Over the next couple of Sundays, we’ll be trying something a bit different. Here’s the rundown:
This Sunday will actually be a Sunday that is tweeted about…live. We’re hoping that people in the congregation will take out their iPhones (we have a relatively young congregation) and Blackberries and tweet the service live. We’ve set up a dedicated site for this here. If you want to show up and live-tweet, just do that. Use the hashtag #harmonychurch so that others can read what you have to say! You can follow Harmony Church on twitter here, and you can follow me on twitter here. This could go pretty well…or be awful publicity…depending on how mean people decide to be 
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Next Sunday, our worship leader (Pablo) will be out of town for marital counseling. Instead of bringing in another worship leader as we will be doing later in the month and next month, we will be having a pure liturgical service…no music. There will be a call to worship, a reading response, a call to confession, a confessional prayer, a reading, the whole 9 yards. It will be WAY out of our comfort zones (including my own), but it’s important that we remember that worship is not a Christian term for music, but that rather it is the act of attributing everything to God and keeping Him central to all things…including a church service.
Should be fun over the next couple of weeks!
How did the liturgical service go for you guys, Derek?
The liturgical service was different in both positive and negative ways. We’ve received feedback from “cultish” to “cool”. We’ll probably incorporate more liturgical elements…explaining them as we go. I think the whole service being liturgical was a culture shock for some of our people. And we moved through it rather quickly. But we will definitely become slightly more liturgical in our regular worship services because I think it does provide something that music normally escapes (reflection, etc.)
-Derek