How long should it last?

[Milestoneworship]

I have been taking a look at Worshp setlists around here, and I've noticed that most of you guys do four or five songs per service. My sets are considerably longer; at least half of our Sunday morning service is worship music (probably 30 minutes or so). In your mind, how long is the perfect worship set?

[milepost13]

A couple of things:

1) The number of songs you do has got to be totally base on your church and your culture. You do what works best for your church, and I do what works best for my culture. I can certainly learn things from how other churches do it, but you can't try to make your church look and sound and feel exactly like another church. What seems perfect in one church may be horrible in another.

2) It can (IMO, it should) change every Sunday (or at least occasionally). Last Sunday it was 6 songs = 35 minutes for us...this morning (and I'm sitting in our lobby half-way through our first service) it will probably end up being 4 song = 20 minutes. Last week was all about worship, so we naturally sang/played music a little longer. This week is all about mission, and we're bringing in some other elements of our service that allow us to focus on mission.

3) We believe and teach and practice that every element of our worship gatherings can be an act of worship...with that mindset, prayer, giving, silence, taking notes, listening to the sermon, hanging out with each other...they all all become just as important an act of worship as the singing. We're never concerned with getting our standard number of songs or for preaching for the expected ammount of time because the big picture is worship, not singing or preaching.

Nate

[sicstrings]

I'm with Nate on this, I don't believe there is a perfect number either. For us sometimes 5 is best, but just a few weeks ago we did 10. We also try for a balance of all coporate aspects of worship like those Nate listed.

[El Ben]

Since my church is a hulking beast of Charismatic, time-absorbing material, we try to keep worship down to twenty minutes, which usually translates into three, maybe four songs, although I hear that there were times here when worship would sometimes go for an hour. :eek:

[Stevie Nature]

I agree, there's no magic number of songs. We typically do 5 now because we're in a temp facility (yes still) so we can only practice Sunday mornings. When we get to the new facility we'll probably do more music. We integrate several different element into our corporate worship. We will have music, various times of prayer, giving, Scripture reading, readings, and of course the sermon. We understand all of these to be aspects of corporate worship. As far as how we balance them, we tend to give more time to the sermon (about 45 minutes or so).

[russhutto]

We stick to 3 song setlists. Our entire gathering lasts one hour.

We do 4 special "nights of worship" per year where we do 2-3 hours of musical worship activity/prayer/worship teaching.

Because of the "culture" we target we've found that the 3 song setlist works best, and the 4 worship nights are extremely SPECIAL.

We kind of follow the less is more philosophy. I'd definitely rather hear people say, "Man, that was short, is it over already?" than "Duuuuuude, when will it ever end...?" Now if we could only get our lead communicator to follow that, haha, just kidding.

[Darryn]

Our church does about five songs for the main worship segment. The worship set lasts about 30 min and includes about 5 min of meat and great. That puts us at about 5 min per song.

I would love to do a longer worship session. 45 would be great. Has anyone gone to a church that did that? How was it?

[russhutto]

Most of my life, I've been in churches where the music set went from 45 minutes to an hour.

Honestly, there's only a MINORITY of church attenders who usually appreciate that length. Most of them are on the worship team.

[twc_admin]

Since my church is a hulking beast of Charismatic, time-absorbing material, we try to keep worship down to twenty minutes, which usually translates into three, maybe four songs, although I hear that there were times here when worship would sometimes go for an hour. :eek:

Ben,
heheh .. I wonder what dominant, control-freak worship leader was there when you worshiped for an hour!? :confused::D

[Kevin E.]

Ben,
heheh .. I wonder what dominant, control-freak worship leader was there when you worshiped for an hour!? :confused::D
Control freak ok but not stage clean freak:D

Our church usually goes about 45 minutes to hour and 15. It depend on announcements,offering length ect. 30 minutes to 45 is good most the time the crowd will stay in it for that long

[worshiptrench]

We do 4 plus video or some other special element generally or 5 if we don't since we have three services on Sunday. When we get into the new building and do two services with more time between, we'll have time to consistently do 5 + special feature (video, interview, etc).

For a while we did an extra song on Saturday night when we were trying to get peeps to move to it to create space. We called it Super-sized worship and did some funny video commercial in a McDonald's like setting where a girl ordered a worship service and I, in uniform, told her all meals on Saturday were supersized and would she like a free extra song, video or an extra 10 minutes of preaching. She said, "Well definitely not the preaching...hmmmm."