I am experiencing a change in how I spend my time this week. For the last 2 months, I had been spending large amounts of time preparing for a 6-week sermon series while my senior pastor was away.
You could say I did a few things....uhhh....differently.
As a finale to the series, I organized the entire worship service backwards. That's right! I put the sermon at the beginning and the singing at the end. You can go here for part of the why. A lesser reason for doing so was to keep people guessing.
I wouldn't do something drastic just for kicks and giggles, but it is interesting, to say the least, to see people deal with change. Here's a few of the things that happened.
Our church has a bulletin. We print the order of service each week. Truthful to my plan, I printed the service order backwards. I had no less than 4 people come to me before the service, bulletin in hand, and ask if we were starting at the bottom of the bulletin. I corrected them and said we would go in the printed order.
This is interesting to me because people assumed the most crazy thing we might do is mess with the printed order. We wouldn't actually do a service backwards, would we? We understand that the Holy Spirit only works when we sing first and then preach, right? Oops!
To add crazy to kooky, when I began the sermon, I started from the back of the sanctuary. If you're ever looking to raise the blood pressure of people, camp yourself in the back of a church, where people assume they'll have a bigger buffer between themselves and the preacher. I found out one lady showed up a few minutes late for the service, saw me preaching in the back, and left, assuming she had missed the entire service.
When do we turn our clocks again?!?
People are funny.
Well, it's done now. The only interesting aspect left for me will be to see how the quirky aspects of a 6-week series impacts people to their mission and calling. After all, living any other way but with purpose would just be backwards.
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