In many churches, the Sunday order of service (liturgy) is focused and effective, with each element making sense and building on the others. Until it’s time to tack on the announcements. And then, it’s as if the ship has run aground and the train has slipped the tracks.
“Liturgy. That’s a High Church thing, right?”
“It was an Old School way of having a lot of ceremonial stuff in worship services.”
“No, I think it’s just like a Greek Orthodox thing. Or Catholic? Something the priest does?”
In recent years elements of contemporary evangelical Christianity have begun to study the purpose of liturgy in corporate worship — often for the first time. Many others still don’t know what it means or how it would be relevant in modern worship, but are pretty sure that they serve in a non-liturgical church.
In the truest sense though, any church that has an order of presentation and a way for the congregation to participate can be said to have a liturgy. For instance, Church A might conduct services like this:
Writers Mingling Before A Sojourn Songwriting Seminar
In the previous three articles we looked at reasons for establishing a songwriting community, ways to do that, and how to establish the community through regular workshops and fellowship. But if your goal is to produce new worship music for your church fellowship, then your songwriting group hasn’t arrived until it’s doing that. And it’s not going to do that in the most efficient manner until you provide clear direction and lay out a vision.
This can be as simple as saying “We need more songs about the cross” or “we need some good ‘Call to Worship’ songs and some songs of assurance.” Then you need to communicate how writers should submit songs. If you have a small church and only a couple writers, this might be an informal process. Large churches will need to come up with specific procedure, which might look something like this:
Now we’re diving into the middle of how to start a songwriting group, so if you haven’t read part one and part two of this series, I’d encourage you to begin there. I’m going to begin this article by addressing pastors, elders — whoever is in charge of “shepherding the flock” of your church. If this doesn’t describe you, then you still have a role to play in this article: show it to your pastor. You’ll need to give him an idea of the kind of sub-group you’d like to launch within his church’s music ministry, and you’ll need his counsel.
In part one of this series we laid out a biblical and historical case for encouraging a community approach to songwriting. Of course an exhaustive argument from the Bible alone would probably take a book, because the Bible is replete with proverbs, examples and prophecies relating to community. Isaiah 52:8 says “The voice of your watchmen – they lift up their voice; together they sing for joy” and Proverbs 11:14 tells us “… in abundance of counselors there is victory.”
As we head into the nuts-and-bolts of how to set up a songwriting circle, we must start with an awareness of two things: the enemy and the foundation:
The Enemy
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” ~ Walt Kelley
Glorious is a great song from Trent Smith's 2013 GREATER JOY and would make a great addition to your Sunday Setlists! [Read more...]
Download: Glorious F# Chart | Download: Glorious (Lyrics)
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