What You Can Learn from Visiting Churches
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.
Best Resources for Teaching Worship
Seven college and seminary professors list their top short reads for teaching worship and say which resources would be most helpful for church worship and liturgy committees.
Jane Rogers Vann on Trusting the Liturgy
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.
God of Justice, Love, and Mercy
A vesper service led by singers, band, organ, and strings, the Fuller Seminary Chapel worship leaders utilize traditional and original resources to guide worshipers through a prayerful liturgy of confession and forgiveness.
My Soul Finds Rest in God
Join with singer-songwriter Sandra McCracken for contemplative songs and liturgical prayers, while making space within this worship service for both lament and joy.
Cory Willson on Inhabiting the Liturgy
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 Resources for Radical Hospitality
Scripture models well for us how to speak about immigration in worship. Together, with Abraham, Jesus, and the early church, we can model radical hospitality, we can lament the pain of leaving and the pain of the journey, we can witness God's faithfulness to the refugees and migrants in the past, and together, united as the body of Christ, we can seek responses that reflect God's heart. Ultimately, we can look forward with hope, knowing that our "citizenship is in heaven."
Children and Worship
With a new frontier of research on children's spirituality, research as well as experience is showing churches that creating a sacred space for children, where they can encounter the living God, is vital for their faith formation.
Learning to Worship for the Life of the World
For the Life of the World is one of the most influential books ever written on the sacraments.
Dale Sieverding on Cultural Differences in Recruiting Youth
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.
How Ritual Training Overflows into Expressive Worship
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.
Olivia Stewart on Young Children and Worship
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.