Well it took me a few days to muster up the energy to turn on the computer and post again. This is one of the things that I was worried about when I re-started blogging — just didn’t know if I’d have the desire to post regularly or the topics. However I do find myself wanting to throw some thoughts down on a regular basis but this time I did need a few days to decompress.
This past weekend we did two different services. On Sunday morning we had a family worship service with all the kids involved. We created a living room feel to it with couches, rugs, lamps, etc. At one point we invited all of the kids that wanted to up to the stage to participated in singing the Christmas carols/hymns we were worshiping to. The kids had been working on these songs in their classrooms so they were prepared to sing. We had them sitting around the “living room” singing like in an old-fashioned Christmas movie.
We also showed a “man on the street” video that a guy in our church shot footage of — the street were our kids classrooms a couple weeks ago. It was a cute video with some funny answers and at least a couple of my kids answered that Jesus was the reason that we celebrate Christmas.
Finally I had a group of 5th and 6th graders help me out with the message. I set it up like a talk show and they were my expert witnesses. They helped me tell the story of the Magi and then I closed it with a 10 minute monologue to try to pull some application on the theme of worship. I had given these kids a couple of weeks to study the scripture and they had really done their homework. They had pulled out some great insights from the text and I was glad to see that God had taught them some of the same things that he had shown me as well. One of my favorite things was hearing how their parents had worked with them to study the passage. Hopefully all the families involved saw how easy it was to study the scriptures together.
Christmas Eve was solid as well. I don’t always love Christmas Eve services because of the extra stress involved but I am always excited about the non-Christians that always show up at our services. I didn’t feel like it was the greatest service and I was pretty un-happy with my message from a stylistic point of view. But I did get the opportunity to preach the Gospel pretty boldly and am just trusting that God used it to draw men and women to himself. Also I was real proud of our worship team — they did a great job and the sound was really us.
