August 23rd

This post will not do justice to what happened Sunday.

It was a great day musically. It was a great day of ministry too. I have to put a plug in for WILD, our student ministry. We started Sunday night and it was just a ton of fun. If you're on facebook, you should look at our page, Wild @ Kaw Prairie.

It was a great day theologically! PD really brought home the message of Grace. One that we all need for the resentment and vengeance we carry around, but one that, for that reason, we need to extend every chance we get.

Carly rocked Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats," a natural lead in to a message on vengeance. I know what you're thinking, "those people are Kaw Prairie are pretty slick!" Well, you're right, but you should know we steal (borrow) most of this stuff. The idea is getting the message across. Carly did just that sporting her cowboy hat. Nice work Carly and band for rendering that song well.

It was funny to me that right before we played that song in the first service, the person doing announcements (who will remain unnamed), finished up with her announcements and said "let's return to worship now." Well, "Before He Cheats" was hardly a worshipful song, although it did serve a purpose in our worship and our application of the morning's message. It was just an interesting introduction. You can appreciate that a bit more by watching the youtube video of that song.

In what you might call a more worshipful tone, we also did:

Here I am to Worship - Chris Tomlin
Come Thou Fount - David Crowder Band
Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) - Chris Tomlin
The Wonderful Cross - Chris Tomlin

Have a great week!

August 16th

I'm catching up slowly.

The week before last was the beginning of "The Theology of Country Music."

Doug did a phenomenal job of singing "That's My Story" by Collin Raye

We also sang:
All Because - Steve Fee
How Great is Out God/How Great Thou Art - Chris Tomlin
Mystery - Charlie Hall
Marvelous Light - Charlie Hall

If you're going to look up those songs please keep in mind that I'm not necessarily listing them by author, but by the artist whose performance we tried to emulate.

I really should get on the stick and get some cowboy boots and a hat for this series.

August 9th

It's been a while since I posted. Bad blogger!

I would hardly call myself a blogger.

So a week and a half ago was great! Here are the songs we did:

We Fall Down (F#): Kutless
A Mighty Fortress (G): We came up with our own arrangement
Sweetly Broken (B): Jeremy Riddle
Surrender (G): Lincoln Brewster
Love the Lord (G): Lincoln Brewster

I suppose if I had posted right after the service I might actually have some anecdotes about it. Sorry :(

I will say that our experience with the new PA system is paying off. We're not seeing a ton of dividends yet, or at least not that we can hear, but we are learning so much about how "not" to run the system. Not that this particular week was aweful, it was in fact as good as could be expected, but that we learn more every week. More to come on that.

Eschatalogy at KP

This week's sermon in the series of "Things I wish Jesus hadn't said," was about the end times. Jesus did talk about the end, and he said some things that are very intriguing. Opposite of that, He also said that our chief concern was that of doing the work of the Father until the Son returns, not to ignore that work to devote our time and energy to figuring out when and how He's returning.
Admittedly, the study of His return does in many ways yield the fruit of of the Kingdom as it gets people thinking about it and confronts them with a decision. So the sermon wasn't about finger-pointing, and line-drawing between people, it was simply a palette of several scholarly and faithful views that exist on the second coming.

My favorite part of it all was that short video in that church. That part when the lighting strikes and suddenly the room goes from being full to there only being like 20 people there. It was a cool video anyway.

As part of this presentation on such a hot topic, we did our best to cover REM's "it's the end of the world as we know it." That was pretty fun too. There were more words in one verse of that song than there were in all the other songs we sand the whole morning combined. Actually, I don't know if that's a fact, but it sure seems like it.

We also did:
Beautiful the Blood (Fee)
Enough (Tomlin)
How Deep the Father's Love (our own arrangment; more closely resembles Kelly Minter's)
The Stand (Hillsong United)

I'd be curious to learn what most folks at KP thought of the "The Stand." It's a great song with a simple lyric. For me, the intense nature of the words and music of the chorus really draws me in to the meaning of the words. I've been singing that song for a few years now, and as you might know, the words repeat themselves quite a few times. Even with that, the words still draw me to their meaning much like they did when I first learned them.

"I'll stand with arms high and heart abandoned, in awe of the one who gave it all. I'll stand, my soul, LORD, to you surrendered; all I am is yours."

The band did a really great job this week. Aleks was able to play guitar, which was a a lot of fun. Ethan went from being asleep at practice, to being totally rocktastic on the drums during the actual service. I just don't know what happened there. Kasie was a rockstar on the guitar. Doug seemed to have a great time singing. Joe played very well. Sam was his usual awesome.

The coolest thing I heard about our set was that someone said, "on that last song, it was worshipful to just watch the band worship." That is the highest of affirmations and testimony for a worship team.