First full service

Outside view of Christ Church 

Today I led my first service in its entirety. Last week Rev. Cindy kindly let me lead the family service from the order of service whilst she took control of the intercessions and the address.  Over the Christmas period I also had a chance at doing prayers of intercession as well as addresses.  
This week I combined all of them and led the service from start to finish minus the reading and notices. The former as usually you do get someone else to read to break the monotony of your voice for the congregation and the latter as I didn't have a list of them. 

I feel like it went really well! I didn't trip over anything and everyone there said I did a great job. I was nervous but it felt like God was present and was helping me maintain my composure and keep on top of things. I'm suffering from a chesty cough at the moment yet throughout the service I didn't need to stop to cough even once!

I'm not sure if anyone would be interested but I'm going to post up the prayers of intercession I used today in a separate blog post, but I thought I'd talk through the process I used to create them.

As you probably know as you're reading this blog I am a fully trained teacher, currently working as a supply teacher. As such  I'm used to planning lessons, a skill which has come in very handy!  When creating a lesson there is no point in reinventing the wheel. Someone out there will have done that lesson before you, so you can have a look and use that for inspiration.  I did this for both the address and the prayers of intercession.

Hope no one felt this way! 

For the address I searched for sunday school resources relevant to today, as I knew it was for a family service where half the congregation would be kids.  I then structured my ideas in an interactive way, including leading questions to get the congregation involved, ensuring it wasn't too kiddy as it needs to be interesting to parents as well.
It's always good to make the address relevant to something they know so you can get the message across easily. Luckily today was about the baptism of Jesus so I talked about the font, the difference between baptism and christening and how Jesus being baptised allows us to enter God's graces through the same means. The hardest part of this address was timings. It's easily a topic you can talk about for ages, but children, especially young children  have short attention spans so I had to keep it short and sweet yet informative.

For the intercessionary prayers for today I looked online for ones from the past to get some inspiration.  I then took the general theme of baptism and made simplified prayers out of it that were relevant to recent world events as well. Again it would have been easy to make a complex list, but bearing in mind the congregation structure I kept it simple!

I'm glad I didn't fall flat on my face! 

Overall it has been great fun preparing the resources. It only took about an hour to do, though I put that down to experience through teaching.  It was also amazing to be able to teach God's word first hand and lead everyone in prayer. I can't wait to do my next one! Hopefully Rev Cindy will let me loose on the adult congregation next time!