Sun 18 Jan 2009, 6.00pm

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A church in the southern part of Sydney, known as "the Shire" (and yes, lots of hobbit jokes abound) has just rebuilt their 50 year old building. It's one of the largest churches in Sydney (around 2,000 members), with almost half of them being teenagers, and almost all of those teens being surfers :-).

My wonderful wife and I decided to visit as we have friends who are members there, and our pastor was also keen to hear what their new building was like. Btw, our churches work together with a couple of others to bring 2 hours of preaching on free-to-air TV each week in Sydney, and are now also on air in Melbourne, with Brisbane being the goal for 2009.

ShireLive had their new youth pastor preaching tonight, who's just moved over from Perth to head up the massive youth ministry at Shire. He gave a great message based on Daniel about our personal furnaces that we have to deal with...one of which will be success, so it was a great counterpoint to our own message this morning at Harbourside.

The main room now has quite steeply banked seating for just over 1,000 people, and there were probably around 600 there last night (still very much in that holiday mode with people away), most of whom were the youth getting ready for a 1 week summer camp starting tomorrow.

Service style is very very similar to Hillsong, very relaxed but still reverent, and perfectly suited to the culture of the church and the community it serves. It all felt very natural, and very "Australian". It was immediately obvious that most members there are a bit more stereotypically Australian than our area; a lot of ours are recent-ish immigrants or 2nd generation (me being a very glaring exception).

And the music was great. The worship leader tonight was a former Australian Idol Top 12 contestant who we instantly recognised. Thankfully she's also a wonderfully humble person and did a great job of leading us into God's presence ready for the message.

Overall, a great time of worship...and I felt a little bit like the Secret Worshipper...who, btw, I don't really like the idea of - how can you establish your roots firmly in a church if you're constantly visiting others to scrutinise everything? Anyway, the site is entertaining - or rather, it usually is but at the moment they're in the middle of redoing it and there's none of the articles up. Oh well :-)

The songs:
Sing Sing Sing (Chris Tomlin)
My Future Decided (Hillsong United)
He Is Lord (Hillsong)
Til I See You (Hillsong United)

Now go and check out all the other setlists and reviews on the “Sunday Setlists” blog carnival at FredMcKinnon.com.

and see what else is on my mind as I share how I'm going with Shaping The Space.

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Sun 18 Jan 2009, 6.00pm