The Revitalization Playbook: Encourage Real Worship

Since my post on March 8^th, I’ve been writing a revitalization playbook, a church leader’s resource for helpful, timely, turnaround strategies.

The first three plays were “scripted,” in the sense that I strongly recommended that they should be implemented in this order:

• Help your people face the true condition of their church,
• Help your congregation to take responsibility for the condition of their church,
• Lead your people to begin praying for revitalization.

Since April 4^th I’ve shared seven additional plays which church leaders can employ – under the guidance of the Holy Spirit – in their own unique situations.

Helping your congregation to discover or re-discover real worship is another great step on the road to revitalization.

What I’m talking about:

 By “real worship,” I mean: Demonstrating or expressing, with help from the Holy Spirit, our love for and loyalty to God. 

 You’ll notice that I didn’t say, “singing songs in church,” because you can worship all day long without singing songs in church and you can sing songs in church all day long without worshipping. It grieves me to hear people who ought to know better using the word “worship” as a synonym for singing songs in church.

The following are a few thoughts which have helped churches to put an end to their worship wars: 

• As mentioned above, we can have worship without music and we can have music without worship.
• If we’re going to do our worshipping with music, the main thing to God is that we genuinely worship.
• When Christians truly understand worship, they’re not obsessed with having just the “right kind” of music.
• There are worshippers and there are worship warriors. Real worshippers don’t go to war over worship and worship warriors probably don’t actually worship.

What I’m not talking about:

By encouraging real worship, I’m absolutely NOT saying that you must get a big new band or an excellent new worship leader.

Great worship is certainly enhanced and facilitated by great leaders and great music performed by great musicians.

But great worship is also offered to God by prophets, paupers and persecuted saints sitting in the dust, in the dark, with nothing to offer God but their thoughts and words.  Worshippers in the Bible are often speechless, helpless, clueless, nonplussed and un-glued. They are too awestruck, weak and humbled to hold up their heads, let alone sing. In some cases, worship is what they give to God when they can’t give Him anything else.

How real worship will help your church:

(1) When we worship God, we please God. He really wants this from us (I Chronicles 16:29, John 4:21-24).  If we want Him to bless our churches, pleasing Him (not the seekers or the deacons or the teenagers) should be of paramount importance.

(2) When we worship God, it changes us. Again, I’m talking about real worship, which involves the help of the Holy Spirit (Philippians 3:3).  Worship puts God in His place.  Worship puts us in our place. It re-adjusts our values and our vision. As the simplest of all creeds declares: “There is one God, and He is not me.”

(3) When we worship God, it changes our churches. Again, our values are transformed, but this time it is our congregational values getting re-aligned. Who does our church belong to?  Who is our church for? Who gets to decide what our church is for?  Worship takes us to the obvious answers to these fundamental questions.

How leaders can encourage real worship:

 (1) You can teach it thoroughly and tenaciously. “Thoroughly” means that you do a sermon series on the subject.  Dig down deep and lead your people into great experiences of worship during the course of these messages. “Tenaciously” means that you keep reminding everyone of what was learned during the sermon series. Smaller pieces of teaching on the subject of worship are always appropriate during worship times.

(2) Practice it conspicuously. Leaders who want churches full of worshippers need to be worshippers themselves. I’m not saying that you have to stand on the platform during the singing with your arms in the air, but neither should you be ashamed to confess that you are a worshipper of God. After all, this is nothing to boast about for no one  actually worships from a position of strength or with a spirit of pride.

(3) Work with worship leaders patiently. Not all “worship leaders” are worshippers or persons who even understand worship. I suggest that you assume nothing as you make time to meet and study with individuals who seem to have a God-given desire to lead others in worship.  This doesn’t have to be difficult: study Scripture or read great books together, talk and pray.

(4) Plan for it carefully. I’m not going to tell you how to plan your worship services – there are just too many opinions on the subject and not all churches should be doing their services in the same way. What I am suggesting is that you think and pray about what kinds of songs, prayers, readings, testimonies, etc. are going to lead your congregation to the place of worshipping God. More than likely this will involve some dedicated time, uninterrupted by silly banter and mundane announcements.

If you must have them, put your announcements at the beginning of your service (and get them over with) or put them at the end of the service.  Don’t expect people to turn worship on and off as you toggle back and forth from worship to “church business.”  One more thought: As someone who views hearing from God as being of great importance, I love seeing churches that use the old formula of (1) worship that prepares our hearts to hear the Word of God (2) worshipping God by receiving His Word through a sermon, followed by (3) a time of worship in response  to what we have heard.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:

1. For an easy – but powerful – study of worship, simply look up the word in a concordance (or a topical Bible, such as Nave’s) and start reading.
2. Does our congregation understand what real worship is?
3. Are our “worship services” designed to lead people into experiences of worship?
4. How can we help our people move toward becoming true worshippers?