Thanks everyone who helped make our Adore: Night of Worship a Success. We really had an awesome time with our first ever event like this.  The night was basically broken down into 4 sections (similar to our morning of prayer and worship), and we had about 2-3 songs, and a prayer/activity divider.

We opened with the first 1:30 of I Gotta Feelin’ by the Black Eyed Peas (just staying timely with something that was culturally relevant and lyrically appropriate for the evening… and well… I love the “Tonight’s gonna be a good night” hook).  We went straight into No Not One by Christy Nockels.  Followed up by Lord of All by Kristian Stanfill (which we got our Adore title from).

We then moved onto a Lectio Divina (or divine reading). Sometimes this can be a touchy issue for people because of the almost ‘emptying’ mysticism that is associated with it, but I think there is a theologically ok way of doing a lectio divina, where we read, re-read, and re-read a piece of scripture, focusing on moving form surface to application as we read. We capped that section with a reading of the Prayer of St. Francis lead by Ginger Dooley.

We moved onto Be Thou My Vision with just Chris Arias on keys and Rachel Jackson leading with Megan on harmony which was killer. Almost hauntingly good!  We then did a new Starfield tune Holy Is Our God and then Glorious One by Steve Fee.

Next we broke up into groups of 3-4 and prayer for our local community, our city, and our world for several minutes, a great time for people to just connect with others and simply pray. We closed the section with an abridged version of St. Patrick’s Breastplate prayer, read by Kevin Hammond.

We went on to sing the How He Loves by John Mark McMillan, the It Is Well remake by Todd Fields, tagged that song with a bit of Our God Reigns by Chris Tomlin, and followed that all up with Glory to God Forever by Steve Fee.

We next moved onto a section where there were seven buckets setup around the room filled with sand. Next to the buckets were different questions about sins people deal with. One station dealt with greed, another lust, another jealousy, etc.  As they felt convicted or recognized sin in their life, they were encouraged to take a scoop from the bucket and put it into a plastic bag that everyone had.  From there they filled up each bucket and placed it at the foot of the cross.  I was highly encouraged by the participation level and response to this activity.  We capped that section off by a reading of the St. Ignatius of Loyola Prayer for the Disturbed read by Faye Davenport.

We went into Beautiful by Phil Wickham and capped it with the end of Fix You by Coldplay.  We moved into Hosanna by Brooke Fraser.  We served communion and finished with the very communion-appropriate song Mystery by Charlie Hall.

Thanks to all the volunteers and everyone who really made that evening come together!!!

Right now the Echo conference is going on in Texas, which is a conference for church creatives and media type.  There’s a great quote/post by the guy who runs the Church Marketing Sucks site referring to our love for media:
Lovers of media, technology and the Internet are not necessarily the first people I would go [...]

Well, another truly amazing Sunday.  I have to admit, I am sometimes cynical when Alan asks me to “leave the baptistry open” for a Sunday.  I don’t doubt that God can move, but with a stage setup and everything, its just one more unplanned thing for timing, layout, etc.  I know… salvations… what an inconvenience! [...]