Sunday Night Live!

Outside Hillsong


The Main Auditorium, Worship time


Sunday Night Live is the name of a service at Hillsong Church at 4:30pm and 6:30pm. I happened to attend the 4:30pm service and it was so awesome (sounds Aussie right?) that I have to blog about it. This service was purposely catered for the "Seekers" or Non-Christians that were attending that Sunday afternoon. The event started with worship that was lead by Brooke Fraser, who is quite well known here in Hillsong.

The picture I took of Brooke

The Wikipedia picture of her

After the worship, the platform was set up with some props to make it look like a study room with a brown leather couch, a table, and a table lamp. The youth pastor then took his seat on the leather couch and proceeded to start his sermon in narrative form. While the Pastor was reading from a book, the overhead screens flashed out the definition of the word "Echo", and that was the main theme of the sermon. Other than the pastor and props on stage, there was also a huge canvas on stage that was partially painted blue as the base color of the painting.

As the pastor continued preaching from the leather seat, a lady emerged from the backstage and started working on the painting. All the crowds attention were directing back and forth from the pastor to the painter as the sermon moved on and the canvas evolved into a painting. The sermon, revolving around "Echoes", was started off with the reading of Genesis and how creation came about. The whole point of the sermon was how creation, from humans to the tiny cells in our bodies, all echo the greatness and power of our Creator. To further elaborate "Echoes", a small snippet of the movie "August Rush" was played on the screens, showing this boy who could listen to all the different sounds that echoed from all the things around him (watch the movie "August Rush" it's great!). After the snippet was over, I realized that the painting was almost completed and it was a piece of abstract art (art that symbolizes something). Turning towards the painting, the Pastor rose from his seat to admire the beautiful painting, and started to praise the painting and idolize it. He explained that sometimes we are so caught up by the beauty and perfection of the painting that we forget the Painter, helping us understand that we often get caught up with some good-looking actor that we don't realize that the actor is just a creation of our mighty Creator, and we should give our Creator the praise and not the creation.

Lastly, they set up this studio microphone (the expensive ones that can pick up on aircon sounds) and rolled out this board between the Pastor and the mic. The pastor started to shout across the stage, but the mic didn't pick up on his voice because of the obstruction. But as he drew nearer to the mic and moved away the board, the mic picked up on his voice and echoed clearly across the room. In conclusion, as we move closer to God (the mic), we are able to echo him better and louder to the people around us.

The End!! I hope that wasn't too long and hard to understand.