Today our church celebrate with many churches across the nation in Amazing Grace Sunday. This year is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the UK and about 144 years since slavery was abolished in the US. One of the reasons such a Sunday is needed is because there are still people in slavery around the world. World Hope International is an organization connected with The Wesleyan Church that is a leader in the fight to stop modern day slavery.
I had planned to start our worship celebration with Todd Agnew’s Grace Like Rain, but at the last minute decided to use Chris Tomlin’s “Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone).” One of the reasons is that Tomlin’s song uses the original melody and adds a chorus. So it was familiar. It was a great way to start the service and was spontaneous (It wasn’t in the bulletin.) After that we sang, “Lord, I Lift Your Name on High,” “Amazing Love” (the Graham Kendrick song, not You are my king) and finished with “You Are My All in All. Our focus this morning was on God’s amazing love and grace. For our hymns, we looked to Charles Wesley and sang, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” and “And Can It Be?” The message continued our focus on God’s love and grace. We finished with the classic version of “Amazing Grace.” If you have the time, check out the video of Tomlin’s version of Amazing Grace, which is at the bottom of this post. It includes the original last verse which is included in the picture above from the Wesleyan Methodist hymnal of 1950. The last verse that we sing so often is not part of Newton’s hymn, but was added around the beginning of the 20th century.
This evening we had a wonderful time studying the spiritual discipline of corporate prayer. It was convicting even for me. Our leadership team is going to look at some things we need to do to incorporate more corporate prayer into our services. Pray for us as we continue to discover the corporate spiritual disciplines and I would covet your prayers for our student ministries.
I’m going to sleep, knowing that today was a good day of ministry and look forward to more days like it.
