• Faithfulness in worship practices

• Style of worship and music

• Place of the sermon and Holy Communion

• Use of media in worship

• Shared planning and leadership in worship

• Vitality in worship

• “One” vs. “multiple” worship services

• Providing appropriate musical leadership

• Building or renovating worship space

Ways the Church Can Respond

1. Faithful worship practices. United Methodists combine the free church tradition and the catholic sense of order and wholeness in their worship life. At its best, the former honors the importance of adapting worship to social context. The latter asks every local congregation to draw upon the continuity and riches of the historic and global church in shaping worship. The United Methodist Church provides official worship resources in its hymnal and book of worship as an aid and launchpad for shaping local church worship. The hymnal and book of worship call all local churches to basic practices: worshiping on the Lord’s Day, balancing praise with lament, proclaiming the good news from the Word and at the Table, initiating people into the church using services of the baptismal covenant, and keeping time with Christ using a calendar centered on Easter. Most of our churches follow this “basic pattern” of “Word and Table” worship. (See United Methodist Hymnal, page 2.) The practices of the Word part are gathering and praising God, reading and interpreting the Scriptures, and responding to the proclaimed word. The practices of the second part are setting out food, giving thanks for God’s mighty acts, distributing the food (including to the absent), and enacting concern for the poor. Not all congregations do all of these things every Lord’s Day, but these faithful practices undergird our worship. Congregational leaders are called to guide their people to use them and by these practices to make and send disciples.

2. Style of worship and music. United Methodist worship is diverse and can appear messy and random. The faithful practices above must be owned by a people in a particular place. How people express worship to God has to reflect the culture of “these people.” Indigenizing worship takes skill and sensitivity on the part of pastors, musicians, and lay leaders. The music and style of worship must use the sounds and rhythms of the local culture. They must embrace the ways the culture thinks, speaks, and sings. Apply this principle to our many cultural contexts, and United Methodism worships in many ways. This diversity is the work of the Holy Spirit in the people so long as it proclaims and acts out the story of God’s saving love, and people respond in praise and commitment to live as disciples. Leaders must exercise discernment so that what is capable of carrying “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) is used and what is contrary to the mercy of Jesus Christ is excluded or converted. Those who lead the congregation’s song or help them find their song are critical to helping them worship with their heart music and heart language. Churches must place a high priority on finding and supporting flexible, spiritually vital musical leaders. Should leaders perhaps place as high a priority on this as on providing effective spiritual pastors for each church?

3. The place of the sermon and Holy Communion. Methodism has given the sermon a privileged place in worship. Preaching was the engine of the early Methodist movement as it took the gospel to people needing a powerful caring and saving word. With the establishment of settled communities in America, Methodist preachers settled too, preaching in more respectable ways as Methodists became more middle class. Preaching was the main event preceded by the “preliminaries,” and it was often oriented to a moral cause or served as a teaching opportunity. This worked into the modern period as late as the ’70s. With the rise of the postmodern era in the ’80s and a growing hunger in the culture for experience and sensory connections, there is pressure for preaching to be reinvented for this postmodern context. What does our current and emerging postmodern, missionary context call for in the way pastors preach? How should pastors recast their preaching? Can/should the sermon bear the full weight of proclaiming the word without powerful enactment of the word in feasting at the Lord’s Table? See Worship Matters (Vol. 1) (esp. Part 1), for help in considering stronger preaching and sacramental life in weekly worship.

4. Use of media in worship. Recognizing the postmodern shift from the verbal to the audiovisual, the “contemporary” worship movement is experimenting with the use of electronic media in worship. Churches adopting use of video, computer-generated images, projection of song texts, and use of music on MIDI systems believe this helps them connect with an increasingly electronically oriented society. Critics argue against the use of media, claiming that such use leads to a full-scale embrace of pop culture and turns worship into entertainment. Further, they claim the result is displacement of the core practices essential to worship. We think that leaders need to experiment and reflect on media use, asking, “How is God guiding us here? What values are we using in introducing media in worship? Is it about novelty or faithfulness? Are we clear about what we mean by worship of God? What do we gain? Lose?” Worship Matters gives significant help in considering electronic media (see Volume 1, Chapter 22 and Volume 2, Chapter 9).

5. Shared planning and leadership in worship. Pastors are charged with “overseeing” the worship life of the congregation. But, increasingly, people want to be full participants in worship, including the planning. If worship is going to be the work of the people (liturgy means “public work of the people”) and reflect fully the gifts and resources they bring, then planning and leading worship has to be a partnership of pastor, musician(s), artists, technicians, writers, and many others. Increasingly, overseeing worship may need to mean welcoming a team approach. The cost side of this is time; it takes longer to plan worship and to prepare and share leadership. The benefits are increased participation, greater use of spiritual gifts, stronger ownership, greater opportunity to teach worship, and worship that is more fully the work of the people. Worship Matters (Vol. 2) offers additional help in considering how to take a team approach to planning and leading worship.

6. Vitality in worship. All of these issues can be summarized as a search for vitality in worship. Some congregations say, “We’re dying; the worship just doesn’t seem to draw people.” Others are divided between those who want worship to stay as it is and those who want to embrace change. “Lively” does not have to mean more decibels and dancing. People are looking for practices that connect them to what is alive and life-giving. Many in the older generations are motivated by duty. “If worship is part of our duty as church members, we will be there whether we find life there or not.” For more and more people, experience is the motivator. “We hunger and thirst to be on a journey to belong, to find God and love.” Congregations willing to hear this genuine longing must begin a long, demanding journey—not giving up hymns, sermons, and sacraments, but perhaps shifting from seeing worship as a checklist of worship acts to seeing it as a meeting with God. Moving toward more experience-based worship can be threatening. Many pastors and leaders are stalled because they fear that the journey to more vital worship is too unfamiliar or has to be taken in one big jump. But change can be introduced in ways that do not disenfranchise some in order to serve others. If biblical content is honored, changes in the way we worship can evolve. Continuous improvement in vitality can be achieved by continuous incremental change with weekly evaluation around basic questions; e.g., What worked? What could be improved? What did we learn? This gradual, deliberate improvement is particularly useful when a church has only one service and does not see a way to move toward multiple services of different styles.

7. “One” versus “multiple” worship services. In a culture used to choices and multiple lifestyles, “one size does not fit all.” Church growth consultants propose that churches offer a menu of services, or at least, multiple services to accommodate people’s needs and schedules. There are definite gains and losses to menu-driven worship and multiple services. On the plus side, more needs are met, choices are offered and appreciated, more leaders and gifts are employed, and more people participate. Also, in churches with inadequate space, multiple services can relieve crowding. On the negative side, the sense of being “one” congregation is diminished, one service may be favored over another, and the cost of additional leadership and equipment may seem too high. Most of the negatives can be overcome with compassion and courage.

   One concern to consider is the “menu” of services. If a congregation offers services that are too radically different, the result will be formation and support of disciples cut from very different cloth. The analogy might be a store that sells mutually exclusive products, such as assault weapons and baby clothes. The store may make money, but it is hard to find a coherent motivation for such a business. On the other hand, if a congregation has one service that sings repackaged hymns with a rock beat and another that sings the same music with organ accompaniment, are they being schizophrenic? If we are to make “every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3), what practices and proclamation must be common to all services in order to share one Lord, one faith, one baptism? This is not to foreclose on diversity of worship or offering multiple services, but to point to the urgent questions that leaders must discuss as United Methodists hone our identity in our emerging missionary context.

8. Providing appropriate musical leadership. Finding and supporting leaders for the congregation’s song is as important as finding and supporting pastors. Annual conference leaders must take this seriously as more congregations search for leaders of congregational song. The whole church system needs to act now to encourage and support people in hearing God’s call to lead in music. Pastoral musicians can be professionals or volunteers; but every church needs at least one person who is passionate and able to help the people find and sing their song. In churches with multiple services, multiple musicians matched to lead the varied musical styles may be needed. Pastors and other leaders must ask whom they may be overlooking that could help the congregation sing the Lord’s song.

9. Building or renovating worship space. When the architecture of the worship space contradicts the spirit and style of the worship, the building wins. Many congregations are blind to the resistance of their space and wonder why they can’t seem to break out into vital worship. Worship leaders must ask, “What does our worship space say or do?” If it constrains worship, then the next question may need to be, “What could we do to help the space say what we need it to say?” With the help of sensitive architects, many buildings can be honored and renovated in ways that open them up to revitalized worship. The General Board of Discipleship worship staff can offer guidance and resources for leaders seeking to build or renovate worship space.

Partners in Discipleship

The General Board of Discipleship worship staff are committed to working with worship leaders in struggling with these issues. The word struggle is used deliberately. Attending to God is more than a program or formula. We seek to partner with worship leaders in listening and risk taking so all people can join us in listening to God. When leaders are on the path seeking God, they become agents through whom the Spirit invites people to walk the path of love and faith. We are committed to the means of grace as the foundation for partnership in addressing the issues listed above. Resources, phone lines, web sites, conferences, conversations—these are ways we seek to be available for this partnership.

Resources from General Board of Discipleship, P.O. Box 340003, Nashville TN 37203-0003.

• Staff: Dean McIntyre, Music Resources Director; 1-877-899-278, ext. 7073; dmcintyre@gbod.org; Dan Benedict, Worship Resources Director; 1-877-899-278, ext. 7072; dbenedict@gbod.org; Safiyah Fosua, Invitational Preaching Ministries Director; 1-877-899-278, ext. 7084; sfosua@gbod.org. Web Site: http://www.gbod.org/worship.

Discipleship Resources publishes and distributes these recommended worship resources:

• Worship Matters (Volumes One and Two), E. Byron Anderson, ed., offers a wide of perspectives and practical guidance for vital worship.

• Contemporary Worship for the 21st Century, Dan Benedict and Craig K. Miller, introduces the diversity of worship styles and offers guidance for choices about contemporary worship.

Updated June 2004