Priming Your People to Worship - Christianity Today

Churches that worship well don’t do so by accident. These pastors have found intentional ways to train people to give God what he is due.

Leveraging the Worship Folder

In our worship folder, we have a section titled “Preparing for Worship.” We give the text for the message the following week and the particular attribute of God that will be the theme for the service.

We hope people will read the text and begin to contemplate that particular attribute of God. We might give the page number in the pew Bible and say, “Look up this story and think about how God promised to deliver and how he came through.”

And then almost every week we’ll personalize it with a couple of reflection questions: “How have you experienced God’s hope (or promise, or purity, or love? or … )?”

I preach five or so felt-need series each year, and a week or two in advance we put an insert in the worship folder that lays out the messages.

We do this so people can prepare in two ways: (1) they prepare themselves for worship, and (2) they can prepare by thinking of a neighbor or a work colleague they can invite.

Our approach to worship follows the model of Psalm 96, declaring God’s praises among the nations. We want to worship God conscious of doing it in front of people who don’t know Christ personally so that they can see our worship and be drawn to God.

Our mission statement says, “As God’s family we want to worship him well in all we do, develop people by building disciples, and grow by reaching people outside his family.”

So right in our mission statement we say that creative worship is a central part of our entire mission as a church. We say, “worship well in all we do” because our mission is far more than worship services. We want to help people so meet God on a Sunday that all week long they are inspired to live for him in the way they handle an out-of-control 13 year old, or how they handle a boss who is demeaning. We put that mission statement in every worship folder.

—John Casey

High Tech Inspiration

We planted this church about two years ago, targeting a multi-ethnic audience. Our people are generally young adults, and most are fairly well-versed in modern technology. One of our first investments was a video projector to help us develop a contemporary worship atmosphere. Often, we use a multimedia presentation at the beginning of the service that relates to the sermon topic.

We try to use technology to simplify and communicate. We believe that computers, projectors, etc. allow us the freedom to communicate truth in creative ways. Our visual aids during worship are usually simple, symbolic images to invite people to focus on God. That can be important in a setting like ours, a high school auditorium.

During the week we inform our people of the upcoming sermon topic and events via e-mail. Recently we’ve added an e-mail prayer chain so that our prayer team can promptly pray for prayer requests.

We teach people to come early to the worship service with a sense of reverence, to prepare their hearts for an encounter with God. While we use a contemporary style of worship, our focus is to invite participation, to be actively involved in the worship experience.

It is our hope that technology can be used to enhance how we communicate God’s Word and to generate enthusiasm, participation, and ultimately growth at our church.

—Ray Chang

Get All Excited

When I urge people to worship, I probably sound like a broken record, but I always say: “God didn’t have to do it. We are not here by accident or because we look so good or because we have so much money in the bank. You’re here because God has divinely ordered this day for you.”

I remind people, “Who woke you up this morning? Who started you on your way? Who clothed you in your right mind? Who gave you a reasonable portion of health and strength?” And they yell back, “God, God, God, God.”

I say, “God’s been better to you than you’ve been to yourself.” Then I get them to reflect on all the blessings. It’s kind of like a pep rally.

Preparing people for worship at our church is a spiritual thing—prayer and praise. It’s also a physical thing, both mind and body. The best worship is almost like an aerobic workout. I want you up, moving, breaking a sweat. Movement is essential. The participatory nature of worship is key—the call and response. If you haven’t warmed people up beforehand, it’s hard to get that call and response.

So we begin worship with prayer and praise. We have the congregation stand and lift their hands at appropriate times. From there we move into a time of general welcome. What helps break the ice is after the welcome we ask all visitors to stand and tell us who they are; and we give them a round of strong applause. Then the congregation stands up, and we sing an upbeat song that says, “Jesus in me loves the Jesus in you.” Then we get up and hug everybody for five to fifteen minutes, but everybody gets hugged. It makes the room warm up and spirits start to intermingle. That really loosens things up.

Then the choir gets up and sings. I require the songs to have a strong beat. We want uplifting strong music.

Then we have the altar call, which first involves anointing people and then prayer. Everybody comes down and stands around the altar. Then we sing another song, and I preach the Word.

We have a Bible reading program that takes our people through the Bible in a 32-week session. When people are feeding themselves all week, they can come to church with something rather than for something.

—Sheron Patterson

A Seamless Worship Week

We teach that worship is something every believer should be doing all the time. For that reason, we avoid anything that would draw a sharp line between the Sunday morning service and the rest of life. If we define worship in such a way that it can only be done by the congregation together, that makes it impossible for people to consider worship as a full-time attitude.

We carefully avoid creating an artificial mood that people might come to think of as worship, something unrelated to how people live their daily lives, separating Sunday morning from the rest of the week. I don’t use a “call” to worship, as though we were calling people to be strange, or different, or unreal. Instead, I sometimes introduce the service by relating some of the news items of the week and relating them to our Christian calling, and to the text from which I will be preaching.

My preaching is expository, which means I teach who God reveals himself to be through his Word. Worship, in my view, is acknowledging the truth about who God is and who we are. It is acknowledging his worth, and that should shape every decision we make all week.

We strongly encourage congregational Bible reading through the week, keeping the worth of God on their minds so that even if they skin their knee, they don’t call the doctor first, they first talk to God.

—Donald Grey Barnhouse, Jr.

Prayer and The Presence

We have a network of people called to intercessory prayer, and they begin early on Sunday in a side room. Some pray through the service.

In the sanctuary we’ll have someone playing on keyboard and a group singing, so after people have had a good time laughing and shaking hands in the foyer, they come into the sanctuary to transition to a more God-centered time.

Our choir probably is more centered on prayer than on its music. In choir rehearsal about half the time is spent in prayer, asking the Lord to make them sensitive to the needs of that Sunday and the people there. You can see it when they come into the worship service; they’re leading the whole flow of worship, and we’re all just joining the choir. Because prayer is the center of their music, it draws others in.

On Communion Sunday we put our Communion altar center stage, and that has a dramatic effect. I instituted monthly Communion because I felt we had celebration but lacked that sense of the fear of God. When people came in and saw the altar central, it quieted their spirit, and they began to examine their hearts.

I talk frequently about repentance, so we don’t come to worship encumbered by things in our lives that haven’t been dealt with. I talk often about how we have to push ourselves to express our worship because we’re coming from a secular orientation through the week and this is another environment. We want to transition from the outside to the inside.

We’ve tried to regain the sense of coming into God’s holy presence. When I was a boy in our little church, children didn’t just run all over the platform. There was a sense that when you went into the house of God, you treated it differently. Even when we were celebrating strongly, there was a sense of awe and respect, sometimes to the point that people were afraid to breathe.

The charismatic movement brought in a great jolt of celebration, which the church desperately needed, but after a generation of that, there’s little place for a time of reverence, for treating the sanctuary as a holy place rather than just a meeting hall. So we’ve tried to recover some of that.

Our church went through a time of reconnecting to traditional roots. We allowed ourselves to be mentored by the past. We structure our services around the church year. For instance, in Advent, I pushed people to go to our bookstore and buy a booklet that has a Scripture reading every day about longing for the Lord’s coming. My messages and the music are geared to those same themes.

We borrowed elements from liturgical churches. We have responsive reading in our service. We had everybody memorize the Apostle’s Creed. But we’ve been careful not to back away from spontaneity and celebration and free expression. In Communion we sing charismatic praise songs and pray the Lord’s Prayer in unison and do the Apostle’s Creed. Then when we conclude Communion, we usually pull out all the stops, and people dance if they want.

There’s a joyful kind of Pentecostal flair, but only after we have gone through the steps of repentance and centering on the Lord’s Table.

—Dan Scott