Redesigning Worship

Planning a worship service is far more than just choosing songs and seasonal images. Helping people to genuinely worship God requires creating an experience through which people can enter into the presence of the divine. Discover strategic insights for creating and integrating powerful God-experiences into your own setting. Discover how a real-life worship team interacts, champions creativity and creates powerful God-experiences, one week at a time. This descriptive book offers practical direction for building and leading teams, empowering creative ideas, and guidance for handling conflict and overcoming serious obstacles.

Creative worship is possible—no matter what size the church

Design for transformation--mind, heart, and soul.

Worship professor and practitioner Constance Cherry shows how to create services that are faithful to Scripture, historically conscious, relevant to God, Christ-centered, and engaging for worshipers of all ages in the twenty-first century. More than 150 colleges and seminaries have used or currently use the first edition as a required text. In this new edition, each chapter has been substantially updated and revised, including illustrations, key terms, examples, technological references, and suggested resources for further reading. A new chapter on global worship and a new appendix on live-streamed worship are included.

Much more than a "how-to" for worship planners. Drawing on more than two decades of collaborative worship planning, as well as numerous conversations with other worship planners. Pastor Howard Vanderwell and musician Norma de Waal Malefyt lay out a thoughtful, field-tested process for planning, implementing, and evaluating life-enriching weekly worship. Well over a dozen field-tested tools and a selected bibliography round out this invaluable resource for worship planners.

Pastors and church leaders in many congregations have attempted to form teams for the purpose of planning, or designing, worship. Getting a group of people together in one room is fairly easy. But whether large or small church, staff or volunteer, most discover that it is difficult to form a team that actually works. Using the metaphor of early flight, this resource analyzes how to be a part of a worship design team that works. Major sections include discovering a strategic approach to worship, tips for team composition, a look at how to overcome a series of obstacles that frequently keep teams from finding success together, and some of the usual “mechanical difficulties” that keep teams grounded.

Have we replaced the glory of God with our church programs. If so, is there anything we can do to get the glory of God back into our gatherings and individual lives? While we have good music, well-written songs and history to learn from, we can still miss having the presence of God in our meetings the way it was in Bible times. In this challenging and often provocative book, Jarrod Cooper deals with these important questions. Providing plenty of biblical illustrations to support his concerns, Jarrod shakes up more of our conventional thinking on the subject or worship. Can we for example only worship in the presence of the microphone, worship leader and powerpoint. What if all these were stripped away and it was just God and us? What would our worship be like then?

Drawing on more than 2,500 discussions with Episcopalians in focus groups and personal interviews as part of the Episcopal Church Foundation's Zacchaeus project, William Sachs and Thomas Holland conclude that there is a paradox in the Episcopal Church. At