Trudie relished her Sunday mornings at church. Nowhere else did she feel the same sense of completeness, wholeness, and purpose than when she was among the body of believers, raising her hands in praise to the Lord while the congregation around her sang his praises. Trudie often felt that God had made her for worship. And so Trudie was glad that her church’s worship services were as thoughtful and orderly, but also as fresh, joyous, and heartening, as they consistently were. She hoped that nothing would affect her ability to come to her church for worship with the same sense of being in her own right place, exactly where God wanted her.
Worship
The word church derives from a Greek word signifying a gathering or assembly of believers. That’s what church members do: they gather. And church bodies especially gather for worship. The verb to worship means to give the greatest devotion or worth to something. Church members worship the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. Christians live for Christ, worshiping him with their whole heart, soul, body, and mind. Facilitating frequent, orderly gatherings of the corporate body of believers to worship, while experiencing the presence of God, is a central role of churches. Some churches do little or nothing more than offer worship services. And for those churches, offering regular worship gatherings may be enough, without other ministries. Ensure that your church’s worship is at the center of all it does, if indeed it does anything other than offer heartening worship services.
Goals
Worship services have goals, whether your church articulates them expressly or not. Articulating your church’s worship goals can help the worship leader and others guide worshipful expression in a reasonably orderly fashion, safe and appropriate for everyone present. Worship services should generally prompt and facilitate open expressions of devotion to God, while ensuring that worshipers respect the order of the service without unduly interrupting preaching, speaking, prayer, or song. Churches typically employ music and congregational recitals to encourage worshipers to join in vocal expressions of devotion. Services also often encourage worshipers to stand when singing or reading scripture together, and permit or encourage worshipers to raise hands or clap in praise and to kneel in prayer. Services may at specific times also encourage approaches to the altar for prayer, kneeling, or hands laid for healing or anointing. These activities all encourage worshipers to participate not just in mind and attention but in voice, body, spirit, and soul.
Facility
Your church should have worship primarily in mind when leasing, buying, renovating, or constructing its facility. The sanctuary or worship space generally defines a church facility. Sanctuaries can have highly traditional and elaborate designs, with elevated pulpits, secondary lecterns, choir boxes, musician stations, permanent pews, narthexes, and the like, or be spare and simple, with folding chairs set up for the congregation’s seating in a single unadorned room. Churches also often begin with spare worship facilities and gradually grow the membership and accumulate the funds for more-elaborate facilities and furnishings. Well-designed worship spaces can help congregants worship. But expensive and elaborate sanctuaries are not necessary for participatory and celebrative worship. Help your church develop its sanctuary to honor God and reflect your membership’s devotion to him. See additional insight on the two later chapters on church facilities.
Leader
Worship is the responsibility and opportunity of every church member. In a sense, everyone and anyone can lead worship. A particularly vocal, energetic, or outgoing member, seated or standing among other members in no particular place of prominence, may by the member’s singing voice, raised hands, movement, or other presence and posture, encourage all members present to pour their hearts out to the Lord in worship. Yet worship services generally benefit from some coordination and arrangement, indeed some leading from in front of the congregation. Churches do well to select a worship leader not only of appropriate vocal and musical talent, and administrative skill, but also of good character for worship leadership. Musical pride and preening, for instance, are inappropriate in worship. Energy and emotion, expressed in sound order, may by contrast be highly appropriate, as may musical excellence. Help your church retain a fit and skilled worship leader, whether as a volunteer or, in churches of appreciable size, as a paid staff member.
Team
A worship leader should also be a good team leader. Worship services in many churches include music teams of some combination of musicians and vocalists. Worship services can also require sound technicians for microphones for the preacher, speakers sharing prayer or announcements, and vocalist songleaders. They can also require technicians to change presentation slides and operate video cameras for a church live feed. Other volunteers may arrange and decorate the sanctuary, prepare and serve communion, and greet and seat worshipers. A church may have other special choirs, orchestras, bands, ensembles, and dance teams for Christmas, Easter, or other special services. Even a relatively small church may have a dozen or more volunteers participating in one way or another on a worship team. Larger churches may have dozens of involved volunteers for the worship leader to coordinate. Help your church’s worship leader recruit and support a devoted worship team.
Planning
Worship generally benefits from at least some degree of planning. Churches may enjoy spontaneous worship, without substantial explicit thought and design. Generally, though, some thought and planning serves worshipers well. The pastor and worship leader, together with selected church elders or team leaders, may fruitfully deliberate together over worship goals, the day, time, and length of regular and special worship services, and the order and content of services, tying music to message and season. Regular worship planning meetings are generally a good idea and may be a necessity. Sound church order is never more apparent than in worship services.
Services
A church rightly strives, within the limits of its resources, to hold as many weekly services as necessary to serve all members. A smaller church may hold only a single Sunday-morning service. But as churches grow in the number of their members, a single service may not accommodate all worshipers with the church’s sanctuary. Some churches use overflow space adjacent to the sanctuary, with piped-in video and sound. Other churches add a second Sunday-morning service and, if the church continues to grow, another service on Saturday evening, Sunday evening, or on another day at another time. Weekday-evening services are traditional in some communities and denominations. Churches also hold special seasonal services, for instance around Christmas or Christmas Eve. Alternative and special services also take alternative and special forms, such as a prayer service or teaching service, and have alternative audiences, such as for youth or women. Help your church plan appropriately to accommodate as many worshipers as wish to participate.
Liturgy
The order and content of your church’s services, or its liturgy to use the church term, are also important to the goals of worship. Services may include voice or instrumental music, including choir, orchestra, band, or any other ensemble appropriate to the context and circumstance. Services should generally include instruction, whether characterized as a sermon, message, homily, or otherwise. The instruction should center on the scriptures, God’s Word. Services may include testimonies, while generally urging the confession, growth, and maturity of Christ followers. Services should include prayer and communion. They may include announcements or other communications promoting the fellowship of believers. Services may also offer opportunities for public celebration of baptism. Services may also offer opportunities for the confessions of maturing Christians completing the church’s course of study, and may include ordinations, missionary commissioning, and other traditional acts. Arranging the service order into a time of welcoming, celebrating devotion to God, and scripture reading and prayer, followed by the sermon or message, a joyous response to the message, and a parting benediction, or a similarly intelligible order, can help worshipers participate meaningfully.
Music
Music can be an important dimension of worship, drawing attendees into acts and postures of praise. Music can be so emotionally engaging, though, that worship leaders do well to guide its effects into proper stances of devotion. Music styles and tastes can also differ widely, especially in churches where musical forms may either be popular and current, cultural, formal, or traditional. Worship services should not be consumer experiences. Members and guests do not attend solely or primarily to enjoy or criticize the music but instead to honor and worship God. Music can help or hinder worshipers at times. Discerning church leadership can help a worship leader maintain a music program to achieve its proper objective, which is not to satisfy the pride and ambition of the vocalists and musicians or tastes of the attendees but instead to evoke a sense of awe, appeal, confession, and gratitude, guiding and prompting all to glorify God. Musical variety or consistency may be appropriate, depending on your church body. Help your church maintain a healthy music ministry that supports your church’s worship goal.
Baptisms
Churches commonly hold baptisms during or around worship services, whether of infants, adults, or both. Communal baptisms, with congregation members present to witness, can serve both the baptized soul and the congregation well. Baptism can be an epochal, transformative event in an individual’s life, deeply affecting the individual’s spirit, identity, and soul. Baptisms can also move the congregants, whether they know the baptized individual or not, reminding congregants of their own public declaration of faith and rebirth in new spiritual life. Christian denominations vary in their traditions surrounding baptism. The questions may, for instance, involve whether to sprinkle or immerse and at what age and under what other conditions to do so. Help your church discern the best scriptural terms and conditions for baptism, consistent with any guiding traditions. Your church may need a baptismal font or pool, depending on your discernment.
Weddings
Churches also host weddings. Your church may need a policy for what couples it will wed under what conditions. Must they, for instance, be members of the church or, if not, then have one of the church’s pastors as officiant? These and other questions may determine whether your church should host the wedding at all. Weddings of members raised in your church or widely known and appreciated can be special events for the whole congregation to celebrate. Your church may need to develop a sound policy, acquire wedding accoutrements, and follow wedding procedures to accommodate frequent or occasional weddings. Help your church do so.
Memorials
Churches also hold memorial services for the departed. Once again, your church may need a policy for whose memorial it will conduct and under what terms and conditions. Some churches only hold memorials for members. Others extend the privilege to relatives of members or to anyone whose memorial over which one of the church’s pastors agrees to preside. Memorials can be elaborate not only in their planning and conduct but also, like a wedding, in their special features and accoutrements, especially if the church also hosts visitation hours and a meal around the memorial service. Moving a casket in and out of the church, having a private room for the grieving family, displaying photographs or a slide show of the life of the departed, and providing special music and memorial bulletins may all be regular features of memorial services, requiring extra planning. Help your church assign memorial support to an appropriate care team and develop and maintain the appropriate practices and procedures. Gathering for the memorial of a beloved church member can greatly comfort and hearten the family and congregation.
Reflection
Does your church have an articulated worship vision and set of worship goals? Does your church have an appropriate sanctuary or worship space? Does your church hold enough worship services to accommodate all members? Does your church employ an effective worship leader? Does your church have a committed and skilled worship team? Does the order of your church’s worship services reflect adequate planning and coordination? Do your church’s worship services have a recognizable liturgy helping members participate in worship? Does the worship music at your church support the goals of worship? Does your church have an established, scriptural practice for baptizing members? Does your church have a clear policy for hosting weddings? Does your church have a skilled care team to assist with memorials for departed members?
Key Points
Facilitating gatherings to worship God is a church’s first priority.
Churches should articulate their worship goals to ensure integrity.
A church’s sanctuary or worship space is its primary facility.
Churches benefit from a worship leader to plan and guide worship.
Churches benefit from a worship team for participatory worship.
Churches should generally plan a worship service’s order and content.
Provide enough worship services to accommodate all members.
Follow a meaningful order of worship to promote full participation.
Employ worship music for appropriate goals to encourage worship.
Conduct baptisms according to the scriptures and guiding traditions.
Offer weddings consistent with church doctrine, policy, and practice.
Put in place a policy and care team for memorials the church holds.