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Planning Contemporary Worship Services
Picture two coffeehouses. In each, espresso scents the air. Images flicker across screens. String bass, keyboard, and saxophone twine a slow rhythm that makes your shoulders relax. You forget your must-do list and let poetry, Scripture, and music soothe you.
Seen through the lens of “contemporary worship style,” these coffeehouse settings are twins. After all, they’re both doing Jazz Vespers.
Look deeper and you’ll see that neither is all about the music. “Jazz Vespers here only vaguely resembles its original incarnation at Calvin College,” says Shannon Sisco, who helped lead weekly Jazz Vespers as a college student and transplanted the idea to Wicker Park Grace Church in Chicago, where she’s in graduate school.
As Sisco and other contemporary worship leaders explain, worship is more than music. It has a structure. And the ways we worship form how we live out our Christian faith.
Recognizing true worship
Sisco says the college vespers, with its dimly-lit seating, bouncy jazz, and bright stage, created a space so “those on the fringes and uncomfortable with church could draw near to God.“
She describes Wicker Park Grace as part of the emerging church movement. “A central focus in our worship is building authentic community and encouraging dialogue among participants,” she says. The typical vespers turnout is small enough that people can sit in a circle, volunteer to read from their seats, and take time to talk about the readings.
Both incarnations of Jazz Vespers fit within a definition of worship that resonates with Shannon Sisco and other former worship apprentices, such as Peter Armstrong and Dean Kladder.
Armstrong, now worship pastor at Sanctuary Christian Reformed Church in Seattle, explains that worship is covenantal, a lot like renewing wedding vows. “Within that context, worship is a drama or conversation between God and God’s people. One lesson I still think about every week is Ron Rienstra’s arrow system.
“I look through a liturgy to see where God is speaking to us (downward arrow) and where we are speaking to God (upward arrow) and where we are speaking to each other (two-way horizontal arrow). It’s a delicate balance. Making space for God may look like silence and meditation…or unique readings of Scripture,” he says.
Kladder, now a Princeton seminarian, recently completed a church internship. “Liturgy means the work of the people. So the people should take up their work,” he says.
He’s experimented with having the pastor put the pastoral prayer (a.k.a. long prayer or congregational prayer) back in the people’s hands. “One long prayer can be broken into shorter prayers of invocation, intercession, lament, and confession and placed meaningfully into the liturgical order,” he explains.
Hearing others pray their prayers on your behalf reinforces the understanding of worship as diverse people united in the work of conversing with God.
Structuring worship
Good worship—whether labeled contemporary, traditional, or blended—has a structure. It uses many liturgical forms, all intentional.
When Guy Higashi was associate pastor at New Hope Christian Fellowship in Honolulu, senior pastor Wayne Cordeiro always said, “Form before content.” Just as a lumber form holds concrete in place while you pour a driveway, worship structure provides the form through which content can be delivered.
“Similarly, a frame for a photograph or painting accents the beauty and centers one’s focus. It either adds or takes away,” says Higashi, now a doctoral student and continuing education program manager at Fuller Theological Seminary.
With five services and 10,000 people, New Hope needs to include all worship elements without going overtime—else traffic gridlock results. Cordeiro’s six-sermon series gives worship teams time “to think out what creative elements to use rather than spontaneously scrambling. A simple element like serving communion requires lots of coordination,” Higashi says.
New Hope values using every member’s gifts. With so many involved in planning and leading worship, a clear structure helps all teams keep the service flowing toward the same goal.
Allison Ash, director of chapel at Fuller Theological Seminary, says, “Students who embrace more contemporary forms of worship may see written prayers and formal liturgical structures as boring or dead.
“What they may not understand is that those forms have been crafted throughout Christian history with distinct intentionality. There’s a reason worshipers hear the assurance of pardon after a prayer of confession.”
She’s noticed that students find liturgical forms alive and meaningful when presented in contemporary ways. “After singing Charlie Hall’s ‘Give Us Clean Hands,’ try singing Billy Foote’s ‘You Are My King,’ which allows worshipers to sing of God’s forgiveness just after singing about ‘laying down our idols,’ ” Ash suggests.
Finding freedom in patterns
Far from being dead, worship structures and liturgical forms offer freedom for creativity, according to Chip Andrus, a Presbyterian musician and emerging church specialist.
“For centuries the faithful have gathered together, giving praise, confessing sin, sharing peace, reading God’s Word, praying for others, giving alms, and breaking bread. In this pattern we find the freedom to express our relationship with God in authentic, relevant ways.
“We find deep connection to those who worshipped God before us. We pass on mysteries of the faith to our children in ways that will endure,” he says.
The age-old worship pattern of prayers of the people, followed by offering and communion, teaches us how to live. “If we pray for someone in the hospital, our offering might be to visit that person. If we pray for the homeless, our offering might be volunteering at a homeless shelter once a week during our lunch break.
“This pattern helps us understand that we are people who ask God for help (prayers of the people) and participate with God in answering prayers and serving others (offering). We do this not on our own but joined with Christ and one another (breaking bread and sharing wine),” Andrus says.
He explains that once you see the deep meaning, you realize that how worship structures and liturgical forms are conveyed—whether through organs, robes, PowerPoint, or worship bands—isn’t the point.
“The most important thing is to make space for Christ’s Spirit to move through us, shape us, and feed us as we offer our prayers and lives as servants of the living God,” he says.
Profile: Ron Rienstra on Planning Contemporary Worship
While directing student-planned and -led worship services at Calvin College and Fuller Theological Seminary, or while leading worship workshops, Ron Rienstra has sometimes met “worship leaders who get frustrated with other people’s desire to plan carefully. Those frustrated have not themselves yet done much worship leading.”
Instead, he explains, “They’re responding to the perceived ease with which worship seems to flow from one song to the next and from song to prayer. They’re attributing that flow to the power of the Holy Spirit, without thinking of the logistics involved.”
So Rienstra often proposes what he calls a thought experiment.
Pushing the limits
He agrees with “go with the flow” folks to imagine a worship service that’s not bogged down by planning. But then he asks, “What will we tell the person who runs the PowerPoint? How will the rhythm section know what’s coming next? When will…”
The thought experiment is usually fairly short. The frustrated person starts to see why every worship service needs a structure.
“A typical worship service is not like a Grateful Dead concert, where the primary players jam till they figure out their next songs. In services that aren’t planned, the music will be one or two very simple songs—this is descriptive, not derogatory—that musicians can groove on for ten minutes.
“The worship will be led by one individual, who may say, ‘Let’s just all shout out a name for God now.’ Or the lyric is ‘we love you, Lord,’ so the leader encourages people to express that love. People don’t need to see words on a screen to sing along,” Rienstra explains.
He has, however, worshiped in churches where the musicians have played together so long that they collectively know hundreds of songs. “I’ve seen this most in African American churches. Maybe the bass player lays down a riff, the rest come along, and as soon as the choir knows what’s going on, they join in,” he says.
Weaving common threads
Rienstra says that most good worship services must be planned. Their forms may vary but they’ll be woven with seven common threads or principles for good contemporary worship: covenantal, participative, holistic, expansive, reverent, Spirit-directed, and expectant.
He spells out each principle in volume one and volume two of his Ten Service Plans for Contemporary Worship, based on services at Calvin College and Fuller Theological Seminary. Each volume includes all you need to plan a service, along with how to vary the plan for your congregation. You’ll also find supplemental songs and tips online.
You’ve probably noticed that Rienstra’s principles for good contemporary worship apply as well to traditional worship. “Yet, they’re explicitly crafted to address particular challenges for people planning worship in what some folks now say is a contemporary mode, using musical and presentational styles borrowed from popular culture,” he says.
For example, contemporary worship planners might not disagree theologically with the principle that worship should be reverent, but might not think of it if no one brings it up.
Similarly, most worship leaders wouldn’t have a theological problem with the idea that worship should be expansive—using words, music, traditions, and gifts of the whole people of God. Yet it might not be top of mind with worship planners who are constructing either traditional or contemporary services.
When Rienstra asks worship leaders to show him their last few orders of worship, he often notices that all the songs were written after 1990.
His favorite story about why worship should be expansive dates back to the first time the college LOFT team led worship at a Calvin Symposium on Worship.
“Molly Delcamp, a worship apprentice, led a prayer. She was an excellent ‘pray-er,’ meaning that whatever words she spoke, she meant on behalf of herself and the whole congregation.
“We sang Good to Me, which the band continued playing while Molly spoke a prayer of confession. The prayer was straight up Thomas Cranmer, though she probably changed some of the Book of Common Prayer diction, like thee and thou.
“She prayed, ‘We confess that we have sinned in thought, word, and deed by what we have done and by what we have left undone…. In your mercy forgive what we have been, help us amend what we are, and direct what we shall be…’
“After the service I heard one person after another say, ‘That was the most beautiful prayer! Did you think of that yourself?’ They had no clue it was so old and still widely used,” Rienstra says.
Looking at results, not style
Rienstra recently wrote about how new technology—such as amplification, lyric projection, and looping DJ software—has changed the style of church worship.
Church members often focus on whether a worship trend is good or bad. Rienstra suggests looking at how the Holy Spirit uses a technology to expand worship in potentially wonderful ways and how others use it to narrow worship in historically or theologically suspect ways.
For example, using folk- or pop-style music in worship “can be a healthy enculturation of congregational song” for people who believe that worship is the work of the people, he explains. After all, the Church honors martyrs who died for saying that the Word and worship should be in the vernacular, or language, of the congregation.
Yet some composers “borrow and baptize” only those popular music forms that “emphasize internal, individual, and exclusively positive emotional states…. There are some things we wish to say to God, or hear from God, which are not fittingly or excellently expressed in a folk-derived musical genre.”
The best way to evaluate a worship trend or technology, Rienstra says, is to ask, “Does this help people participate more fully, more actively, more intelligently?”
How Worship Service Structure Reveals Theology
The way you structure a worship service is important, in large part, because the structure reveals your theology. This is true whether or not you’ve thought about your worship’s theological revelations.
“Some worship doesn’t involve any actual conversation between God and God’s people. Sometimes the songs selected—that is, the bulk of the ‘worship’ time—are all in the first person singular. They’re not directed to God as prayer, but to each other, encouraging each other to worship God. Such services resemble more a pep rally than a worship service,” says Ron Rienstra, who authored both volumes of Ten Service Plans for Contemporary Worship.
General examples
In a language of worship class he co-taught at Fuller Theological Seminary, Rienstra asked students to visit different churches to identify the worship service’s dramatic high point, the element toward which other actions point. In Rienstra’s words, here’s what’s theologically most important:
- The Eucharist is the dramatic apex of Anglican, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic worship.
- In a Reformed service, the sermon “is the very words of Christ.”
- In many Congregational churches, the prayers of the people form worshipers’ most intense engagement with God and each other.
- In an evangelistic service, it’s the moment at the conclusion of the sermon where members of the congregation or audience are called to make a commitment to Christ.
- In a charismatic service, it’s the ‘ministry time’ following the sermon.
- In some Vineyard churches, it’s the intimate musical time just before the pastor’s time of teaching.
Worship structure influences life
Guy Higashi, now a doctoral student and continuing education program manager at Fuller Theological Seminary, has served as associate pastor at New Hope Christian Fellowship in Honululu and in the young adult/postmodern ministry of Eagle Rock Christian Assembly in metro Los Angeles.
He says that in a typical 75-minute weekend worship service at New Hope, 45 minutes are set aside for “the preached Word. Worship songs, video clips, dancing, and drama would ‘set up’ the Word. We’d take it to the one-yard line, and the pastor would take it into the end zone.” Every service leads up to an invitation or altar call.
Incidentally, although missionaries banned hula from worship, New Hope sees the Hawaiian culture’s love of song and dance as a legitimate worship expression. “Everything in the service says or shows the same simple gospel message in a way common folks will understand,” Higashi explains.
Donnalei Gaison, New Hope dance director, says that “the list just goes on” for songs that can be done with hula. Using hula in worship, sometimes with songs such as “Lord, I Give You My Heart” or “Shout to the Lord,” helps people walk out of services saying, “I get it!”
Higashi says New Hope emphasizes that worship is not just the weekend service but “how you live your life. If we’re taking seriously what we believe, then we will live the Word of God in the way we work and the way we treat our family.”
Leaders encourage everyone who helps with worship, including those who set up chairs and sound systems, to pray that God will use the equipment and bless the people who will sit in the chairs and hear the service.
Making time and space for God
“Tommy Walker, a gifted songwriter and recording artist, leads worship at Christian Assembly. ‘Taste and see that God is good’ would be his theology of worship. Therefore, worship singing lasts 30 to 45 minutes,” Higashi says.
Christian Assembly musicians rehearse the songs that will be used, including optional ones that Walker will call for if the Holy Spirit leads him to. Higashi says Walker uses “hymns and lyrics of traditional songs, wrapped in the rhythms and movement of contemporary culture. Tommy is a trans-generational worship leader.”
Christian Assembly uses media, paintings, drama, and other arts but keeps the focus on enjoying God and spending time with him, primarily through song.
The congregation’s Fusion ministry for postmodern young adults structures services to create space for conversation. Higashi explains that this structure took many forms during worship. Before and after the service, there was a coffee bar to encourage people connections.
Couches in the sanctuary help attendees feel like they’re in a living room with friends. “We inserted discussion questions into the message times so there was ‘space’ to talk about what you heard with the people around you,” Higashi recalls.
He’s also helped plan chapels at Fuller Theological Seminary. “The Eucharist was the central theological element of chapel worship. Everything—greeting, songs, video, dance, word—was built around Communion. That structure let us plan ‘on purpose.’ This was probably one of my most significant worship times of engaging with God,” he says.
Holistic Worship Includes Lament and Confession
For many Christians, praise and worship are synonyms. For others, praise is part—but not the totality—of worship.
If you want to plan worship that reflects all of God’s inspired Word, then you can’t ignore the psalms of lament, struggle, and despair. Neither can you skip all the biblical passages about God’s commandments and our difficulty keeping them.
That’s why Ron Rienstra insists in both volumes of his Ten Service Plans for Contemporary Worship, thatholistic is an essential characteristic of good contemporary worship (or any worship). He describes holistic worship as bringing “ all of ourselves to worship: old and young, body and soul, brain and heart, doubt and belief, lament and joy.” And true lament often leads to true confession.
Michael Card on lament
Throughout the Christian contemporary music and worship world, leaders are realizing that praise is a necessary but not sufficient part of worship.
Christian singer-songwriter Michael Card is known for his soothing lullabies on Sleep Sound in Jesus and rollicking songs like “Celebrate the Child,” “Come to the Table,” and “Jubilee,” all on his CD Joy in the Journey.
But in his book A Sacred Sorrow: Reaching Out to God in the Lost Language of Lament and his CD The Hidden Face of God, he looks at how the Psalmist, Job, Jeremiah, and Jesus struggle with God. All their angst, Card says, boils down to two fundamental questions of biblical lament: “God, where are you?” and “God, if you love me, then why?”
You can listen to Card explain and sing about lament on his weekly radio show.
When Card spoke about lament at the 2006 Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing, he talked about how God wants something besides our offerings of praise. God also wants us to be honest enough to offer our other emotions in worship, including lament and confession.
At times we offer our laments to God to express our helplessness. Often the best response to this type of lament is to affirm God’s sovereignty.
Ron Rienstra on confession
At other times the best response to lament—especially when we’re sad or angry about situations we’ve had a part in making—is confession.
Yet many contemporary worship services never include confession. Why not?
“A not particularly charitable interpretation may suggest that, in eagerness to be accommodating to seekers and visitors, we’re uncomfortable talking about sin. So we excise that part. Sin is a downer, and we want worship to be up,” Rienstra says.
He’s also noticed a logistical reason why some contemporary worship services don’t include confession. “If you have a moment of confession, it nearly begs for a moment of reconciliation and declaration of pardon. The pastor is specifically charged with that task.
“But if the band is in the center of the chancel and the pastor or ordained person isn’t up there yet, does he or she walk up, motion the band to sit down, pronounce the pardon, then go back to his or her seat so the band can play more songs?” Rienstra asks.
He’s noticed that lay worship leaders feel reluctant to declare God’s pardon. Yet he suggests it’s often the best solution.
The key is for the lay leader to make clear that the words come from God, as in “Hear now these words of God from Psalm 103:12. ‘As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.’ ” Rienstra stresses that with the pardon or declaration of assurance “it’s not okay to extemporize.”
Using the Law comprehensively
Throughout church history, Rienstra explains, worship leaders have used the Law in several key liturgical spots. That’s because God’s Law has three main uses:
- Political, as a goad to civil righteousness
- Theological, to convict us of sin and bring us to Christ
- Didactic, as a guide for grateful living
Many worship services use the law in its second sense. There will be a statement of the Law or Ten Commandments, followed by a confession. The confession could be a congregational response, prayer, or song. Or, in a contemporary service, the worship leader might offer an extemporaneous prayer of confession, after which the congregation sings a song of confession.
Rienstra notes that in the Reformed tradition, it’s common to place the Law after the confession. This section of worship proceeds as
- The call to confession
- Congregational prayer of confession
- Declaration of pardon, spoken by a human voice but with God’s words
- Congregational response of thanks, perhaps the Gloria Patri
- Summary of Law or responsive litany
Several Bible passages offer resources for responsive readings of the Law. The liturgical forms and resource section of the Psalter Hymnal (of the Christian Reformed Church in North America) includes versions using words
- of Jesus from the gospel
- from Matthew
- from the Epistles
- from the Psalms
- focusing on the Law as a teacher of sin
- explaining the Law as a rule of gratitude that God has given to show us how to live.
The Worship Sourcebook devotes nearly 60 pages to the section of the worship service dealing with confession, assurance, and the Law. This section draws on Bible versions, denominational prayer books, and other resources from many countries and Christian traditions.
Learn More
Order Ten Service Plans for Contemporary Worship. Listen to an interview with Ron Rienstra about volume two or read his blog entry about writing that volume. Subscribe to WorshipHelps, a blog by contemporary worship leaders, including Rienstra and Peter Armstrong, or bookmark Worship Weblog.
Learn more about Chip Andrus and his work with the emerging worship movement. Listen to his music.
To learn more about principles of good contemporary worship and music, attend The Church Music & Worship Summit, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Read Nathan Bierma’s essay on the etymology of the phrase “worshipful service.” Glean insights into how worship leaders use projected technology in worship. Check out Methodist advice on how to start a contemporary worship service. Learn why one congregation has chosen not to offer a choice between traditional and contemporary worship services.
Browse Reformed Worship articles on contemporary worship and contemporary Christian music. Follow these templates for planning contemporary worship services.
The prologue to The Worship Sourcebook states, “A well-conceived order of worship ensures that the main purposes of worship are carried out. In other words, a thoughtful pattern for worship keeps worship as worship. It protects worship from degenerating into a performance, into entertainment, or into an educational lecture.” The Worship Sourcebook gives ideas for every element of worship, no matter what “style” you aim for.
Browse related stories on contemporary worship music, developing a faith vocabulary, high school chapels,“in between” words, public Scripture reading, and sermon helps.
Start a Discussion
Talk about good contemporary worship:
- What does the structure of your typical worship service reveal about your theology?
- This story states that good worship must have a structure. A bonus story suggests that holistic worship includes lament and confession. Which ideas do you agree or disagree with? Which elements of worship would you like to change, add, or subtract—and why?
- If you examine the music, words, art, and other elements of your worship service, how many Christian eras and cultures would be represented?
Share Your Wisdom
What is the best way you’ve found to address and talk through principles of good contemporary worship?
- Did you find a resource—visual, online, printed, multimedia, or seminar—that helped your church think through how and why to make changes in your worship services?
- If you have surveyed other congregations in your area or denomination regarding their most creative (and biblically sound) contemporary worship ideas, will you share the best ideas that you discovered?
Comments
- Let's Connect
Carol | Posted Oct 30, 2010 11:38 PM
This site has been so helpful and inspirational. I have purchased both volumes of Ten Service Plans for Contemporary Worship and I am excited to refer to them while planning services as a lay partcipant.
Carol | Posted Oct 30, 2010 11:38 PM
This site has been so helpful and inspirational. I have purchased both volumes of Ten Service Plans for Contemporary Worship and I am excited to refer to them while planning services as a lay partcipant.