THE SONG SET:

Let It Rise (Holland Davis)

Holy Is the Lord (Chris Tomlin)

How Great Is Our God (Chris Tomlin)

The Heart of Worship (Matt Redman)

Declare (Jason Squires)

Shout to the Lord (Darlene Zschech)

THE TEAM:

Worship Leader playing Acoustic Guitar

THE WORSHIP SERVICE:

Each year at Cypress Church, we select a theme to focus on.  This year’s theme is Worship.  I know, right, how awesome for me as the Worship Pastor?  As an encouragement of the theme, I have decided to occasionally bring in guest worship leaders throughout the year so that our congregation can experience worshiping Almighty God in different styles and forms.

This past Sunday, I invited Jason Squires to lead worship.  We are in a series entitled simply worship and on Sunday we looked at the idea of personal worship (next week is corporate worship and then lifestyle worship the following week).  We played a video based on the song “Clear the Stage” by Ross King which talks about our propensity to clutter our lives with meaningless things which get in the way of us hearing from God.  Taking the cue from the song, we actually cleared our platform for the Sunday and Jason led worship all by himself with no band.  It was just him standing center stage with a guitar and a microphone.  This is very different for us because we normally have full band.  But it was great!

Jason Squires is a worship leader with World Vision and Azusa Pacific University’s Mexico Outreach.  He is currently living up in the Sacramento area and works at William Jessup University.  If you need a guest worship leader, I highly recommend him.

I have recently formed a Scripture Presentation Team,
“And God Said...”, whose ministry it is to present
Scripture through various forms such as readers theater,
monologue, drama, tableau, etc.  This past Sunday they
presented Psalm 145 in a readers theater format from
behind our backdrop on stage with the backdrop lights
shining on them creating their silhouettes on the backdrop.
It was very powerful.

We also did something for the first time ever at our church.  Following the sermon, we gave the congregation the opportunity to text in questions about the sermon and the topic of personal worship.  We then put the questions up on the screen and a panel of three (myself, the senior pastor and one of our other worship leaders, Suzanne) answered the questions right then and there.  We were able to answer four or five questions within the time allotted.  We answered the rest of the questions in written form and posted them on our church website.  We will be doing this panel idea for two more Sundays.

BLESSINGS:

Because it was a single guitar and voice, you could really hear the congregation singing out.

I was very encouraged by the panel discussion.  There were some great questions turned in and it felt like we were really connecting to the congregation.

CHALLENGES:

Getting the texts up on the screen fast enough was a task for the tech team.  We’re hoping some changes made this week will streamline the process for this Sunday.

This post is part of Sunday Setlists - a website of blogs from worship leaders from all over the country.