life’s little stories

I was not a part of a normal worship service this weekend.

I’m not sure what ‘normal’ is, really, but for us, this wasn’t it.  

This weekend was our church’s 3rd annual church family camp, held about 2 hours away from our fair city, at a great camp facility.  With trees.  And flowing streams.  (We’re in central Kansas…. that doesn’t happen so often.) Camp attendance was down a bit this year, and several families had to be home early, so Sunday morning found about 90 of us gathered at a small outdoor amphitheater to worship together.  The ingredients were a basic PA, acoustic guitar, keyboard, a couple of mics, a few ‘magic’ tricks, and lots of willing participants.  

Worship service flow:
Cry Out Your Name (Jeff Moore): concrete thoughts about worship, lends itself to hand motions for the kids
God of Wonders
How Great is Our God: including an ‘experiment’ in various worship postures
Group prayer: open time of prayer, including prayers for written requests that had been collected earlier in the weekend.
Here I Am To Worship
Scripture:  Matthew 6:19-34  read by seven kids.
Solid Rock
(slight break to for shade adjustment)
Message: ‘Trust’ (part of our ‘Heart Rules’) series.  Given by pastor of adult ministries, whom I’ve known for about 7 years but had no idea he was a collector of ‘magic’ tricks.  Enthralled the kids with a few such illustrations.
Communion: 
      My Jesus I Love Thee
      Center (at the end of this song…. we briefly lost all the power to our system
Closing Prayer
(power back on)  played ‘He Reigns‘ by the Newsboys as people were leaving.

Reflections:
This is always such a great time, and a great adventure.  The continual low-or-high pitched rumble of kids, unexpected noises (a siren went off at one point… still don’t know what that was about), the pure beauty of being outside.  I love the creativity that’s possible with fewer people, in a super informal environment.  Could get used to that on an ongoing basis.  We didn’t have any kind of projection, so song lyrics were printed. Using familiar, but effective song choices hopefully allowed people to freely participate.

The overall experience of this family camp is a great one, and something our kids now expect to do every year.  It’s a very easy-going schedule, that allows parents to let go of the ‘we have to go do this’ approach for a couple of days.  Our church staff is committed to this part of our ministry, and will do what we can to make it possible for more and more people to take this weekend to get away with their families. The bonus for the grown-ups:  the conversations that happen after the kids go to bed.  I laughed harder this weekend than I have in months.    Good times.

(the customary worship services were held as usual on our church campus. I hear they went well.  But no sirens.)

This post is a part of Fred’s Setlist Sunday.  Check it out.