Preposterousness

Worship : 19 July 2009

Now celebrating 52 weeks of non-stop worship partay, over at the Sunday Setlists blog carnival over at FredMckinnon.com you can read how other churches around the globe have been worshipping this week. And join the big anniversay celebration next week too! Personally, we've had a huge week with moving and other such joys. I might post about that later, though I probably did enough on Twitter anyway. Huge is also a good way of describing our services today. We had Pastor Suliasi Kurulo preach for both our services. An international evangelist, he is truly one of the most gifted I've ever heard. If you don't know about him, go and do some research - you know it's not hard. Start by clicking on that link I put there for you. Music Sunday AM 1. No One Like You (David Crowder*Band) 2. My Future Decided (Houston, Douglass, Sampson / Hillsong) 3. This Is Our God (Fielding, Morgan / Hillsong) 4. How Great Is Our God (Tomlin, Cash, Giglio) ...then following tithes, offerings, news... 5. My Future Decided (reprise) ...and for the end of service 6. This Is Our God (bridge) 7. Say So (Houghton, Gungor) Dante led this morning, and it was we had a sweet morning. Quite a few little errors from pretty much everyone, but nothing annoying because the whole service was so fun. We had all had a big day in the recording studio yesterday recording a track for our forthcoming album (one of my songs - yay!), so it was a bit weird to be so physically tired yet so pumped for God that He overcame the circumstances so what He wanted for the service would happen. Sunday PM 1. Run (Houston / Hillsong) 2. Kingdom Come (Fielding / Hillsong) 3. He Is Lord (Fielding / Hillsong) 4. Rain Down (Seeley / Planetshakers) ...then for the end of service... 5. You'll Come (bridge) (Fraser / Hillsong) 6. Run (reprise) 7. Say So (reprise) Troy led tonight, and being led into worship of Jesus with him is so cool. His love for Jesus is infectious. Following ministry time with Pastor Suli, we had a moshpit for Jesus going off. Late update : can't believe I forgot to include this. For the PM service, we had Beat It as the meet and greet music, complete with our pastor attempting the moonwalk on carpet . I wish I had my phone ready to video that. And I doubt it would have been getting recorded for the TV editing either. However, rest assured I will check when Diane's unpacked the video editing equipment again... We also had a special treat with a team of Fijian dancers from the Sydney congregation of Christian Mission Fellowship (the church founded by Pastor Suli, and with plants across the globe). I did a post direct from church over on my Posterous blog, which you can click through too. Or, you can just watch the video I've embedded here.

Other Stuff Technically the day was good apart from a muted mic at an inopportune moment this morning, but no biggie. The projector I mentioned last week was taken in for servicing and we had a loaner, which was fun for the techs from my company to mount way up there in the sky (our ceiling is about 12 metres or 40 feet high). Without moving the mounting post, it was never going to be a perfect fit, but the guys did well making the picture fit the screen. It was great to be able to see everything clearly this week, though we seem to have some signal issues I might have to get investigated. What did you get up to today? Note for Facebook readers : remember if I post a video or song, you'll need to actually click through to my blog to see or listen. You know you want to.

Posted

Worship : 12 July 2009

This post is part of the weekly Sunday Setlists blog carnival over at FredMckinnon.com. Now in it's 51st week! Go and check out the other setlists too. Being Awesome Church is awesome. That's all I have to say. Well, not quite all, since there's a lot more words on this page, but ... whatever... The message was back on the Let The Word Do The Work series (part 5 this morning and part 6 in the evening service). The AM message was easily one of Pastor Gary's best messages too. If you want to catch any of them, you can go to our website, and click through the TV links - search for Awesome Church, or Harbourside Live (for pre 30 June messages), and you can see low-res streaming of our TV program. Diane edits it. She rocks. I'm only slightly biased about that. Note that the messages on TV are around 2 months behind, so today's awesome message won't be on until September at the earliest. Music Sunday AM 1. No One Like You (David Crowder*Band) 2. Run (Houston / Hillsong) 3. To Meet You Here (Goodwin, Scarpato / Awesome Church) 4. He Is Lord (Fielding / Hillsong) ...then following tithes, offerings, news... 6. Run (reprise) ...and for the end of service 7. He Is Lord (bridge) Coming after a full-on week at Hillsong conference, I deliberately didn't use songs that had been sung there, because that can often fall flat if you're expecting your 300 people to sound like 26,000 (which was the count for the last night, when Chris Tomlin led worship - go and read my posts about the conference over at my Posterous blog if you haven't already). The worship was sweet this morning, everything well balanced technically, and a nice sweep of anthemic through to intimate moments. And it's so good to hear the congregation singing when you're on the stage, as I did several times this morning. Sunday PM 1. Your Name High (Houston / Hillsong) 2. Show Me Your Glory (Murgida / Awesome Church) 3. You Are Here (The Same Power) (Pankrantz, George / Hillsong) 4. He Is Lord (Fielding / Hillsong) ...then following tithes, offerings, news... 5. For Your Glory (Pringle / C3) Worship+ 1. With Everything (Houston / Hillsong) 2. You Are Here (The Same Power) 3. Who Tha King? (Reddy, Araullo, Costello / Awesome Church) Merv led for the main service songs, and both songs 3 and 4 weren't planned but came through the flow of the meeting. He Is Lord has really been resonating with our congregation since we introduced it a few weeks ago. Troy led for Worship+, and it was a little weird. Communication problems I think. But people were still blessed so that's all that matters. Who Tha King? will need a bit of arrangement massaging before we record it, so it's likely to be on the schedule for September. But no matter what, it's gonna be lots of fun pretending to be a black choir for the backing vocals :) Other Stuff We had our speakers (remember that saga) fixed and back in place today, so the ugly spare ones from my work can go back again. Happy about this. However, now our projector has decided it doesn't like being bright. This wouldn't normally be a big issue, but it's mounted 15 metres up and requires scaffolding to be built in the church for servicing. When my techs looked at it 2 months ago, it was dusty but fine. Now it's looking ttiirrreeedddd. Hopefully it's not too much of a hassle to fix it. Now, Diane and I are getting in some Sunday night relaxation before the onslaught of moving takes place this week. Fun! So, what's going on in your world? I wanna know. Note for Facebook readers : remember if I post a video or song, you'll need to actually click through to my blog to see or listen. You know you want to anyway.

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Worship : 14 June 2009

This post is part of the weekly Sunday Setlists blog carnival over at FredMckinnon.com. Go and check out the other setlists too! Amazing how missing a week in your home church makes you so hungry to be back there when it really is home. And it is home. We started a new series of AM messages titled "Let The Word Do The Work", so over the past few weeks we've also been playing some of the awesome gospel stylings of Donald Lawrence and the Tri-City Singers before and after the meetings. If you look up iTunes you'll find him, and we've been playing his 2009 album The Law Of Confession, Part 1. (I can only link to the Aussie iTunes store...which isn't much use for most of you who read this...so I haven't done it. I'm sure you'll cope.) Good good stuff, and so far removed from what we could achieve in our team with our whiter-than-whiteness for most of the team. Oh, and part 1 of the message series was great too - looking forward to the rest! The PM service was about debt cancellation, and was both informative and inspirational. A good thing. Music Sunday AM 1. Break Free (Houston, Ligertwood Crocker / Hillsong) 2. No One Like You (David Crowder*Band) 3. To Meet You Here (Scarpato, Goodwin / Harbourside) 4. This Is Our God (Morgan / Hillsong) ...then following tithes, offerings, news... 5. Now Is The Time (Delirious?) ...and for the ministry/end of service 6. This Is Our God (Morgan / Hillsong) 7. Run (Houston / Hillsong) I was leading again for the first time in three weeks, and it was good fun. I muffed some lyrics in No One Like You, and the drummer set the tempo at about 2 gazillion BPM, but it was still hilariously fun and the congregation are continuing to love this song. The slow songs today were particularly sweet - we had some solid 5 part harmony again, and a virtually acapella chorus in "To Meet You Here" - and I've mentioned it before, but I'm looking forward to when we record this song. Talking of recording, I played the team the rough mix from Saturday's recording session of "Redeemer". Everyone was as excited as I was with the result, and Margaret (the writer and lead vocalist) said it's just as she imagined it when she wrote it. We did some very cool choir things in the studio that have come out really sweetly. Two tracks down, and this novice producer is very happy :) Sunday PM 1. Tell The World (Douglass, Houston, Sampson / Hillsong) 2. Hosanna (Fraser / Hillsong) ...then following tithes, offerings, news... 3. Say So (Houghton, Gungor) ...and then for Worship+ after the service 4. Awesome God / Perfect Son (Mullins, Reddy / Harbourside) 5. Stronger (Morgan, Fielding / Hillsong) 6. More Than Life (Morgan / Hillsong) 7. For Your Glory (Pringle / C3) Julie led again tonight, and as I mentioned last time, she's 15. However, even more exciting was seeing 13 year old Matil do a stunning job song leading for "Hosanna". Blown away. Troy led for Worship+, and did a great job as always. Other Stuff For the meet & greet fill-in riff, the team tonight played Men at Work's "Down Under". Very funny, since none of them were even born when it came out. Of course, our former rock band leader pastor started singing it, including the "where women glow and men chunder line"...naturally. Very very funny. He even finished by saying "ok, now let's get back to holy". Ha! Our pastor also talked to Diane at length about a possible ministry opportunity which might be coming up. It would be a paid position. This is unfathomably exciting, but I'll leave her to share (or not share) further details at this stage...(btw, you should know that she's far more likely not to share anything) How about your weekend ?

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Worship : 7 June 2009

This post is part of the weekly Sunday Setlists blog carnival over at FredMckinnon.com. Make sure you check out the other setlists too! Just in case you haven't seen my last post...Diane and I weren't at church today. We were traversing New South Wales, but if you want to see a little more of that, you can visit my last post, or wait until we have some pics up...if we got any good ones... In the meantime, here's the setlist for Sunday morning. I don't know what they played Sunday night, I'll undoubtedly find out evenually. 1. Salvation (Seeley / Planetshakers) 2. No One Like You (David Crowder*Band) 3. Redeemer (Murgida / Harbourside) 4. Where You Go, I'll Go (Johnson, Mohr / Bethel) In other news, a big announcement was made at church today. From the beginning of the new financial year (1 July), we're going to have a new name. Of course, there's lots of varying opinions about the impact changing your name can have on a church, and just a couple of days ago we had a great discussion with one of our very best friends (first met via Twitter, and who knows about this stuff) about some of the pros and cons. Conclusion : God is bigger than a church name. So what is it then ?... Well, ever since I found out what it was going to be (by virtue of being on the leadership teams which voted for the change), I've had a tweet worked out for how I was going to introduce it to the twitterverse. So here it is:

Our church is changing its name. I voted for Awesomesauce Church...but the sauce had to go

Yep. This is gonna be fun. Seriously though, I'll share a bit more of the reasoning behind our new name in coming weeks...prorably.

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