Message

This past Sunday, I had the great honor to minister to the main congregation at Family Fellowship Christian Center, where I am the youth pastor.

I taught on Revelations 3:14-22 and had an incredible time.  If you are interested in listening to the message you can go here to listen to it.  The title of the message is Sitting on the Throne with God.  At the moment of this blog post, it is the top one on the list of podcasts.

I think it is really cool that I get the opportunity, once in a while, to act like a preacher instead of a teacher.  I talked for over an hour and it seemed like 20 minutes.  No one in the congregation was even getting figitty, which after an hour and nine minutes, I would have expected.

I also started to realize just how much work goes into a Sunday service, how much responsibility that I actually have on a normal Sunday and how much more I would have if I were also the senior pastor.

To put a normal Sunday Service in perspective, here is a list of things that have to take place to make the time between 8:30 am to 12:30 pm go smoothly.

Pastor arrives to building 8:15 am, turns on heat, sets up the first service (Bible and a Bagel).
Pastor waits for people to arrive.
Pastor ministers to the early morning bible study.  (This is the same message as the main service, even though the two messages are delivered in an entirely different manor and the two are seldom, if ever even in the same ballpark.)
Pastor ministers from 8:45 to 9:30 (or a little later.)
9:30 - 10:30 worship team starts practice/sound check for main service. (The pastor and I are both on the worship team.  He leads the worship team, but when he's out, it falls to me.)
10:30 - 11:00, worship service. 
11:00 - 11:15 - "The Pastor" - Pray over school aged children
                                         - Take offereing.
                      "Me"            - Prepare sound for recording
                                         - As youth pastor and elder, pray over the school aged children
11:15-12:30 - Main service ministry / recording.

Now, that is the overview.  These duties are normally divided between me and Pastor Rick.  However this past Sunday, all of this fell to me.  For about 4 hours I was running around like a frantic beast.  When everything works well this whole process is easy.  When things start failing though, it's crazy.  Not letting people see that things are falling apart takes skill, or luck.  On Sunday, for worship practice, my wireless guitar transmitter was flaking out.  I had to use a mic.  This is no big deal, but it limits my freedom of movement.  After we were done with worship, I went to get the wireless mic for preaching and the mic was not in its normal place.  We found it after a couple of minutes of frantic searching, then, for some reason, it wasn't being broadcast out of the main speakers.  After a quick rewiring job, we got everything going and service started, about 4 minutes later than normal, but the people in the congregation were none the wiser.  It was cool.

Anyway, that was a morning to remember, the chaos didn't crack us and the word of God was delivered.