Evidences of God’s Grace: Easter ‘08

High points of God’s grace and provision easily get lost in all the details and business of life. Here is a story of how God moved in an amazing way on Easter this year both in Mars Hill Church and with my daughter Trinity. I wrote this for an upcoming “year end” publication but wanted to share it here as well.

Good Friday and Easter are like the Super Bowl at Mars Hill Church. Each year this weekend holds both our largest attendance and most elaborate production effort. As your worship pastor, overseeing the music and many of the details of the sound, light and video, it is the busiest time of the year for my team and I. To be honest, it’s easy to get caught up in all the details and forget the core reason for all the celebration.

This year, as we have in years past, we planned to have baptisms to visibly demonstrate how God has worked in peoples’ lives. However, only a few days before the big weekend, we decided to do something we had never done before. We called it “spontaneous baptism”. We decided that, in addition to the 12 or so people we had planned on baptizing at the Ballard campus, we would do an open call to everyone who became a Christian that day or Christians who had not yet done so to come forward and be baptized. This was one of those things that was either going to be amazing or incredibly awkward.

Easter Sunday arrived with the usual nervousness and running around to make sure everything was going to work together according to plan. We began the first of our five services at 9am. Following and great–but uncharacteristically short–gospel message from Pastor Mark, Pastor Bubba Jennings got up and called people to respond in celebration and baptism. He passionately called people to come forward promising that, in case they were concerned about getting their clothes wet, we had loads of t-shirts and sweat pants to change into backstage.

As we started into a tune, I watched the people in front of the stage anxiously waiting to see if anyone would come forward. Immediately Bubba and the prayer team were flooded with people responding to the call. I hadn’t even finished the first verse of the first song before someone got baptized which the congregation received with thunderous applause. One baptism followed another. The last person was baptized as I sang the last refrain of our last song. I have never seen anything like it. I have never sang like I did that day and I have never seen Mars Hill respond in song and celebration with such joy and passion. The combination of seeing the resurrection clearly in the Scripture, the congregation’s response in song and seeing the work of the Holy Spirit move people so visibly to action was absolutely electric.

Here is some video of what it looked like…

We’d only had our first service and it had already been an amazing day. But the 11am service would become one of the highlights of my entire life. The service began similarly to the 9am except it was much bigger being just shy of 1400 in attendance. There were so many people to baptize I added 2 additional songs to our set. Every time I would look over at the baptismal I would see Mars Wasson, our production director, motioning for me to keep playing.

At the end of singing “All my Tears”, for the second time, everyone was waving at me. I thought they were motioning for me to continue playing and I was trying to think of what we would play next without messing up the song I was still singing. I saw a little girl coming up the stage out of the corner of my eye but that was all that registered. As I finished the song I finally realized why everyone was waving and yelling at me. It was my first born daughter Trinity.

Now you have to realize that my daughter Trinity, unlike her father, is a very shy girl. At the age of 6 she will hardly speak two words to someone she doesn’t know. When we prayed for Easter Sunday the night before she said she would get baptized someday but not in front of so many people. It was “too scary”. Yet there she was standing in the baptismal in her Easter dress waiting for me to figure it out. I lost it. With tears streaming down my face I went over, rolled up my sleeves, and baptized my baby girl over the edge of the tub. There were few dry eyes in the house and I could not have been more proud or happy.

Unfortunately, my wife was not there to see it. She was home cooking Easter dinner and Trinity was there with my sister, her aunt. After Bubba gave the call for baptism, Trinity turned to my sister and literally said, “I have to get baptized right now!!!” She walked up to the stage an got in the tub before I even realized what was going on. There is nothing in the world as beautiful as seeing your children develop faith of their own and I will remember that day for the rest of my life.

You can see my reaction here:

Over the course of the day we baptized over 150 people with more than 130 of them spontaneous with no thought of what would happen that day. It was unbelievable.

Obviously not all days are like that. Most Sundays Mars Hill church folk still tend to look like they drank sour milk when they sing. My daughter is still a typical 6 year old and the world is still full of sin and brokenness. However, much like the monuments of memorial that God directed people to build in Old Testament times, Easter Sunday 2008 will be a monument to the visible grace of Jesus and movement of the Holy Spirit as long as I live.