Reflections from Sunday's Worship

It's 8:00 a.m.  Abbie is still in bed as she is sick this morning.  While I wait for her to wake up, I thought I would evaluate the 9:30 worship service where I preached.  If you read my previous post, you have a general idea of what I preached on.  In Advent week number 2, the lectionary focused on John the Baptist and his preparations for the coming Messiah.  So here are a couple of thoughts on the service.

Order of Worship-  I changed the order of worship around some this week.  It accomplished what I hoped it would (change of pace, more space for the sermon/communion). 

Environment-  I had my friend, Joe, bring in all sorts of construction signs and barrels to place throughout the sanctuary and hallway.  One of our high school students, David, dressed as a construction flagger and directed traffic in the hallway with his Stop/Slow sign.  All he needed was a lunchbag to look truly authentic.  The signs really piqued people's interest in what was going on that morning. 

When I came out for the sermon (I was hiding in the back room), I had on an orange safety vest and a hard had.  With my dark jeans and a tie, I said that I was the project foreman.  While it felt a little strange preaching in a hard hat- it couldn't have been stranger than John Wesley preaching on top of his father's grave stone!

Heat-  We have an old water boiler heat system.  And for some reason, it kicked out overnight and the sanctuary was really cold at 8:00 (even colder when I arrived at 6:45 a.m.).  When the boiler was reset, heat started pouring in- and it did not stop!  Our system tries to get the room to 68 degrees as fast as possible.  Which means that it's kicking out 80-85 degree's of heat.  It would take both hands to count the number of people I could see falling asleep at various times during the service- which may have been better than sweating as badly as I was because of the heat!

There are plans to replace this system in the relative near future.  I will be quite happy to have a trustworthy system in place so we don't have Sunday's like that.  No heat might have been better!

If you were able to attend the service, I'd love to hear your feedback!  As a staff, we're always looking to improve what we do.