline.

Yesterday was perhaps one of the sweetest days of worship that I can recall at SSCC.  I think there are lots of reasons.  We’d just had a “Night of Worship” event the Friday night before.  We had more margin (see tomorrow’s post!) in our service plan, and the teaching focused on worship.

We opened slowly, with an older classic, “Open the Eyes of My Heart”.  I find it nice to open slowly sometimes.  Paul Baloche calls this an “on-ramp”.  It gives people a transition into worship and I could see people making that transition clearly.

To open up the top of the hour, we introduced a new, upbeat song called “We Are The Free” from Matt Redman’s newest album, “10,000 Reasons”.  I’d originally decided that although I love this song, it would never find a home in our typical sunday service.  I felt it was just too edgy and youth-driven.  It didn’t seem to fit our culture.  I had so many people from the band and congregation who’d already heard the song and really encouraged me to go for it.  To my surprise, the song was really well-received.

From that song we segued directly into super-familiar “Glory to God Forever”.

After a time of announcements, we introduced the brand new worship ballad from the Passion 2011 album, “Waiting Here For You”.  Heather, one of our team members, led this and did a beautiful job.

At the conclusion of this song, I felt a strong sense that we should just wait a moment and not rush into the sermon.  We lingered there, and before I knew it, we were praying and crying out to God.  The congregation was praying, people were praying for others who needed prayer … it was a beautiful thing that I’ll describe more fully in tomorrow’s blog post.

Our Discipleship Pastor did an incredible job teaching on worship, our response to God, and living the life of worship.

We concluded with a traditional version of “The Old Rugged Cross” with nothing but vocals and piano.  IT WAS GORGEOUS.  I loved hearing the people of God sing this classic hymn.  I also sang the deep bass line, which was stylistically different for us, but added to the traditional feel.  It was a special moment.

Transitioning out of the hymn we sang “The Song of Moses”, a newer song from some guys up in Atlanta.  It was massive and I can only say that I felt that our congregation literally walked together through this journey of worship.  It was one of my favorite Sundays!

As always, I’m sharing our worship service recap as a part of the “Sunday Setlists” event, hosted weekly at TheWorshipCommunity.Com.