The shape of your Sunday service is forming the way people in your church relate to God – not just in the moment, but through the week.
That puts real significance on how we plan and lead services – whether we’re music leaders, service leaders or pastors. We’re going to explore how to give our services a gospel shape, and how we can help people to see connections as we lead services – for the spiritual formation of our churches.
We’re good at making sure each individual element of a service (songs, prayers, liturgy, etc.) is sound and true, but often we stop there. When the connections between elements are given little or no thought, it can communicate to the church that we’re going-through-the-motions, and singing ‘because that’s just what we do in church’ – with no reason to their rhyme. We can even lead people to make misleading connections (hence Calvin moved the offering as far away from the Lord’s Supper as possible so no-one thought that we meet with God by giving money to church!)
