Planning Worship Services
Have you ever wondered how we go about planning our weekly worship services? Consistent with a Reformed theology of worship, we focus on a steady diet of the ordinary means of grace: Word, Sacrament, and Prayer. This is the call of God to worship him in the way he has prescribed and graciously invited us to do so. In our liturgy, we seek to infuse every element of worship with the Word of God. We read the Word, sing the Word, pray the Word, preach the Word, and “see” the Word (in the visible Sacraments). In this Bible-centered dialogue between God and his people, we receive his Word and give it back to him and one another. As God’s Word directs our worship, each week we structure the service to reflect the flow of the Gospel, the grand narrative of Redemption. As we walk through this framework, the sermon passage gives us the particular verbiage and themes to highlight. I like to think of weekly worship planning at this intersection of the Gospel framework and the sermon passage. This keeps our liturgical flow anchored in the Gospel while we explore a diversity of themes directed by the exposition of Scripture.
Mapping it out
The horizontal axis reflects the Gospel Arc in both the content and our proper response. In this way our service order walks through the Gospel Narrative of Creation > Fall > Redemption > Consummation. This calls for our responses of praise, adoration, confession, lament, faith, repentance, assurance, thanksgiving, and commitment. The elements of worship reflecting this flow will help us keep this trajectory in view and tell the story of Gospel. We see this general pattern in the broad Scriptural message, as well as passages like Isaiah 6, Deuteronomy 5, Romans 11-15, and Revelation 4-21. Generally, we start with a praise-oriented call to worship and first song. In light of God's holiness, we recognize our sin, so we sing songs, read Scripture, and pray to confess our sin and cry out for God's mercy. Focusing on the grace of salvation, we sing of the work of Christ on the cross and his glorious resurrection. Then we receive God's Word preached, respond through feasting on and with Christ in the Lord's Supper, which prepares us for a final song of sending and commitment, followed by God's blessing in the benediction.