Dear Sir,
I confess myself more than a little bemused by John Benton’s article ‘Against Themed Services’ (en October 2019). He describes such services as those where ‘not just the final hymn but all the hymns, prayers and readings are chosen so as to fit in with the main thrust of the sermon’ – which happens to be how I approached every service I ever led in 30 years of pastoral ministry. I never spent hours ‘getting it right’, or ‘a whole day trawling the Internet’ for anything. I simply believed that just as the sermon should have a clear message, so everything surrounding it should have that same clarity. Such services can still have a mixture of praise, confession, prayer and instruction, but they are all employed in such a way that the ground is well prepared for when God’s word is preached. It seems to me the far bigger danger is ‘un-themed’ services, just as there are far too many ‘un-themed’ sermons delivered from our pulpits.
Yours faithfully,
