Inside Today's Experience (Christmas Eve Morning Edition)

What an awesome day!
We had 15 people make professions of faith in Jesus!
We also broke our attendance record.
Not bad for having our Christmas Experience on Saturday instead of Sunday.
Honestly I had no idea going into this morning whether switching to Saturday morning was a good idea or not.
For multiple reasons it seemed to be the right decision but I figured it would either be a hit or a complete flop.
Thanking God this evening that He honored our efforts and that we in turn were able to honor Him through our efforts.
Just like last year’s Christmas Eve Experience, set-up was a bit stressful because of all that we were trying to pull off.
So thankful for the entire team. They came in at 7am this morning and we finally finished up getting ready at 9:47.
Considering I had told everyone last week to be in their seats at 9:50, we were cutting it real close.
Special thanks to Andy, Mike and Cris for the extra work they accomplished from the tech side. Your hard work paid off…thanks!
As always the band…Bill, Gayle, Jeff, Mike, Steve and Aaron did a fantastic job.
They put in a lot of work Thursday night and this morning to get ready and the results were fantastic.
This week they were also joined for one song by Jake Sellers on drums…he did awesome for his first time with us and considering how young he is…thanks Jake!
Here’s the opener we did called, “Let There Be“…I put together a video for it and Gayle as usual killed it!
The other special we did was our rockin version of “O Come O Come Emmanuel“.
And yes for the 2nd year in a row we used trash cans.
Who says we’re not traditional? :)
I actually had an “older” guy stop me in the lobby who was disappointed we didn’t do “The Little Drummer Boy” again.
Funny thing is he was being serious.
Again couldn’t be prouder of my team…from the parking lot to the “pew” our people serve with all of their hearts and with excellence!
My message focused on how King Herod missed out on what should have been so obvious…the birth of God Himself just a few miles away.
Of course the application was not to miss out on Jesus in the midst of the busyness of the Christmas season.
You can listen to the entire message here.
Or you can watch the Experience from start…to almost finish here. (Note: it is uploading as of 6:30pm. It should be live by 9-10pm).
Unfortunately the camera battery died a few minutes before we ended.
What you miss in the video is me leading the 15 through a prayer to receive Jesus and then everyone standing to sing along to the remainder of “It is Well”.
Yep…that’s right the hymn…done as a hymn not Exponential style.
A couple of brief announcements followed and then we closed with the “Party” song which you can see the band perform from last week’s Experience.
FYI…on of the announcements I gave was the results of our Contagious Christmas Challenge…you/we gave enough that we were able to help 50 needy families have a Christmas that wouldn’t have otherwise! Way to go Exponential!
Again it was an incredible day…what’s weird is coming home and the NFL was on anyway…feels just like a Sunday except it wasn’t.
So glad we decided to worship and celebrate today!
In fact…we’re going to do it again next Saturday at 10am to avoid New Years Day.
Hope to see you then for the conclusion of the “Party” series.
As I announced it’s called “The After Party” and will be a recap of every series we did in 2011.
Going to be an awesome time looking back on God’s faithfulness.

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