Weekend Teaching Series: Senior Weekend
Sermon Title: It’s a Rap
Sermon in a Sentence: “… the last thing I’d want to say before I leave”
Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 5 out of 10

Attendance: Up 16% from last weekend, up 123% from same weekend last year
Service Length: shortest — 4:30: 73 minutes. Longest — 6:30: 92 minutes

Understandable Message: This weekend’s teaching came entirely from seniors. Six students spoke for no more than 5 minutes each (we had cue cards letting them know how much time was left). The general themes were about surrendering to God, discovering how God has wired you, and living a life that matters.

Volunteer/Student Involvement: Students spoke, led the music, directed and ran cameras, helped emcee, made our opening video … pretty much everything.

Element of Fun/Positive Environment: Initially we opened with a video of one of our students dancing all around the Refinery that was pretty funny. But Sunday morning the band was messing around and came up with a really strong cover of — “Heartless” (The Fray’s version) — and so we led off our two Sunday services with that. We also closed all the services with “Dancing Generation” which is a song that got dusted off from its semi-retirement. In the 6:30 service we pulled all the seniors up on stage to dance with that song — lots of fun.

Music Playlist: All I Need is You, Breathe, With Everything, Dancing Generation

Favorite Moment: We had a video testimony from a student named Chris who is going blind. In it Chris describes his path toward becoming a Christian, and when the video ended he came on stage to play a song he wrote around that time. One of the best testimony moments we’ve done in a weekend service.

(I’m still gone on the Road Trip – this report was written by Josh Pease. He’s an incredible 2-year intern heading into the home stretch of his time with HSM and headed up this weekend.)

JG