Worship Service Considerations pt. 1

There is an intended flow to Journey worship services (and most Christian services for that matter) that we need to adopt in our song selection structure.

Briefly, that flow is:

• Focus on God by acknowledging his goodness and his presence with us (1 Tim. 6:12)

which moves us to…

• Introduce his truth in the teaching/preaching of his word (Colossians 4:15-16; 1 Timothy 4:13; 2 Timothy 3:15-16)

which moves us to…

• Respond to who he is and what he’s doing in us (1 Corinthians 14:16)

which moves us to…

• Encourage/Challenge one another in the mission (Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:15)

By the way, this is a biblical model for how worship looked in the NT. Though we don’t have a prescribed template for exactly how to do a worship service (God is much more creative and complex than a formula allows for), we do have a thematic idea of what a service should include based on the early church as presented in Acts and the epistles. There are specific elements (like giving of offerings, prayers, preaching, communion, proclaiming the Gospel, etc) that are always present in the corporate worship gathering, and of course, they fit into one of the four basic categories above. (For more on this, see D. A. Carson's intro to Worship by the Book ).

Our role, then, is to really lead people to participate in all these things, mostly, though not always, in the order above. This is why we start with a meaningful Call to Worship[1] (whether spoken or musical), incorporate Scripture readings, sing songs that acknowledge him and his sacrifice for us, songs that lead us to respond to him in our hearts, and songs that encourage us to respond to him and others with our actions. That brings us to song selection.

Setlist Creation

Most of us have our songs that we like doing with our particular musicians, so I don’t want to talk so much about the strengths and weaknesses of this particular song versus that particular song. My purpose here is to talk about the types of songs we do at the beginning of the service and the types of songs we do on the “back half,” and how this helps us achieve the atmosphere and flow objectives mentioned above.

In the next post, I will walk through a typical Journey service. With the new staggered worship format made necessary by the multi-site approach, the descriptions below won’t fit exactly for every service, but the heart behind the song selection will stay the same.

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[1] A good Call to Worship or opening prayer should acknowledge the presence of God among us by his own choosing. In other words, avoid the common, and theologically inaccurate, mistake of suggesting that we have the power to invoke or conjure up God’s presence by our words. This means, we have to avoid phrases like: “Lord we ask you to come and meet with us…” or “God we invite your presence among us…”. I’ve made this mistake before and it was pointed out to me that this is just bad theology. Instead, let’s acknowledge that God is with us, and urge the Holy Spirit to help us see him more clearly.