A Commitment to Deliberate Worship
Scott Aniol May 2nd, 2008
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The third priority of Religious Affections Ministries is to encourage a commitment to deliberate worship in churches. Unfortunately, many church leaders put little or no time carefully thinking through their worship services. I’ve been amazed how many times I’ve witnessed some of the following occurrences:
- a music director frantically flipping through the hymnal five minutes before the service to select hymns
- a pastor planning the flow of his service more for pragmatic reasons than for biblical reasons
- a repetitive service order simply because “that’s how we’ve always done it”
- congregants who just want to get through “the preliminaries”
For all that could be said against the Seeker-sensitive movement (and believe me, I have a lot to say against it), the one thing positive that could be said about that philosophy is that it has very specific goals, and church leaders in such churches are very deliberate about how they order their services and what they include in them.
So what about churches driven less by the market and more by the Bible? The New Testament, in the context of organizing worship services, commands that we do all things decently and in order (1 Corinthians 14:40). So we must be deliberate about our worship services. But deliberate about what?
First, congregational worship should be deliberately God-focussed. Worship should be about God and for God, and this affects the content, mood, organization, and elements of the worship service. A deliberately God-focussed perspective will motivate church leaders to careful analyze every aspect of their service to determine whether it really focuses the congregations on God, His Word, and proper spiritual response, or whether it focuses them on themselves and their preferences.
Second, congregational worship should be deliberately congregation-oriented. In other words, every element within the service, the content of those elements, and the order in which they are included in the service should be deliberately selected to aid the entire congregation to God-focussed worship. What kind of music is chosen, the order in which it is arranged, and what is said between service elements can either distract the congregation from what they are supposed to be directed toward or actually help them better set their minds and hearts on God and His Word and respond rightly to Him.
All of the resources Religious Affections Ministries provide by way of Church Music Administration assistance is to encourage this kind of deliberate congregational worship.
