Much of this last week has been spent reflecting on the conference last week and the ’shift’ that has happened in our own church during the past month or so – like some “universal revelation” has descended into our hearts and minds and we’re now in a new phase for our church. To sound like a broken record – it’s exciting, but also scary…

Music
My good friend Dante (lyricist of the third song…) was leading this week. I’m also his mentor for his Bible College course, and we’re accountability partners. I have been really blessed seeing him grow from being barely confident in song leading to being a wonderfully effective worship leader.

AM
What The World Will Never Take (Sampson, etc/Hillsong) – Dante has a good rock voice, and so the rockier Hillsong tracks like this sound great in his voice. I can fake it to a certain extent, but why would I?
Say So (Houghton/Gungor) – always good fun, our version has taken on a middle ground between Israel’s soul and Michael’s rock interpretations of their song.
To Meet You Here (Goodwin/Scarpato/Harbourside) – it feels a little weird to review your own songs, but this was totally beautiful this week. Always a huge compliment when you get people turning up to the resource desk asking where they can buy the song on CD
Hallelujah (Myrin/Sampson/Hillsong) – from 2004 and an ‘old’ favourite, we’ve only done this song once in the last 3 years. It was time to bring it back. I think it went for 15 minutes before we stopped the congregation – yes, you read that right…

PM
All Day (Sampson/Hillsong)
Saving Son (Murgida/Harbourside)

Worship+
You Deserve The Glory (Richards)
Shout Unto God (Houston/Hillsong)
This Is Our God (Morgan/Fielding/Hillsong)

The Ablaze Youth Band are getting really good musically. Our new mics have helped with some clarity issues that these guys often struggled with before, but it’s also because they are simply growing. Their ability to flow in the move of the Holy Spirit was shown tonight with Worship+ being the best yet. Beautiful.

Messages
The AM message was “Don’t Be Deceived”, and included some prophetic word for our congregation based on the story of Gideon’s army. Just a quick review of the notes shows 15 verse/passage references to reflect on for the week – hadn’t realised there were that many, but I wrote them down so they must be right

The PM message was another unplanned one; I was talking with PsG after the morning service, and during our talk he came up with the title “Preparing, Protecting and Positioning”. He decided to go home and prepare that message for tonight rather than using the planned message. At this rate, the planned series on “Training For Reigning” won’t get done until next year. And that is fine if God keeps giving PsG messages as powerful as this past month.

Service Summaries
I had no concept that the AM service ran over by an hour, again. In addition to longer music at the beginning, and a slightly longer message, the people did not want to leave after the service either, and the reprise of Hallelujah kept on keeping on. For the first time in ever, we didn’t have an altar call. I think this was a combination of realising the service had run long (and this was before the closing soak), but also just simply forgetting. PsG is still human after all.

The PM service and Worship+ ran right on the “suggested” length. It’s exciting to see our evenings growing in attendance these past few weeks, and I do think it’s partly due to the fact the word is spreading the the youth team are doing a great job with the music (cos the messages were always top class

Also, the sound was quite probably the best it has ever been for both services. This makes me very happy.

However, undoubtedly THE most fun bit was having our friend Jenni do a voice-over for a segment of our church news. Whispers in the crowd: “who’s the American?”, our response: “well, actually she’s Chinese”… Cue bemused looks and no further questions…hahahaha.

Favourite Moments
A shout out to my wonderful wife Diane who was in the tech booth this week making sure ProPresenter work our first Mac service. Yay We still need to work on the live video syncing (it’s a bit behind), but all things considered, it was great…and all the things Diane did were very smooth. The diff between what we had and what we now have is huge, and there’ll be more changes to come as Diane keeps creating new bits to include in the visuals.

No pastorisms this week…oh well, you can’t have everything I suppose. I’m still waiting for the reprise of bitter and twittered…

Annoying Moments
Nothing directly related to the service, but Diane only got about half-an-hour’s sleep last night. As a result, she was running on adrenalin and prayer (and coffee, I think), which seems to have done the job better than she could have hoped. God’s good like that.