This post is part of the weekly Sunday Setlists blog carnival over at FredMckinnon.com. Make sure you check out the other setlists too!

The church is still on a high from the conferences and guest speakers from the past few weeks, but more than just being on a high, we’re excited about what doors God is opening for us, and closing others too.   It’s been great having a quiet-ish week since then to soak all of it in, and prepare for moving forward – wherever that may be.

Today’s AM message was drawn on 2 Cor 8:7 (shown in the Amplified translation below) :

Now as you abound and excel and are at the front in everything – in faith, in expressing yourselves, in knowledge, in all zeal, and in your love for us – [see to it that you come to the front now and] abound and excel in this gracious work [of almsgiving] also.

and looked at what those things we are told we excel at mean…

The PM message expanded on some of the themes from the morning, partly focusing on the Hebrew word for prosperity “shalowm“. The more I think about how to describe the message, the less able I feel to do so in a short space…so I won’t. There was lots there. Like there always is.

Music

Sunday AM
1. I’m Not Ashamed (Andrew, Thomas / Hillsong)
2. Can I Have More Of You? (Byrnes)
3. Lead Me To The Cross (Fraser / Hillsong)
4. Where You Go, I’ll Go (Johnson, Mohr / Bethel)
…then following tithes, offerings, news…
5. No One Like You (David Crowder*Band)
…and for the ministry/end of service
6. Where You Go, I’ll Go (Johnson, Mohr / Bethel)

Rachel led for the first time this morning. She’s 17 and has been in the main team since she was 14. She’s been a song leader, as opposed to a worship leader, for just on 2 years and tt was great to see her rise up a level into leadership from being a singer and No.2 keyboardist. She’d been deep in prayer about it all week, and though a little nervous, she has such a well-developed dependence on God that she did a beautiful job leading the worship today. It’s only the beginning

Sunday PM
1. For Your Glory (Pringle / C3)
2. Saving Son (Murgida / Harbourside)
…then following tithes, offerings, news…
3. Shout You Praise (Orosa, Araullo, Reddy / Harbourside)

…and then for Worship+ after the service
4. For Your Glory (Pringle / C3)
5. More Than Life (Morgan / Hillsong)
6. With Everything (Houston / Hillsong)
7. Let It Rain (Farren)

Julie led tonight. She’s 15. Rachel, who led this morning, is her elder sister. I’ve said it before, but I love seeing our youth rise up as leaders. Our pastor said he remembered her as a toddler. She took it all in stride (she’s not one for attention), and did a beautiful job leading us into the throneroom.

Worship+ was quite probably the best it’s ever been as a worship encounter. Invigorating.

Taking a cue from Steff, a Sunday Setlists blogger who often includes videos of the songs in her sets, I thought I’d include this one, the title track from C3’s 2008 album. We’ve been doing this for several months now, and it’s a great upbeat song – lots of dancing happening. C3 may not be as famous as Hillsong or Planetshakers, but many would be aware of Phil Pringle’s Christian City Church international network. Semi-interesting aside : Phil Pringle and Brian Houston grew up together in New Zealand, so I’m told by a very reliable source.  Amazing to think that two of the main church leaders from the southern hemisphere were childhood friends…

Other Stuff:
No-One Like You was new for us. It went really well…except that the words for the projection were typed up in an el bizarro manner apparently, so were very hard to follow. Diane will #prorably get around to fixing those soon…

Finally, my twitter followers may know that the front fill speakers I mentioned last week were indeed a problem…they’d been blown. Unfun. No-one’s sure how it happened; no-one ever is. Thankfully, working where I do, I was able to wangle some of our hire stock and get the issue fixed until ours are repaired.

How about your weekend ?

By popular demand, here it is.

Previous instalments in the saga can be found here and here and here.

Some Stats:
- we had around 40 minutes of “material” to sort through.
- approx 5 minutes of it was seriously unfit for public consumption…I had no idea just how wrong I could be (and it was all me). Of course, you may think the bits I’ve elected to include might be inappropriate anyway…
- we alluded to including a taste test of chilled chocobaconbits. It was delicious, but the footage was just boring.
- there will quite likely be some “issues” with an occasional word that may be acceptable in some countries and not in others, ifyaknoworrimean.

And yes, my laugh sounds a lot like Muttley, get used to it, ’cause there’s a fair bit of it in here…

The chocobacon thing has been going for a few weeks now (no, I’m not going to link it all…), and Diane’s contribution with Digella Awesome continues to make me laugh.

So I’ve done the outtakes video.

Thing is…should I post it?

It’s very funny.

To me.

But will it be to you?

So…how about you let me know what you’d like me to do.

In the first comment down there, I’ve inserted a little PollDaddy Poll, so head on down and vote for whether this should go up or not.  Get voting.

I’d forgotten about this advert until it was shown on what is quite possibly my favourite non-black-comedy TV program, The Gruen Transfer.

Who knew a chop could be so sexy?

Tempting as it was to post the Family Guy link here…this post is of far greater cultural import than such frivolity.

Last Sunday, we travelled up to the Blue Mountains after church. The Blue Mountains are one of our favourite places on earth, and are an easy drive.

Diane has some pics from the trip over at her blog, but I’m including one little bit of the day here.

We went to visit Cahill Lookout to view the early stages of sunset, before we headed on to Echo Point for the rest of it.

View Larger Map

I’d never been to this lookout before, and both Diane and I were impressed with the amount of birdlife that was evident through the song…even though we had difficulty spotting many birds at all.  They were all very well hidden in the scrub, though a few did make themselves known to us.

Some of said song is captured in this short vlog….though perhaps it should be a slog since the its mainly the song and not the video.  Anyhoo, enjoy the weird and wonderful world of Australian birdsong.  It’s shorter and less melodic than I would have liked…because the battery went flat literally seconds before beautiful melody was breaking out. D’oh!

This post is part of the weekly Sunday Setlists blog carnival over at FredMckinnon.com. Make sure you check out the other setlists too!

Following the HUGE weekend last week, there was great momentum flowing to carry us into the conference we were hosting at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. And regardless of your views of Kenneth Copeland, hosting one of his conferences was always going to be a big deal for a small(ish) church.

And I must say, the conference was awesome – in the true Biblical sense of the word.

But this post isn’t about the conference (which was Thursday to Saturday). This is about worship in my local church on Sunday. Just like it normally is. The conference will likely be blogged either here or over at Diane’s place sometime soon.

This morning was my RDO. These seem to come around really quickly, but I get blessed so much by the team that I look forward to the off-stage opportunity more and more.

We had Rev Michael Flowers preach, which was one of those examples of serendipitous circumstance that I love to share in.  Michael serves KCM as the head usher for the conferences, which consumes the vast majority of his time, though he also has his own fledgling ministry. He preached a message of love today unlike any I have ever heard. It spoke right to my heart, and given some news we had heard earlier, this helped focus our thoughts and our prayers, while also being a beautiful summary of the marvelous time we had shared in over the preceding three days at conference.

In fact, to describe church this morning as a LoveFest would not be exaggerating at all. We are so blessed to be part of such a beautiful family. But don’t for a minute think I’m saying that we’re perfect or anything like that. Just read my prior worship posts. We’re still human, but I can see tangible differences, renewal, restoration, unity…love.

Music

Sunday AM
1. What The World Will Never Take (Crocker, Ligertwood, Sampson / Hillsong)
2. Your Name High (Houston / Hillsong)
3. Stronger (Morgan, Fielding / Hillsong)
4. Worthy Is The Lamb (Murgida / Harbourside)
…then following tithes, offerings, news…
5. this was going to be Your Name High…but the way the service went, no song was needed
…and for the ministry/end of service
6. This Is Our God (Morgan / Hillsong)

Margaret led today, and did a great job leading the youth team. It’s great to have dependable, servant-hearted people to do church and life with.  She also wrote the 4th song we did today.  It is beautiful and I’m looking forward to recording it in the coming months.

There seemed to be a technical issue with our front fill speakers, but I didn’t get a chance to look at them today – so that’s a task for the week that I will be getting one of my service techs (from work) to check them out.

While Ken was preaching at Hillsong for the evening service, Diane and I took advantage of the last of our weekends without a night service to visit my convalescing mum (staying with my aunt and uncle on the upper north shore of Sydney) and spend some time with a few of my cousins as well. It was great to see mum improving more and more…though after seven weeks away from home (a 9 hour drive away), she’s keen to get back there, which will hopefully happen in two weeks’ time…

What did you get up to this weekend ?

Enough of you enjoyed last week’s post on my choir boy past that I’ve now served up part two.

This time, I’ve gone for pieces that are quite different musically, but there’s another key difference…these are both much much longer.  So make sure you’ve got time to appreciate them, or can put them on nice and loud as background music for 15 minutes or so. Freak out your neighbours with the 2nd one especially.

While you’re listening, you should also go and have a look at my elder sister’s blog, CeeLew, who once again was a soprano in these choirs, while my non-blogging, non-Twittering, non-Facebooking younger sister, Lis (Liz, but since her name is Elisabeth, her Liz is Lis…ok?) was an alto.  I was a tenor.  And I am these days as well, though I’ve worked a lot on increasing my baritone range as well.

First up, our school choir : St Peters Chorale.  It’s still a world class choir, even without all of us.  I know, hard to imagine isn’t it??  It must be the Graeme Morton factor, as most everything he touches turns to gold when it comes to choral music.

(Had I mentioned we went to boarding school, btw?)

Anyway, Past Life Melodies by Sarah Hopkins is a great example of haunting simplicity, and features some wonderful harmonic singing.  If you’re short on time, fast forward through to around the 4:30 mark, by which time the drone has been set up and the harmonics are starting to bounce over the top as two of the guys trade harmonic lines.  I will admit I was always a little disappointed with the title of this piece (and not just because of my faith), as I think it is far more evocative of the Australian outback than it is of past lives.  What do you think?

Next we head back to The Australian Voices who featured in the last post.  This is the final movement of the title track of our first album, Great Southern Spirits.  Uluru is the indigenous name of Ayers Rock, that amazing centre-piece to our nation.  Diane and I have been there 3 times, and I can’t get enough of the place.  Truly amazing, and I think this song reflects the diversity of the environment quite well – but bizarrely you can hear me very clearly throughout.  There were 15 other guys in this choir, so I’m not sure why my voice is so prominent; I know I can project well…so that must be it…

This piece was considered key in the album winning the Sunnie Award for Best Classical Album in 1994. The lyric is based on poetry by Michael Doneman, while the music is by Stephen Leek, who was also our school’s composer in residence for a period of time. You don’t realise how cool that is until after the fact. Like a lot of things in life I guess.

Enjoy the outback … “they capture the moment on film”

Australia’s relationship with food advertising makes me smile… Condescension FTW.

…at least, I think this is the third transition post…

Time gets away – I’d intended to do these a bit more often.  But then again, that would be terribly boring, and we’ve managed to get in much more ‘us’ time than we’d expected, so I’ve been posting about that.  As always, God is good good good.

All is going smoothly on the practical front of selling our little corner of the world, while emotions ride varying size rollercoasters at various times…

The apartment/unit/flat/home is generating a lot of interest which is great for the auction coming up on the 6th of June…not long !  Take a look and make us an offer we can’t refuse

And we don’t yet know where we’ll be living after that.  In reality, since we’ll be renting for a period of time, we’ll have a month to find somewhere after the auction before the sale settles – and that’s the time we’ll be finding out where we’re going to live (along with the packing…ugh)

It’s this not knowing malarkey that’s a little bit uncomfortable, but keeping all things in perspective, it’s a doddle really.   And we are constantly reminded (in hindsight) that God really does make all things work together for our good.  And while this isn’t about comparisons, if anyone has a right to complain at all about how hard transition can be, it’s this guy.  He’s a great example, and friend.

…ok, perhaps not major major.  More like major minor…or minor major….or…just minor minor.

Except that it’s from a friend, so that’s megamajor in my book.

Anyway, so far this post has Too many Ms.

So I’ve won this award, and I’m truly honoured. Though Christy, this will do NOTHING to help me stop the myth that my blog is written by a woman

Of course, that has much more to do with my writing than anything else, but – whatever…