Good Friday at our church is entrenched in tradition, to which I am a latecomer. Because we've had a history of having worship leaders on staff who go on to much bigger things (Chris Tomlin, Brandon Heath, Robbie Seay), from the moment I arrived on campus, I was barraged with conversations constantly harking back to our (fairly recent) days of yore, with sighs of "I miss when.." and "it was way better..." We are not a forward-looking community.
Our biggest signature move was to rent out the massive outdoor concert venue across the street from us each Easter weekend. We centered the event around a big concert on Good Friday led by our worship leader du jour. When we needed to cut costs, we moved the weekend back to our campus, but then we built a hefty stage on the lawn, hauled out every watt of moving lights we had and rented a heap more, and had succession of events that drifted slowly from "energetic worship" to "energetic rock festival," all played before our less-than-energetic members (we're Methodists. We don't jump. At most we... lean).
A couple years ago, I joined a worship committee that sacked all that, moved the service back into our sanctuary, killed the rock-show vibe and tried to revert the service back to a night of worship and teaching as strong and unified as we could manage.
It's been a couple of years of that now, and I'm proud of the work I've gotten to do on those services. I won't wander off into a diatribe of what worship is or why it matters, because you've likely (definitely) read much better thoughts than mine before, but as much as we've maintained a good deal of spectacle in these services (we are who we are), it's been nice to center the evening around community and worship, and to focus on the meaning of that particularly sacred evening.
This is all unnecessary introduction for these three videos I did for this year's service, based around the theme of "Torn" - two stories, totally unrelated, but deeply connected to what happened on that Friday a long time ago. If you'd like to see all the videos in context, the sermon they're interspersed in is up at The Woodlands United Methodist website.
I've never been happier with work I've done, or more excited about the stories I got to tell. These videos are my favorite of all my work.