Confessional #1

The first of the new confessionals is here. Wish I could do video, but I'd have to go to the church, become very proficient at Premiere (which would take a lot of time), which would then potentially open me up to other "tasks". So, for now, I'll just be doing a typing confessional.


The morning started out pretty okay. I'd asked everybody to show up a little early because we needed to reset the stage and AUX mixes after the Jeff Johnson concert last week. Almost everybody got there early. Consequently, by the time we played the first note, it was about 8:30 a.m. It actually pretty well. We got through the entire set with a couple of extra run-throughs and were done by 9:05.


The service as a whole went well. Ross Reynolds, a young man that grew up in our church, is about to complete seminary and was our guest preacher. He preached in all three services so he started off over in the sanctuary preaching in Traditional first. More on that later.


We opened the service with Ross King's Praise the Lord, a real congregational favorite. Our next tune was new to us, This Day, from Vineyard. It came out on their Wonderful Mercy cd back in 2001-2002. Really great song with lead parts for both April and me so it allowed both of us to lead. The response from the people was great and Jay nailed the guitar parts. Because it was Communion Sunday, we went straight to the offering next and did Todd Wright's Glorify. Slight glitch here. Kathy starts it just like the cd in the key of F. Well, genius me, finished praying(I was focused) and forgot to capo. I hit the first note, realized it, and went to correct it, but Kathy stopped playing. Mark, thankfully kept the percussion going, Kathy started back with my cue, and we never missed a beat. Talked to my wife, Anita, and she said she never even realized it happened. Because Ross Reynolds was preaching in Traditional, we went straight to the Communion litergy next. Our Communion song was Jared Anderson's Here Us from Heaven. I love this song and so does our congregation. April did a great job both singing melody with me and then doing all the girl parts from the cd. Only thing, we were in wait mode for Ross to get to our service. We played Hear Us from Heaven for 18 minutes it seemed like. Not really, but we had to extend it a bit. Because it was in the key of B and I planned the set before I knew we would be doing the service in the different format and I hadn't planned to have to extend the song while we waited, I boxed myself into that one song because of the key without the ability to move back to some of the earlier songs. It didn't matter to the congregation and they sang the heck out of Hear Us From Heaven.


Ross preached the first sermon of a new series we're doing called T for Teen. The cover slide is on this page. He got that really uncomfortable topic that the church loves not to address, Sex and Pornography. Let me just say, there were some parents of younger kids in that room sweating bullets worrying what a seminary student was going to say. Ross did a great job.



We closed with This Day slowed down for the invitation and then rocked it on the way out.


All in all, a good first Sunday. Everybody stepped up and did a great job. Makes my life so much better. We are blessed with a great team.



Runnells will be preaching next week so we're excited about that. I think I'm going to change our stage set up around a bit so we'll see how that goes.