Drills and Scales for Shaping Pastoral Imagination
Every good soccer or basketball team does drills to practice basic skills. What kinds of drills or scales would be most fitting for worship planners and leaders?
Every good soccer or basketball team does drills to practice basic skills. What kinds of drills or scales would be most fitting for worship planners and leaders?
Including thoughtfully-chosen images in worship may minister to certain people in ways that the rest of the service does not.
Calvin Seerveld, whenever he can, urges worshipers to build a scriptural vocabulary of lament. When offered in genuine humility and trust, lament in worship need not be the last word.
Now that so many church members have digital cameras and so many congregations can project images, the possibilities for using photography in worship have soared. Here are tips from congregations that use photography to build community and to picture the entire world as belonging to God.
A virtual study desk for students, teachers and preachers to a wide variety of contemporary and historical resources for study and liturgy for each lectionary week and pericope, or check out the scripture Index to locate links to study resources relating to specific passages.
I love worship music. I love it so much that I have spent a lot of my life learning about it, listening to it, singing it, leading it. However, I often wonder if our discussions about worship are focused way too much on music...
In a recent seminary class, we were reviewing key moments in the history of the church. My colleague Scott Hoezee asked students to think about what church life would have been like in six different centuries. As students reflected on each of these different moments in history, it struck me that in each of them public worship would have been led almost entirely by a single pastor, with the help of a single musician...
The person behind the mixing board is the invisible member of the worship team, every bit as integral as singers or drummers or even leaders. So it’s important to get the right person for the job.
The following chart outlines a historic pattern of Christian worship. While most churches don’t use the exact wording found in this chart, there are thousands of churches on many continents that use a version of this pattern.
Jamie Smith recently gave a lecture in which he said that repentance and assurance in worship are remarkable formative practices that are indispensable to the Christian life. He noted that on Oprah, we can find a form of assurance ("you're o.k.," "just be yourself"), while our shopping mall elicits shame or anxiety in all of us ("none of us measure up to the standards of the good life projected there.")
What are some of the resources and reflections that would be most helpful to you? How can we develop this site in order to be as helpful as possible?
I have learned a lot from Mark Charles. Mark is a veteran blogger and a long-time CRC member, who writes very thoughtful pieces on cross-cultural exchanges, especially for members of the church, from his home in Window Rock, Arizona. This piece is the fruit of Mark’s trip to Siberia for a gathering about culturally relevant worship practices. I especially like Mark’s honesty about the unsettling quality of encountering worship practices that are new to us.
Psalm singing is most certainly making a comeback. How many (more or less complete) Psalm settings does your congregation know and love to sing? Which ones are your ‘heart songs’?
If you’re wondering whether projected technology is all it can be in your congregation’s worship, maybe it’s time to rethink your approach.
You intuitively know that words set to music sink in more deeply than plain text does. They become part of your muscle memory. That’s why the new hymnal Singing the New Testament is important.
When Jesse Leimbach died three years after being diagnosed with cancer, the people of Granite Springs Church in Lincoln, California, knew that pious clichés wouldn’t help. So they used the words God has given us all in the Psalms.
What if you could find five people in your congregation, perhaps each representing a different decade (one child, one teen, one thirty-something, one fifty-something, one-eighty something)to tell you what single Psalm verse best expresses the praise and thanks that they personally long to offer God. The results are likely to be inspiring. Someone might choose a verse from Psalm 150, another a verse from Psalm 30, another a verse from Psalm 63.
What does this arrangement say about who or what is most important in worship? What does it convey about how or whether people in the seats or pews take part in worship? What does it imply about who calls you to or leads worship?
As Christian Reformed congregations reclaim the importance of baptism, they’re making the sacrament multisensory and helping worshipers “live into” their baptisms.
The following is an emerging draft of all of the worship-related resources provided by the Christian Reformed Church and its agencies and educational institutions—and easy place to gain access to the audio files, bulletin covers, liturgies, videos, and publications that worship planners and leaders need to do their work well.
How can this service faithfully and imaginatively bring this scriptural text alive? How can the service invite the meaningful participation of everyone present? How can we serve as the prophets and priests for our community at worship? Planning worship is more a pastoral task than a logistical task.
Henry Nouwen once argued that the three greatest temptations for Christian leaders are to be a) relevant, b) spectacular, and c) powerful (In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership, Crossroads, 1987).
Hymnary.org is a new kind of online hymn index.
We are the Faith Formation Committee, established by Synod 2007 and appointed by the Board of Trustees.
The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship promotes the study of Christian worship and the renewal of worship in worshiping communities worldwide.