26 Jun Now for something a little bit different!
Happy Friday Y’all!
Well get ready for something different this week.
Because of some local necessities, when you YouTube into worship on Sunday it’s going to look and feel different.
I hope you find it a “good” different (isn’t that someone’s ad slogan?)
Anyway…Part of what you’ll experience is a concerted effort to allow worship in these waning days of lockdown to be less of a passive watching event & more of a participative group engagement.
Think for a bit about walking into worship on a Sunday. From whatever it takes to get you out of the house, into the car & to the Guide Hall…the conversations before worship to finding a place to sit & singing & sharing in the Faith Chat & nodding off when I get long-winded to morning tea to the cleaning up & packing away to the final farewells as we all go home…you’re “doing” worship. All of it is active & you’re engaged & sometimes you’re polite & laugh when I say something I think is funny. We pray for each other, check in with one another & “do” church as a community the way it was designed.
But from the comfort of our lounge rooms…I can be completely alone, hit pause, or never get out of my pajamas, or skip it & come back on Tuesday or not at all and no one knows and I don’t really have to do more than listen for as long as I want. That’s not the church Jesus died for, rose for, & sent the Spirit to create.
Some of us have been bringing friends & family into our homes to watch with us & praying together & communing together…and that is exactly what we would invite more of us to do moving forward.
You’ll notice some extra study/discussion materials included with the Service Order and Growing Praise this week. Print that stuff and have it handy on Sunday. Grab a few folks…6, 8, 10…plan on lunch together afterwards and when our compressed on-line service ends, work through that material with your group. Spend time reading the Scriptures that I provide at the end of the message & the others listed. Take time to really delight in how God is revealing himself to you in that moment through his Word. Then pray together, commune together and have lunch. In fact, this might be the perfect week to invite someone who wouldn’t normally walk into a worship space or church building. It won’t “look like church.” I promise not to spoil the surprise.
As the local restrictions on gathering in our homes begin to relax even more, think about the folks you normally see in worship & ask them to join you in your home.
Then think about those you wouldn’t naturally invite…invite them.
We’ll be trialling this “style” of on-line presence for a few weeks.
It’s different, but I find it more personal & more real than standing in an empty room shouting at a camera.
So…here’s how you get in: Link for Sunday’s service. https://youtu.be/bk8-A17AKWk
And the Service Order and Growing Praise are on the website…you can link to them from here as usual…and the extra study resources are at the end of the Service Order.
The Text of the “sermon” will be there by Sunday night.
Don’t forget…from before the beginning of time…God had his heart set on you.
For God saved us and called us to live a holy life. He did this, not because we deserved it, but because that was his plan from before the beginning of time—to show us his grace through Christ Jesus. – 2 Timothy 1:9
Live delighting in that redemption!
John
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