The Oasis Sunday morning experience...
“They don’t do anything weird at that church, do they?”
All of us know how intimidating it can be to go to a new place, with people we don’t know, not knowing exactly what we’re going to find there. And that might be especially true of going to church! What if we get there and we don’t understand anything that’s going on, or they’re involved in some, shall we say, unusual practices! That’s when we start looking for the nearest exit and hope no one has parked us in!
Well, at Oasis, we’d like to make it as easy for you to experience this church thing as we can. We’d like to take the fear factor out of it for you. So here’s a blow-by-blow account of what you’ll find at Oasis on a typical Sunday morning. It’s not overly complicated, and we’ll do our best to make sure you’ll understand the language! The one thing we are certain of is that the people you’ll meet are just like you—on a journey to know more about God and to find new life in Jesus Christ!
And we should say up front that what we do not consider our Sunday morning gathering to be the most important thing that we do, it's not the primary focus of our life together. We think that's how our friendship with God and each other works itself out in the 'everyday' of our lives. Sunday morning is just a support for that, a time for partying, reflecting, refreshing, resting, refocusing...get the pic? Okay, on to Sunday A.M.
Getting Ready: To warn you ahead of time, you’ll find that we’re a pretty casual bunch when it comes to what we wear. You’ll generally find our pastor in Dockers or jeans and a golf shirt, and jeans, shorts, T-shirts, and skirts (no, our pastor does not wear a skirt) are all about equally represented (although we're not sure we could tell you the last time we saw a tie come through our doors!) So when you’re getting ready, choose clothes that you feel comfortable in. We don’t think God really cares much about what’s on the outside anyway!
Arriving: So now you’re in the car and heading over to the school. After you’ve driven by the entrance to the parking lot a couple of times trying to decide if you really want to do this, you take a deep breath and pull on in. We say we start at 10 AM, but, since we provide coffee and snacks before hand, and since we're really all about genuine relationships, well, it might be a couple of minutes after that! So you might want to get here in time to grab the java or juice and get the kids accustomed to where they’ll be headed as well. We meet in the multi-purpose room of the school, and the entrance is on the south side of the building toward the rear. We’ll actually have some friendly-types in the parking lot to welcome you, give you some information, help you find the nursery if you need that, and point you in the right direction. Inside, don’t be surprised to find real warmth from the others who are participating with you. We are a friendly group! Some background music will be playing until it’s time to get started.
Simply Worship: There’s nothing complicated about what we do during our worship time. That’s really what we think worship should be: an opportunity for you to meet with God, express yourself to Him, and hear about Him from the Bible.
We start that with about 20 minutes of a mixture of singing, praying and reading from the Bible. The Oasis praise band is dynamite, and even if you don’t enjoy singing all that much, just listen and tap a toe or two. We also take a couple of minutes during this time to say “hey” to each other. We really see church as a family kind of thing. We think you’ll catch a sense of real commitment to one another at Oasis.
Following the singing, we'll send the pre-school through sixth grade kids off for their own learning time. We do take an offering at this point (if our pastor remembers!), but if you’re visiting with us, we want you to just sit back and enjoy the special music or background song that’s playing—we are not after your money here!
The last portion of our time together is Pastor Jim's message from the Bible. We believe that the Bible is given to us by God, it is His actual words. All of our messages come from what God tells us there. You’ll find they deal with real life, with issues we face daily, and in language we don’t need a dictionary to understand!
When Jim finishes up, we may close with a reprise of a song we did earlier, and that will wrap it up. All told, our morning lasts anywhere from an hour and fifteen minutes to an hour and a half.
See, no snake handling or chicken sacrifices! The only time we do anything dramatically different is on the first Sunday of the month which is Family Sunday, where our kids stay with us for the whole morning (maybe you’d prefer the snake handling!), but we make up for that by having a potluck lunch following the worship.
To be honest, we love Sunday mornings! We think there’s room on Sundays to laugh, cry, think and relax. We really aren’t scary people—at least most of us aren’t! So come and have a great Sunday morning--and a cup of coffee--on us!