How to Write a Great Call to Worship for Lent

So, you’re staring at your laptop screen. It’s later at night than you’d like to admit. The Word document is blank and that vertical bar is flashing, daring you to write the first word. You need to start your worship service. You need a call to worship. It’s Lent, and you want to get this right. Do you write it, find it, or split the difference and adapt something?

What’s in a great Call to Worship for Lent?

The season of Lent is a time in which we emphasize the need for soul-searching and repentance, both in our individual devotions and in our corporate worship. It provides opportunities for creativity as well as pulling in the voices of faithful Christians who came before us. 

How we begin our services is important for focusing our worship. It can prepare the congregation’s minds and hearts to begin the work of worship (“liturgy” is the work of the people—it is not meant to be passive) and it can pull the sermon into the conversation of the entire worship service.

The call to worship is a special gift of the broadly Reformed tradition to Christian worship, a piece of liturgy which is an invitation—even an imperative—to the congregation to worship God together. So what is in a great Lenten call to worship? 

In this blog post we’ll talk a little about what a call to worship is, its central purpose, and strategies for writing, adapting, or choosing an effective one for Lent, along with some examples you can use in your own services.

What is a Call to Worship?

A distinct “call to worship” is, in terms of the history of the church, fairly recent. It first really emerges in the middle of the English reformation and the Westminster Assembly (mid 17th century), which directed that the minister precede the opening prayer by “solemnly calling on [the congregation] to the worshipping of the great God.” [1]

The popularity slowly grew and, in the 20th century, it became a fixture of the worship in many Presbyterian churches—and has been adopted by other denominations and traditions, including some Methodist, Lutheran, and evangelical congregations.

The key to the “call” in the call to worship is that it is a call from God to worship. [2] God is the initiator and the people are responding to that call. We start the service with the “vertical” relationship between God and us. From that divine initiation, everything else that the church does—that worship is—flows. [1] & [3]  

Beyond those critical points, there is a lot of freedom in crafting or choosing a call to worship that draws the congregation from their ordinary lives into worship. Many calls to worship are taken straight from Scripture (our own library contains hundreds). An advantage of adapting a passage (or pulling together multiple passages) is that it starts the divine-human conversation with God’s own revelation. It also provides a Scripture-forward context for the preaching and worship to come. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t innovate beyond Scripture—our creativity can be a gift we give to God in our services. 

Calls to worship can be responsive or spoken only by the pastor. The great advantage of a responsive call to worship is that it embodies the dialogue which is being started in the worship service. On the other hand, when the pastor offers the call in one voice, there is a sense in which he or she is more clearly embodying the divine initiation of the call—and the response could then be a song of praise immediately following.  

How to Write, Adapt, or Choose Calls to Worship for Lent

The way a call to worship sets up the themes, tone, or theological background for the service allows it to play a special role during Lent. If you want to adapt your calls to worship for Lent, there are a few approaches you can adopt.

Scripture-Based Calls to Worship (Writing and Adapting)

At any time, a call to worship can be used to tee up the day’s message. Picking a piece of scripture from the passage you’re preaching on and integrating it into the call to worship is one way to do this. In Lent, this will organically pull in the themes as they are reflected in your choice of text and sermon topics.

An obvious way to do this is to adapt the call to worship directly from the day’s texts. If the text will be read in full later in the service, it may not be the best choice to simply read the text as the call to worship, but drawing from it can still prepare the congregation for the message — and even allow “callbacks” in your sermon to the call to worship.

Here’s how it might work in practice with Joel 2, a common text for Lent. It readily lends itself to being adapted for a call to worship that will resonate when you return to it in your readings and sermon (I use the ESV below for Joel 2:12-13a):

Leader: “'Yet even now,' declares the Lord,
'return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
and rend your hearts and not your garments.'"

No matter how often we stray, God calls us back. 
He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, 
and abounds in steadfast love. 

People: He loves us and forgives us. He has redeemed us, and we will follow him as long as we live.

Leader: Let us worship our righteous and gracious God.

This call to worship combines a small part of the larger reading (usually Joel 2:1-2, 12-17), and personalizes it to a congregation contemplating themes of repentance during Lent.

On the other hand, themes from your sermon may be worth pulling out and including in a call to worship, without directly quoting the text. How you do this will depend on the way you approach the text in your sermon. For an example, imagine that you were preaching on the temptation in the wilderness from Matthew 4. Here's three possible ways you might interpret it:

• Turn stones to bread: the temptation to turn from God for provision.

• Test God: the temptation to make our relationship with God transactional.

• Worship Satan for power: the temptation to abandon God for power and security.

Here is an example of a call to worship that could open a service in which you were going to preach that message.

Leader: God is our provider, our protector, and our salvation.
The voice of the world says: “Turn to me to provide you food, shelter, and everything you need.”
People: The Word of God is our bread. We will trust him to provide.
Leader: The voice of the world says: “Everything is a transaction. Come to God on your terms.”
People: We are God’s beloved children. We come because he calls.
Leader: The voice of the world says: “Worship at my feet and I will give you power and safety.”
People: We will worship God alone. We will not fear the world.
Leader: Let us worship God together!

This "prepares the ground" for a sermon that offers an interpretation or application of the gospel passage along these lines.

Obviously, this can be taken too far. If it isn't immediately understandable to the congregation, it may be confusing. If it's too ham-handed, it could be feel manipulative. But done right, it opens worship with an introduction to the day's themes that prepares minds and hearts for the Word.

Thematic Calls to Worship for Lent

There are a cluster of familiar themes that come to the forefront in Lent. It isn’t that they aren’t always applicable, but they receive special emphasis: confession, sorrow, repentance, fasting, simplicity, and preparation, to name a few. Picking calls to worship that bring one or more of these themes to the fore can put those themes at the front of the minds and hearts of the congregation as they begin to worship. 

Granted, this may be one of the more obvious approaches. That’s one reason why The Pastor’s Workshop makes it easy to search keywords on our Call to Worship page. You can do the same for our full liturgy library—starting on the main Liturgy page, entering a search term and then using filters to select prayers of confessions, benedictions, or other liturgy types on your selected topic.

A slightly different approach, however, would be to consider calls to worship based on specific kinds of psalms.

If you wanted to highlight our need for forgiveness, consider a penitential psalm (like Psalms 32, 38, or 51). Psalms of lament (like Psalms 3, 13, or 25) can highlight our need for forgiveness or admission of our deep need for God. Psalms of thanksgiving (like Psalms 30 or 124) can take the tone of the service in another direction, shifting from our plight to the great things God has done for us.

While shorter psalms may be recited in their entirety (and your denomination's service books may already have responsive versions), psalms can also be excerpted for focus on a given theme (as some cross genres) or length (for example, beginning a service with a full recitation Psalm 51 may be a big ask for a call to worship).

Here's an example of how you might excerpt a Psalm for length and focus.

Consider Psalm 38. It is a powerful penitential psalm attributed to David. It is worth reading in full, but if you wanted to highlight the penitential elements over the autobiographical elements (e.g., festering wounds, enemies setting traps), you could excerpt it along these lines (this uses the NIV translation):

Leader: Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger
or discipline me in your wrath.
People: My guilt has overwhelmed me
like a burden too heavy to bear.
Leader: All my longings lie open before you, Lord;
my sighing is not hidden from you.
People: My heart pounds, my strength fails me;
even the light has gone from my eyes.
Leader: I have become like one who does not hear,
whose mouth can offer no reply.
People: Lord, I wait for you;
you will answer, Lord my God.
Leader: For I am about to fall,
and my pain is ever with me.
People: I confess my iniquity;
I am troubled by my sin.
Leader: Lord, do not forsake me;
do not be far from me, my God.
People: Come quickly to help me,
my Lord and my Savior.

For the sake of example, this is a pretty liberal excerpting for focus, containing verses 1, 4, 9–10, 14–15, 17–18, and 21–22. It highlights the confession of sin, the need for salvation, God's knowledge and initiative, and plea for God's help.

The key here is to remember that the genres of the psalms offer many different thematic directions which can be used to tune a congregation’s heart toward Lent’s themes.

Creating a Narrative Arc through Lent

With some planning, you can use your calls to worship to subtly guide your congregation through a narrative arc during Lent—something which works best if you do it in concert with a sermon series.

It thinking through the narrative arc of Lent latent in your text selections or sermon themes. To pick an example, in our own 2026 sermon series, At the Mercy of the Mercy of Christ, it starts with the deep confession in Psalm 51 and slowly rises through a contemplation of Paul’s writings on sin and redemption, culminating in his hymn to Christ in Phil. 2 on Palm Sunday.

It's not as daunting to do as it might seem. Try an exercise like this:

1. Identify the services you intend to include in "the arc." Maybe Ash Wednesday to Palm Sunday — or to Easter.

2. Put in the texts you have in mind and the general thrust of the sermon. You don't have to have it fully worked out — if you can state the point in a short sentence, that will probably be enough.

3. Look for a plausible arc that can be "drawn" through them with a narrative shape: the first couple of sermons set up the conflict and characters, the middle sermons explore that conflict (deepening the conflict, increasing the hope of resolution, perhaps foreshadowing it), the final sermons provide climax and resolution. It's ok to make modifications to your selected texts and sermons to clarify this arc.

4. With the arc identified, look for (or write) calls to worship that support that arc through relevant texts or themes for your congregation (you don't have to stick with just one of the strategies above).

Choosing calls to worship (and other liturgy) that guide the congregation through that story requires a little planning, but it also is able to allow your congregation to participate in the process, giving a greater feeling of connection and progression across the weeks of Lent (and potentially through to Easter).

Let’s go back to the beginning — a blank document, a flashing cursor, and a desire to get it right. We’ve looked at the fundamentals—conveying God’s call to his people to join together in worship—and we have frameworks to work with: starting with Scripture, starting with themes, or building a narrative arc. You have examples to use or adapt—and we have a library of hundreds more calls to worship for you to discover.

References

[1] Chuck Colson, "The History of the 'Call to Worship'," byFaith Online (2024).

[2] Ron Man, "Whose Gathering Is It, Anyhow?" Reformed Worship (2025).

[3] Brian Cosby, "What Is the Call to Worship?" Lingonier (2025).