Last Full Day

Today was the last full day of our CECL session. We will have a morning session tomorrow, but that’s it. What made today kinda special was that we had very little in the way of official stuff to do. We didn’t have any sessions until 11AM, so we used the extra morning time to review our final two sermons.

It was my turn.

My Sermon Tape

I showed the message that I preached on August 28, Prepare for God’s Presence. It was a message based on Nehemiah 1:9b where God promises to bring his people out of exile into a land of his choosing where he will place his name.

I really like the message, but I know I could have tightened it up some in the presentation if I had spent more time on it beforehand.

The comments I got were really encouraging for the most part. According to my peer team, I have “zealous energy” that says I’m not just enthusiastic but that I have a passion for what I’m trying to communicate to people. I have a strong knowledge of the Bible and an ability to summarize major themes with a few words. I also have an ability to help people see how the text really applies to their lives.

One person told me that he was listening to my message from the perspective of the “younger” person in the congregation who was really angry and grieving that I will be leaving the church soon to go plant a new church. He said that I was getting getting him all riled up to do something but then I was going to leave him all alone to do it himself.

That really led into an interesting discussion where I was trying to defend the people in my congregation because I have not seen that kind of immaturity playing out. Now, of course, I hope it really isn’t there. It would be a shame if there are a number of people who are really feeling that way but aren’t telling me. It would be a worse shame if people were telling my leadership team and they weren’t telling me.

The most encouraging comment was that held by everyone in the room: I’m clearly called into church planting.

There was one other comment that I took to be incredibly encouraging, and I’m going to have to follow up on it somehow, but one of the pastors in the group (I won’t say who) actually told me that he was ready to leave his church and come with me to Lafayette! Now, we were all doing a little role playing, but if this fellow was actually being serious, that might be a lot of fun!

Now, it’s my job to come up with some kind of goal to go along with my “unique excellence” in sermon communication, and I don’t know what I’m going to come up with. Maybe I’ll let it percolate some more.

Debriefing last night’s worship service

After our morning sermon viewings, we had a session where Michael Quicke took feedback and responded to questions from us all about the service last night and the sermon he preached.

It was pretty interesting. I got to ask for him to explain why he hadn’t read the text and why he hadn’t made any clear application, and he said that usually, he would have the text read at another point during the service and that he preferred to let the Holy Spirit do any specific conviction regarding how the text applies to a person.

Afternoon Worship Planning Session 2

Then, in the afternoon, we had a session where the worship programmer from Ripon Community Church answered questions about the worship planning process they had previously described to us. I was really impressed with their system, so I asked a number of questions aimed at figuring out what they are doing well and what I could take to Lafayette with me.

In the process, I found that Ripon Community Church is a sister church of ours and is a young church planted only three years ago with quite a similar vision to what we will be doing in Lafayette. I also found that Amy, the worship programmer, was hired NOT to lead worship, but to coordinate and administer worship teams, to plan services, and to act as a liason between the lead pastor and the artistic people of the church. She spoke very highly of the wisdom of hiring a staff person for a job like hers.

Evening Worship

The evening worship service was intended to be a full example of what a creative, integrated worship service might look like. I was looking forward to it, but it was clear that others weren’t too interested in it because about half of the CECL class has already left for home.

There are reasons for that, of course. We are pastors and we need to get back to our congregations for Sunday. The main part of the week is over really. I was somewhat disappointed to see so many not there.

The message for the worship service was given by a Aaron who is a “church plant intern” at RCC and is preparing to plant a church himself in a few months. The worship leader was Angela, the sister of Amy, the worship programmer at RCC and Angela’s husband Sam.

The service was a whole event of music woven together with teaching, and the majority of the teaching was done in first-person narrative style as Aaron just had a “conversation with God” about the topic of God’s faithfulness to us no matter what. It was really to explain the point of the book of Hosea.

The most profound part of the service for me was the connection of the theme of the book of Hosea with the song Roxanne by The Police. Before the teaching time began after the first set of music, Roxanne started playing while images hinting of prostitution and the lyrics for the song flashed on the screen. Before tonight, I never knew that Roxanne was a song about a man who is in love with a prostitute and who loves her so much that he wants to get her off the street.

It was an amazing connection of a book of the Bible to the current culture because that is exactly what Hosea went through, and it’s exactly what God goes through every time we look to other things for temporary fulfillment.

The other profound point was the statement that stupid things can offer us temporary fulfillment in life, and that temporary fulfillment often feels like all we need because there is always something else to offer more temporary fulfillment when the fulfillment from the first thing wears out. If we string together enough temporary fulfillment, that will be a full life, won’t it?

Action Steps

• Get this! My action step is to follow up with Sam and Angela to share with them my dream of a new church in Lafayette, Indiana.