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The Art Of Worship Flow Part 2
My last blog began the conversation about creating a good worship flow. All the elements of an assembly should work together to point a person in one direction: the central message. (ATTENTION: What I’m not saying here is that the sermon is the central point of the service. Nor am I saying that up tempo worship songs should be the “opening set up” song to the more important or meaningful ballad!) What I’m saying is this: it all works much like a great story where one word isn’t wasted.
In light of this, I want to share 4 additional tips to help craft a good worship flow.
5) Pay attention to the transition between different elements. A worship leader should not just want to eliminate silence, but to move seamlessly from music to video to sermon to communion to (fill in element here). For example, you are playing a video with music behind it. Choose a song in the same key as the background music so you can move seamlessly between the two elements.
LRCC does a meet and greet time every Sunday, which is one of my favorite parts of our services. It gives our church time to fellowship for a few minutes and/or meet any visitors (I prefer the term “guests”) who are seated near them. However, it is hard to transition back from this brief “social time” into a spirit of celebration or reflection. This Sunday, we are trying something different. We are going to quietly “ooh” the song “I Worship You, Almighty God” followed by a prayer. I believe this will ease us back into a time of reflection without feeling like we just did a 180.
This is where we get to think creatively. There are several ways to create a flow between these elements. Are there ones that work better for your church? What has been successful? What has crashed and burned?
6) Beware of the biggest Worship Flow Killer: ANNOUNCEMENTS. This element is a struggle at most churches. It is a vital way to communicate special projects, trips, prayer requests, and events to your people. So, where do you put them in your service where everyone hears them? Some opt for the beginning of services; just get them out of the way! Others know that many of their people arrive “fashionably late”, so the beginning isn’t an option.
Some churches place announcements at the end of services. The upside- everyone is in attendance and hears them. Downside- many have trained themselves to tune them out by the end of services. Church members are turning their phones back on, pulling their things together, and ready to eat lunch.
A third option is to place announcements right smack in the middle services, maybe just before the sermon, to eliminate the problems of both. However, placing them in the middle disrupts the flow of worship. It gets people thinking about plans and schedules and “How are we gonna pay for this trip?” questions. It is extremely difficult to find a way to call the congregation into refocusing on the message.
So, with the pros and cons of all the options, which is best? That is something each congregation must decide on its own. We have just recently reevaluated where our announcements go in our church service at LRCC. We have been doing them during the offering while the baskets are being passed (I think this is a good idea), but it was right in the middle of services. We felt the resistance as we pulled them back into a song or two before the lesson.
We have now opted to put them near the end immediately following our prayer time. We have a “Altar Call/ Prayer” song as people respond to the message. Both our Preaching minister and Involvement minister read through the prayer requests and we pray. We immediately move into the announcements with our involvement minister. Some of our announcements are about the sick and prayer request related news, so we begin with those. This transition works seamlessly! Then we end with a closing song – one that is a charge to go and live out the message we just heard.
7) Don’t overuse music as transitions. With a cappella churches, we don’t have the luxury of having the key player or pianist play transition music behind everything or during prayers. We have to think creatively about these kind of things. I like the idea of using ooh’s (as we are this Sunday), but I do so with caution.
Two reasons:
a. You have to have a well-trained praise team to do this. I have seen some teams try this and end up overpowering the pray-er or fall apart on tempo. Some teams just aren’t comfortable singing anything but words – and that’s ok.
b. Like bread, it can get stale quickly. So, use it sparingly. Besides, part of the creative process is finding creative ways to make a worship time flow. Let’s not cheapen things by always using the same old ideas.
No matter how much you plan, the Spirit of God is the only One who makes it work. I’ve created and crafted what I thought was the ideal worship flow, only for it to be lackluster and rigid. There have also been times when I thought: “This Sunday isn’t going to be very good”, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. Worship was vibrant and passionate – and it had nothing to do with my planning!
You must remember that the Spirit of God can work through your planning and creative energy. If I’m reading 1 Corinthians 12:7-11 correctly, He gave that creative energy to you! But realize that He also can take what you feel is your weakest work and breathe life into it. It is in those times that He is reminding us that we don’t control the Spirit. It isn’t about us – it is all about God! If you take nothing else from this blog, remember this last point as we plan, create, and build better worship flows!