Sunday Recap! Handling Heavy News.

Pin It Still soaring from service on Sunday. The band really nailed it!  It was a solid day musically and I'm glad, but much of the success of this day had to do with planning.

On this day I felt like we really ministered to our church (and each other) in a time of loss.  One of our most prominent volunteers had passes away on Friday.

Service planning wise we weighed our options on what to do with this heavy news. We actually mentioned not addressing it, but quickly realized that sends all the wrong messages and would have been distracting. We knew we had to make a prominent mention of her passing but we wanted to make sure it wasn't this heavy sad burden we couldn't recover from emotionally.

We believe service planning is very important, so we came up with  a strategy. We would start service with the song Happy Day. About 3/4ths through the song we brought down the music and Pastor came up and delivered the news. He delivered it in the context of this being the Happiest Day that our friend had ever experienced. We finished out Happy Day and it felt great! 

How we handled that news really fueled the rest of the day.  I've worked in churches where the pastor would have waited till he preached to mention it in passing as people where turning in their bibles trying to find the book of Hezekiah. Some would have mentioned it during announcements sandwiched between potluck and the ladies auxiliary. I was glad we planned on how to lead our congregation through this news.

This was also the first week we had done "Our God."  It couldn't have been better timed. It's been a long time since I did a first time song that was better received than "Our God." It was the perfect song for the day so we even brought back full band to reprise it at Altar.