Guest Blogger: Wade Joye, Worship Pastor
Pastor Steven asked us to showcase some of the things we have done to kick off the fall and create momentum, so I wanted to highlight the creative elements we used in our worship experience on the first week of our Give. Me. Faith. series. Our team wanted an element that highlighted the various things we attempt to place our faith in that have failed us. The goal was to build the emotion of wanting to let go of these things and instead embrace what will last and can be depended on.
This illustration was a combination of video and live elements, and is probably our best attempt so far at integrating the two together. The video team killed it with this video, so check it out below. This came after our worship set, which included an original song called Give Me Faith.
During this video, we set up three shadowboxes on the stage that each had an image on them. One represented wealth, one portrayed government and leadership, and the last image stood for relationships. These images were also incorporated into the previous video.
The band performed Snow Patrol’s Open Your Eyes as someone came out and interacted with the images for the first verse and chorus. When the second verse hit, the person began to cut through each image with a razorblade. There were super bright lights in the shadowbox that caused light to break through the cuts in the images.
After each image had been thoroughly sliced and diced, the band hit the big ending of the song. At that moment, each image was ripped off to reveal the words GIVE in one box, ME in the other and FAITH in the last. This reveal was very powerful and captured the emotion that we wanted going into the sermon.
What makes me proud of what our team pulled off isn’t that it was just a cool element for the sake of being creative. What made this element great was how cohesive it was with the theme of the day. Everything really built towards Pastor Steven’s sermon and set him up very well to preach on this issue. It ended up being an amazing worship experience as over 500 people gave their lives to Jesus that weekend! And I can’t think of a better way to kick off the fall.