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On the campus of Calvin University
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College and seminary professors offer church observation guides for their students. You can use their insights to learn more when you visit other churches. This process can also help you understand how people experience liturgical practices in your own congregation.
Many worship leaders wear themselves out trying to make worship new, fresh, relevant and, above all, different than it was last year or even last week. Maybe they don’t need to change so much and so often.
A majority of U.S. Christians born before 1965 are white. However, the fastest growing groups in the U.S. as a whole and in its churches are people of color. Preaching must change to reflect this diversity so that all generations and nations can encounter God through the Word
While some U.S. politicians play on fears about ethnic minorities, changing demographic trends actually offer churches a huge opportunity to create new forms of worship.
Maybe you feel like a bad Christian when you catch yourself thinking about work or weekday concerns during corporate worship. But doing so can help you worship more deeply and faithfully.
Worship conversations change when you choose to see tradition as a lively center from which to innovate. This provides common ground between those who fear change and those who overvalue change.
The Micah Groups program brings together pastors from diverse denominational, theological and ethnic contexts, all who desire to become empowered wise preachers. They seek justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God. Over time, they build enough trust to have courageous conversations about worship, preaching and justice.
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles launched a summer camp to train young Catholics to lead in local liturgical ministries. They discovered that finding gifted youth requires different approaches in different cultures.
Lay training in both formative and expressive liturgy helps Catholic adults and youth live out their identity in the universal priesthood of all faithful believers. Protestants can learn from this.
It sounds counter-intuitive, especially today. But it turns out that helping children learn to get quiet in their own ways is huge for helping them encounter God.
Even Christians who profess to love the Bible sometimes zone out when scripture is read aloud in public worship. Here is help for readers, worship planners and the congregation to experience the living Word.
Assigning different voices to different phrases can be an effective way to convey meaning in public scripture reading. This is known variously as choral reading, scripted scripture and enacted scripture.
