Preachin' it

Well, even if I do say so myself, things seemed to go really well this weekend. Dave C. led the worship, overseeing the international debut of our first ever girl drummer from the Arctic Circle, Erika (ha! it's not every church that can claim they have a girl drummer from the Arctic Circle).

I actually quite enjoyed preaching, and using the old mindmap as my preaching notes worked really well. As expected, each of the three services was a bit different, with different parts of the sermon being emphasised for each of the three crowds, and the flexibility of using a mindmap instead of a manuscript really helped in this area.

So, despite this summer season being the Cairo version of "Day Before Vacation Sunday (DBVS)", I didn't preach a controversial sermon, we didn't have any snake handling in church, no sumo wrestling either, but I did throw sweets at the crowd. I admit that it would have been most satisfying to throw Skittles, but the floor at church is so dirty that we decided we had better use wrapped sweets and toffees. Although we've kicked footballs in to the congregation before, I don't think they've ever had the preacher throw stuff at them, and to give them their due, they seemed to take it very well. It was, of course, a marvelous illustration of God's generosity. At least, that's my excuse when Steve comes back...

We had no triangles or cow bells in the worship band, though we did have a clarinet (very mellow, thanks Petra.), and David didn't throw in any unicorn songs (you missed your chance there, mate, I was waiting for you to kick off an early 80's Vineyard Worship Music revival), so it was quite a tame DBVS by SCL standards.

What was really cool, was celebrating communion at a service where the theme was "giving and serving" - the whole image of Jesus giving himself up as a sacrifice for us, and Jesus serving his disciples at the last supper was a wonderful way of illustrating how we should respond to God's' amazing generosity by practicing the discipline of giving.