Worship Weblog

Fredericktown Book Group – second meeting

Posted by cicw

Friday, September 4th, 2009

Book Groups

We invited 30 book groups across the U.S. and Canada to meet and discuss The Church of All Ages and its implications for their worship, and to share their notes here.
Learn more

Our second discussion session had a great mix of ages, gender and denominations. We had eight in attendance. Jack began with a devotion that was so timely for our meeting as it was all about “traditions”. It encouraged us to ask if our traditions served us or served God.

That led right into discussion on our first topic which was—Is worship a corporate activity of the Body of Christ or a teaching service for adults? Interestingly members began answering this with talk of church mission and vision statements carrying over to the meaning of worship.

Comments included:

“A mission statement is important to what a church is”
“to know and share God’s love”
“living and sharing God’s word”
“learn”
“tell”
“care”
“share”
“keep it as simple as possible.”

Mary E: “Do worship planners in your church intentionally think of the mission statement when planning worship?

Carole: “One would hope so.”

A lot of time was given over to the part of corporate worship that the sermon plays.

Laura: “I sometimes don’t feel like I’m worshipping if I’m listening to a long sermon. There needs to be more prayer.”

Carole: “Just this week my husband (a pastor) said he’d be including the congregation more in prayer time because the liturgy says “prayers of the people….not just prayers of the pastor.”

Jack: Teaching takes place in our Sunday School and can be integrated into the Worship service.

Joy: If the worship service can be an extension of the Sunday School, there would be more cohesion .

Tim: “Scripture says that we’re to love God with our Heart, Mind, Soul and Strength, so there needs to be a teaching element but do we have to have a traditional sermon to do that?”

Mary M: “There’s a difference between preaching and teaching. Preaching is to help people to look at their relationship with God in a new way. It’s about building a personal relationship with God rather than learning content.”

Mary E: “ It’s an interesting observation that the two youngest members of our group (Laura and Tim) are voicing concerns with the traditional sermon and how they view its influence during corporate worship.” (The rest of the group did nod in agreement that this was something that might need to be looked at further among church leaders and worship planners.)

We moved the discussion into an area where we asked ourselves if we have too much music and not enough story in our worship services. Both Ed and Jack belong to churches that have held events such as reenactments of The Festival of Booths, or a Bethlehem village. Even though these weren’t held during the regular worship service, both Ed and Jack agreed they were intergenerational in nature, fostered stronger relationships among members and may have enhanced corporate worship. Joy felt that we definitely need to make the scriptures come alive.
We talked as a group about stories (testimonies). We gave testimony how such stories can influence peoples’ lives. Carole’s church incorporates a time of testimony following soup suppers on Wednesday nights. Jack shared how moved he was by a passion play he saw when he was just a boy. Jack is now 83. With passion, he said the drama was powerful! We concluded that maybe we needed to do more of that storytelling in our corporate worship services.

In conclusion, I think our conversations gave us more to think about. We generated more questions. Here are a few:

How do we plan worship for those who have a mindset that worship should be “feed me” “meet my needs” without it becoming a performance?

In worship planning, do we need to be mindful of the fact that men might respond differently to prayer and testimonies than women do?

Tags: bgfredericktown, Book Groups 2009, intergenerational