MAILING LIST 
Vital Worship
Feature Stories ... for inspiration, learning and group discussion
 As a Calvin College worship apprentice, Shannon Sisco helped lead Jazz Vespers. Photo courtesy of Calvin College. |
Print this story for study and discussion 
Planning Contemporary Worship Services
Text by Joan Huyser-Honig
Photography by Steve Huyser-Honig
Do you know how to look beyond the style of a “traditional” or “contemporary” worship service to find its worship vision, structure, and theology? Ron Rienstra says it’s a question more worship planners should ask and answer.
Picture two coffeehouses. In each, espresso scents the air. Images flicker across screens. String bass, keyboard, and saxophone twine a slow rhythm that makes your shoulders relax. You forget your must-do list and let poetry, Scripture, and music soothe you.
Seen through the lens of “contemporary worship style,” these coffeehouse settings are twins. After all, they’re both doing Jazz Vespers.
Look deeper and you’ll see that neither is all about the music. “Jazz Vespers here only vaguely resembles its original incarnation at Calvin College,” says Shannon Sisco, who helped lead weekly Jazz Vespers as a college student and transplanted the idea to Wicker Park Grace Church in Chicago, where she’s in graduate school.
As Sisco and other contemporary worship leaders explain, worship is more than music. It has a structure. And the ways we worship form how we live out our Christian faith.
 Do your services create a balanced dialogue with God and each other? |
Sisco says the college vespers, with its dimly-lit seating, bouncy jazz, and bright stage, created a space so “those on the fringes and uncomfortable with church could draw near to God.“
She describes Wicker Park Grace as part of the emerging church movement. “A central focus in our worship is building authentic community and encouraging dialogue among participants,” she says. The typical vespers turnout is small enough that people can sit in a circle, volunteer to read from their seats, and take time to talk about the readings.
Both incarnations of Jazz Vespers fit within a definition of worship that resonates with Shannon Sisco and other former worship apprentices, such as Peter Armstrong and Dean Kladder.
Armstrong, now worship pastor at Sanctuary Christian Reformed Church in Seattle, explains that worship is covenantal, a lot like renewing wedding vows. “Within that context, worship is a drama or conversation between God and God’s people. One lesson I still think about every week is Ron Rienstra’s arrow system.
“I look through a liturgy to see where God is speaking to us (downward arrow) and where we are speaking to God (upward arrow) and where we are speaking to each other (two-way horizontal arrow). It’s a delicate balance. Making space for God may look like silence and meditation…or unique readings of Scripture,” he says.
Kladder, now a Princeton seminarian, recently completed a church internship. “Liturgy means the work of the people. So the people should take up their work,” he says.
He’s experimented with having the pastor put the pastoral prayer (a.k.a. long prayer or congregational prayer) back in the people’s hands. “One long prayer can be broken into shorter prayers of invocation, intercession, lament, and confession and placed meaningfully into the liturgical order,” he explains.
Hearing others pray their prayers on your behalf reinforces the understanding of worship as diverse people united in the work of conversing with God.
 A liturgical dancer fills the baptismal font to remind worshipers of their baptism each week at Church of the Servant Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. |
Good worship—whether labeled contemporary, traditional, or blended—has a structure. It uses many liturgical forms, all intentional.
When Guy Higashi was associate pastor at New Hope Christian Fellowship in Honolulu, senior pastor Wayne Cordeiro always said, “Form before content.” Just as a lumber form holds concrete in place while you pour a driveway, worship structure provides the form through which content can be delivered.
“Similarly, a frame for a photograph or painting accents the beauty and centers one’s focus. It either adds or takes away,” says Higashi, now a doctoral student and continuing education program manager at Fuller Theological Seminary.
With five services and 10,000 people, New Hope needs to include all worship elements without going overtime—else traffic gridlock results. Cordeiro’s six-sermon series gives worship teams time “to think out what creative elements to use rather than spontaneously scrambling. A simple element like serving communion requires lots of coordination,” Higashi says.
New Hope values using every member’s gifts. With so many involved in planning and leading worship, a clear structure helps all teams keep the service flowing toward the same goal.
Allison Ash, director of chapel at Fuller Theological Seminary, says, “Students who embrace more contemporary forms of worship may see written prayers and formal liturgical structures as boring or dead.
“What they may not understand is that those forms have been crafted throughout Christian history with distinct intentionality. There’s a reason worshipers hear the assurance of pardon after a prayer of confession.”
She’s noticed that students find liturgical forms alive and meaningful when presented in contemporary ways. “After singing Charlie Hall’s ‘Give Us Clean Hands,’ try singing Billy Foote’s ‘You Are My King,’ which allows worshipers to sing of God’s forgiveness just after singing about ‘laying down our idols,’ ” Ash suggests.
 Whatever the setting, the Lord’s Supper unites worshipers with God and inspires them to be Christ’s hands and feet. |
Far from being dead, worship structures and liturgical forms offer freedom for creativity, according to Chip Andrus, a Presbyterian musician and emerging church specialist.
“For centuries the faithful have gathered together, giving praise, confessing sin, sharing peace, reading God’s Word, praying for others, giving alms, and breaking bread. In this pattern we find the freedom to express our relationship with God in authentic, relevant ways.
“We find deep connection to those who worshipped God before us. We pass on mysteries of the faith to our children in ways that will endure,” he says.
The age-old worship pattern of prayers of the people, followed by offering and communion, teaches us how to live. “If we pray for someone in the hospital, our offering might be to visit that person. If we pray for the homeless, our offering might be volunteering at a homeless shelter once a week during our lunch break.
“This pattern helps us understand that we are people who ask God for help (prayers of the people) and participate with God in answering prayers and serving others (offering). We do this not on our own but joined with Christ and one another (breaking bread and sharing wine),” Andrus says.
He explains that once you see the deep meaning, you realize that how worship structures and liturgical forms are conveyed—whether through organs, robes, PowerPoint, or worship bands—isn’t the point.
“The most important thing is to make space for Christ’s Spirit to move through us, shape us, and feed us as we offer our prayers and lives as servants of the living God,” he says.
PROFILE: Ron Rienstra on Planning Contemporary Worship While directing student-planned and -led worship services at Calvin College and Fuller Theological Seminary, or while leading worship workshops, Ron Rienstra has sometimes met “worship leaders who get frustrated with other people’s desire to plan carefully. Those frustrated have not themselves yet done much worship leading.” Instead, he explains, “They’re responding to the perceived ease with which worship seems to flow from one song to the next and from song to prayer. They’re attributing that flow to the power of the Holy Spirit, without thinking of the logistics involved.” So Rienstra often proposes what he calls a thought experiment.
He agrees with “go with the flow” folks to imagine a worship service that’s not bogged down by planning. But then he asks, “What will we tell the person who runs the PowerPoint? How will the rhythm section know what’s coming next? When will…” The thought experiment is usually fairly short. The frustrated person starts to see why every worship service needs a structure. “A typical worship service is not like a Grateful Dead concert, where the primary players jam till they figure out their next songs. In services that aren’t planned, the music will be one or two very simple songs—this is descriptive, not derogatory—that musicians can groove on for ten minutes. “The worship will be led by one individual, who may say, ‘Let’s just all shout out a name for God now.’ Or the lyric is ‘we love you, Lord,’ so the leader encourages people to express that love. People don’t need to see words on a screen to sing along,” Rienstra explains. He has, however, worshiped in churches where the musicians have played together so long that they collectively know hundreds of songs. “I’ve seen this most in African American churches. Maybe the bass player lays down a riff, the rest come along, and as soon as the choir knows what’s going on, they join in,” he says
Rienstra says that most good worship services must be planned. Their forms may vary but they’ll be woven with seven common threads or principles for good contemporary worship: covenantal, participative, holistic, expansive, reverent, Spirit-directed, and expectant. He spells out each principle in volume one and volume two of his Ten Service Plans for Contemporary Worship, based on services at Calvin College and Fuller Theological Seminary. Each volume includes all you need to plan a service, along with how to vary the plan for your congregation. You’ll also find supplemental songs and tips online. You’ve probably noticed that Rienstra’s principles for good contemporary worship apply as well to traditional worship. “Yet, they’re explicitly crafted to address particular challenges for people planning worship in what some folks now say is a contemporary mode, using musical and presentational styles borrowed from popular culture,” he says. For example, contemporary worship planners might not disagree theologically with the principle that worship should be reverent, but might not think of it if no one brings it up. Similarly, most worship leaders wouldn’t have a theological problem with the idea that worship should be expansive—using words, music, traditions, and gifts of the whole people of God. Yet it might not be top of mind with worship planners who are constructing either traditional or contemporary services. When Rienstra asks worship leaders to show him their last few orders of worship, he often notices that all the songs were written after 1990. His favorite story about why worship should be expansive dates back to the first time the college LOFT team led worship at a Calvin Symposium on Worship. “Molly Delcamp, a worship apprentice, led a prayer. She was an excellent ‘pray-er,’ meaning that whatever words she spoke, she meant on behalf of herself and the whole congregation. “We sang Good to Me, which the band continued playing while Molly spoke a prayer of confession. The prayer was straight up Thomas Cranmer, though she probably changed some of the Book of Common Prayer diction, like thee and thou. “She prayed, ‘We confess that we have sinned in thought, word, and deed by what we have done and by what we have left undone…. In your mercy forgive what we have been, help us amend what we are, and direct what we shall be…’ “After the service I heard one person after another say, ‘That was the most beautiful prayer! Did you think of that yourself?’ They had no clue it was so old and still widely used,” Rienstra says.
Rienstra recently wrote about how new technology—such as amplification, lyric projection, and looping DJ software—has changed the style of church worship. Church members often focus on whether a worship trend is good or bad. Rienstra suggests looking at how the Holy Spirit uses a technology to expand worship in potentially wonderful ways and how others use it to narrow worship in historically or theologically suspect ways. For example, using folk- or pop-style music in worship “can be a healthy enculturation of congregational song” for people who believe that worship is the work of the people, he explains. After all, the Church honors martyrs who died for saying that the Word and worship should be in the vernacular, or language, of the congregation. Yet some composers “borrow and baptize” only those popular music forms that “emphasize internal, individual, and exclusively positive emotional states…. There are some things we wish to say to God, or hear from God, which are not fittingly or excellently expressed in a folk-derived musical genre.” The best way to evaluate a worship trend or technology, Rienstra says, is to ask, “Does this help people participate more fully, more actively, more intelligently?” |
Don’t miss the bonus stories on how worship structure reveals theology and why holistic worship includes confession and lament.
Order Ten Service Plans for Contemporary Worship. Listen to an interview with Ron Rienstra about volume two or read his blog entry about writing that volume. Subscribe to WorshipHelps, a blog by contemporary worship leaders, including Rienstra and Peter Armstrong, or bookmark Worship Weblog.
Learn more about Chip Andrus and his work with the emerging worship movement. Listen to his music.
To learn more about principles of good contemporary worship and music, attend The Church Music & Worship Summit, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Read Nathan Bierma’s essay on the etymology of the phrase “worshipful service.” Glean insights into how worship leaders use projected technology in worship. Check out Methodist advice on how to start a contemporary worship service. Learn why one congregation has chosen not to offer a choice between traditional and contemporary worship services.
Browse Reformed Worship articles on contemporary worship and contemporary Christian music. Follow these templates for planning contemporary worship services.
The prologue to The Worship Sourcebook states, “A well-conceived order of worship ensures that the main purposes of worship are carried out. In other words, a thoughtful pattern for worship keeps worship as worship. It protects worship from degenerating into a performance, into entertainment, or into an educational lecture.” The Worship Sourcebook gives ideas for every element of worship, no matter what “style” you aim for.
Browse related stories on contemporary worship music, developing a faith vocabulary, high school chapels, “in between” words, public Scripture reading, and sermon helps.
Feel free to print and distribute these stories at your council, staff, worship, or education committee meeting. These questions will get members talking about good contemporary worship.
- What does the structure of your typical worship service reveal about your theology?
- This story states that good worship must have a structure. A bonus story suggests that holistic worship includes lament and confession. Which ideas do you agree or disagree with? Which elements of worship would you like to change, add, or subtract—and why?
- If you examine the music, words, art, and other elements of your worship service, how many Christian eras and cultures would be represented?
What is the best way you’ve found to address and talk through principles of good contemporary worship? Please write to us so we can identify trends and share your great ideas. Whether you do these or any other things, we’d love to learn what works for you:
- Did you find a resource—visual, online, printed, multimedia, or seminar—that helped your church think through how and why to make changes in your worship services?
- If you have surveyed other congregations in your area or denomination regarding their most creative (and biblically sound) contemporary worship ideas, will you share the best ideas that you discovered?
CICW web story reprint policy:
You have permission to reprint this article (or other stories in this collection) in its entirety, in print or online. Before the title of the article, please reprint the following permission statement. If you are reprinting online, please link to the website listed.
This article was first published by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, http://www.calvin.edu/worship/stories/.