First Wednesday in Silence

I met some new people tonight who came to our First Wednesday service this last week and they shared how impacting it was for them. I too am still thinking about our time together in silence.

It was powerful.

For those of you who don't know what First Wednesday is, here's the short of it... every month at The Orchard, we get together on the First Wednesday to worship together, to catch our breath and begin our month by keeping first things first.

It's our chance as a church community to commit each month to God.

A chance to take a break from the business of life and focus our attention on our Creator.

We actually do some pretty creative things on FW to help us connect in different ways and I plan to post some of these ideas on future posts.

This last FW, we used silence - just taking the opportunity to be quiet and listen for God's voice. When a room of 100-150 people are doing this, it's powerful. We used the Nooma film "Noise" to help get things into this mindset of being quiet and still. Then we directed people purely with words on our screens. We spent nearly 40 minutes in silence.

We meditated on some scriptures in silence.

We took communion together in silence (the breaking of the wafer all together after so much silence was amazing).

We prayed together in silence and left together in silence.

It was probably one of the most moving FW experiences I've ever had.
I'll post the keynote or a version of it so you can see how it worked.

Have you ever taken time to connect with God like that before? In silence?
Peace.