From Sampler to Sower

Weekend Teaching Series: Avatar

Message Title: Avatars and Incarnation

Sermon in a Sentence: We do not need to fear rejection when we approach God, because He chose us.

Text(s): Ephesians 1:3-14

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 3 out of 10, Again, a fairly straightforward message that was fun to preach.

Message Summary:

We began by watching the following clip.  (The embedded copy is from YouTube.  We got our clip from WingClips.com.)

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A busy schedule has kept me from updating my blog recently, but I’m working to get back into the swing of posting regularly.  I’m going to go back a couple of weeks with my reviews to include all three sermons from our Avatar series.

Weekend Teaching Series: Avatar

Message Title: Avatars and Incarnation

Sermon in a Sentence: Avatar provides hints and glimpses of the greatest story ever told, but Jesus Christ is the incarnation of God in whom we can trust.

Text(s): John 1:1-14

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 3 out of 10, A pretty straightforward night with an enjoyable theme.

Message Summary:

In January we launched a three week mini-series inspired by themes from the new blockbuster movie Avatar.  In week one of our series we examined the story of the movie as a whole and asked the question “What makes this movie so compelling?”

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Weekend Teaching Series: Heroes

Message Title: The Foolish Vow

Sermon in a Sentence: God is not honored when we treat him like the idols that surround us.

Text(s): Judges 10-11

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 3 out of 10, A straightforward night, with one of the tougher stories in the Bible.

Message Summary:

Heroes moved into its sixth week with the story of Jephthah. We’re working our way through the book of Judges with our students, and we’re into the homestretch now.  That’s a good thing, because if you know anything about Judges, you know things are getting bad, fast.

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Weekend Teaching Series: Heroes

Message Title: The Judge Who Wasn’t

Sermon in a Sentence: Be careful which voices you allow to have influence in your life.

Text(s): Judges 8-9

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 6 out of 10, There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in tonight’s service.  The only difficulty was the normal and enjoyable task of exegeting a passage of scripture and learning to hear and speak its message to a new generation.

Message Summary:

Our Heroes series based on the book of Judges for Junior High continued this week.  However, for the first time in our  series we talked about someone whom the Bible never calls a judge.  Abimelech, son of Gideon, is sometimes listed among the judges of Israel, but he neither saved Israel from any threat, nor was he called by God to this task.  His tale is just the end of the story of the judge Gideon.

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(Here’s another old sermon, this one delivered in our youth services during our first full sermon series here in Middletown in February of 2003.)

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One of the things I do here at Middletown is make the sermon graphics for my Senior Pastor’s (Dr. Phil Rogers) sermons each week.  Phil likes to distribute notes when he preaches, and likes to have the “answers” show up on the screen while he’s preaching so people don’t get lost trying to fill them in.   That means Power Point!

Of course, Power Point is less than ideal when you’re trying to communicate to people.  There was a time when Power Point was new and cutting edge.  But the fact is, many people “get” to watch Power Point presentations every day at work (and a lot of times, it’s bad Power Point at that).  There’s few things worse than coming to church and getting hit up with more of the same stuff that left you bored and uninspired all week at work (especially when the Power Point at church is bad Power Point too).

That’s why we’ve tried hard to leave Power Point behind.  Each of our graphics is designed in Corel’s graphics suite, but we do use Easy Worship’s integrated PowerPoint viewer to make displaying them easier.  That way we get the ease of Power Point’s presentation interface without the often clunky and bland Power Point clip art and text rendering (and NO WordArt!!!).

To give you a feel for what our slides look like, here are some sample slides from a sermon Dr. Rogers is presenting today at ONU’s Pastor Appreciation Days.  His message shares the story of our small community and our church, and lessons that he has learned in more than 30 years of pastoring in Middletown.  The analogy he’s using for his message is the difference between throwing rocks (creating exciting but only short lived splashes) and the less glamorous task of digging channels so the current can flow.  I’m pretty excited about the message, and hopefully after he delivers it he’ll let me blog some more about what it all means.  (I’d hate to steal his thunder . . .)

Pictures after the jump…

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Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 10 of 10, For the same reasons as the Junior High service, this was a difficult night.  Fortunately, by the time the teaching time came around in the service, the Excedrin I’d been taking all day finally began to kick in.  I really did think, going into this service, that there was a chance I’d have to cut the teaching short.  But God is good.

Message Summary: We’re in the fourth week of our You Decide series in which we’ve been answering the questions students ask. As I’ve mentioned for the past three weeks, we’re using a  Poll Everywhere poll to collect the questions teens have and I’m choosing the best to answer at Water’s Edge.  This weeks top questions included “Who is Legion?” “What’s the difference between the Old and New Testament?” and “Will all dogs really go to heaven?”

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Weekend Teaching Series: Heroes

Message Title: The Cowardly Warrior

Sermon in a Sentence: Actually, I didn’t have one going in . . . but more on that later.

Text(s): Judges 6-7

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 12 out of 10,This was one of my toughest nights in youth ministry ever.  The game took a little extra prep, getting audio clips ready for “Name that Tune.”  That  alone would have made it a 7 out of 10.  But what knocked this one out of the park difficulty-wise was an incredible headache, intensified exponentially by our stage lights.  After struggling through the game and music, I had to go to house lights for the teaching time and even then the headache was so bad I couldn’t think straight.  We made it through the night, but I know my teaching was adversely affected.

Message Summary:

We’re in week four of our Heroes series for Junior High. We’re working our way through the Old Testament book of Judges, seeing what we can learn from the people God chose to change their world.  As always we started with a “where we left off” review.  I was impressed at how well my students remembered the heroes from the first three weeks of the series; they even remembered Othaniel, a guy who played only a minor part in week one of the series.

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Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 5 of 10, By the time the Senior High service rolled around, most of the glitches were worked out of the system and everything went pretty smoothly.

Message Summary: This was week three for our You Decide series in which we’ve been answering the questions students ask.  We’ve set up a Poll Everywhere poll to collect the questions and I’m choosing the best to answer at Water’s Edge.

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Weekend Teaching Series: Heroes

Message Title: The Tent-Peg Killer

Sermon in a Sentence: Don’t let fear keep you from being the Hero God is looking for.

Text(s): Judges 4

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 7 out of 10, I guess the easy weeks had to come to an end.  This was a Murphy’s Law kind of Tuesday night.  Fortunately, with the exception of a slightly late start due to a guitar malfunction, I don’t think any of the chaos effected the service itself.

Message Summary:

We’re in week three of our Heroes series for Junior High. You’ll remember from last week this series is taking a look at the book of Judges. We started with a quick “Where we left off…” review which reminded students of the judges cycle (Rebellion, Retribution, Repentance, Redeemer, Rescue) and of the two judges of whom we spoke so far: Othaniel and Ehud.

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