Multi-Site Arts

Isaiah Prophecy Experience

   This is one of my favorite worship experiences we have done for a while. Our new series is called "Indescribable" and is based upon five of the names of Jesus found within the prophecies in the book of Isaiah and the fulfilled in the story of Jesus' birth. The weekend messages center around those five, but we created an experience in the entryways of all 8 campuses that feature all 121 prophecies of Jesus from Isaiah. Every campus has some form of that experience on weekends, but because several are in rented facilities, they are limited on what they can do. Below are some examples of that experience at the Yellow Box in Naperville. We actually are going to leave all of this up for the entire series, through the end of December. We set up the ground level to become the book of Isaiah, where you can follow a time-line through the chapters and experience a series of 10 prayer stations that connect the worshiper with the different themes of the prophecies. We are encouraging attenders to come back during the week by themselves, with a friend or with their small group and travel through the experience to create a new kind of connection with God's plan and purpose for Christmas.

HUGE kudos to my administrative volunteer, Cyndi Dole, who spent the last three weeks of her life making this happen at all sites!

Here a few of the tie-in slides we used in the service during Communion. Each slide featured one of the prophecies and then would fade into a slide that had the New Testament fulfillment of that prophecy. They took a picture of one of our blank scrolls and then super-imposed the scripture over the picture, using the same font we did it. Great job TJ Friesen!

Suffering Rave

One of the things that makes CCC who it is in it's worship life is our history of using "experiential worship" in our service. (Please forgive me, but I am about to mention my book. I promise not to do this as much as the other CCC blogs.) If you want to see more of what that looks like, you can read "Engaging Worship" from Group Publishing.

I am prepping for a seminar I am leading with Eric Bramlett at the North American Christian Convention in Kansas City on Wednesday on "Best Resources for Worship". (Our session is at 2 p.m. on July 4th. Who is in the world is going to attend a workshop at 2 p.m. on the 4th of July? I will let you know if anyone actually comes when I get back.) But since I had to convert the video to MPEG for the workshop, I thought I would post it at the same time on my blog. One of the best things is that this completely reproducible at our multiple sites. The same video goes out everywhere and we just have to produce more of the packets.

One of the examples we always show when talking about our worship experiences is "The Suffering Rave". It is something we developed about 6 years ago for our series leading up to Easter, called "The Last Words of Jesus". That week's service was on "Father, Forgive Them". The point of the rave was to try to get even a taste of how enormous that statement was when Jesus said it. For him to ask God to forgive the people who crucified him and even more, become the replacement for our sins. This was long before "The Passion of the Christ", so when we did this it was pretty controversial.

Here is how it works:

We gave everyone in the congregation a manila packet with the following three items in it: a nail, a thorn and a piece of wood. We had them take those items out and then follow the directions on the video as they appeared. Also we told them to watch the images closely and think about the words: "Father, Forgive Them."

Here is the video. (Again, this is really old so the video quality is archaic.)