worship on Contemporary Worship

Our worship bands are more technically proficient than ever, and louder than ever. The people holding microphones are singing, often expertly and almost always passionately. It’s just the rest of us w...

Training a worship leader (or "liturgist") is a vital task within any faith community. As my friend and former Senior Pastor, Dr. Mark Roberts puts it, the worship leader or liturgist "...

All forms of worship is like fire— it is a good servant, but it is a bad master.

At work, I am more than just a nurse. I am the hands and feet of God. … I am trying to be family to them. Faith is giving me strength to do that. The congregational response to this young woman’s te...

What a small topic! And clearly one I am definitely not the best equipped to answer. But why don’t I share a few thoughts, hopefully, that can help shape a conversation about worship. A New Discover...

I was told that our worship services should be designed with seekers in mind, and that unchurched people have neither the attention span nor the interest to give to the reading of Bible passages. The ...

October 2018 For centuries, the Psalms have been the songbook of the church. From metrical settings of Psalms (think, “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow” or “The Lord’s My Shepherd, I’ll Not Wa...

Step back in time to when you weren’t leading worship, but to a time, whether as an adult or a child, when you arrived a few minutes early to church. Maybe you began to pray for God to help you focus ...

What is a Benediction?  The word benediction comes from Latin and literally means “good word” ( bene [good] + dicere [to say, speak]). Put another way, a benediction is a blessing ...

[Worship is] the celebrative response to what God has done, is doing, and promises to do.

Christian worship, we should recognize, is essentially a counterformation to those rival liturgies we are often immersed in, cultural practices that covertly capture our loves and longings, miscalibra...

Participating in God’s glory-sharing life, then, happens in two contexts: scattered and gathered. Worship scattered is the Spirit-filled life of the Christian in the world, and worship gathered is the...

The foundations of my Christian faith were laid in mid-20th century fundamentalist churches. For introducing me to Jesus, I am grateful. However, over the years I have had to cast aside and recover fr...

Whoever dubbed the debate over musical style a “worship war” failed to realize that worship is always a war. The declaration that there is one God, that his name is Jesus, and that he has died, has ri...

There was much I could have said in that moment. I could have contrasted different philosophies of ministry, especially in relation to the seeker movement in our postmodern culture, and explained how ...

We must conclude that the Christian needs to hear but one call to worship and offer only one response. These come exactly coincident with new birth and, despite our wanderings and returns to the contr...

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 st...

Christian worship is the sanctification of time and space.

Worship is where people are conformed to Christ, join in his work, are accepted back into fellowship, and dance to the beat of his drum. Worship anticipates heaven, where all these things are glorious...

The best liturgies in use in Christian churches are ancient, well-worn compositions permeated with scriptural language skillfully deployed across a series of pastoral pronouncements, prayers, congrega...

Good liturgy, whether formal or informal, ought never to be simply a corporate emoting session, however “Christian,” but a fresh and awed attempt to inhabit the great unceasing liturgy that is going o...

The words that are usually translated as ‘worship’ in English [Bible] translations have little to do with either praise or music, as today’s popular Christian culture suggests.

At a worship service I attended a couple of years ago, my attention was drawn to the enthusiastic worship leader. He opened our time with prayer, asking God to meet us and draw us together in the Lord...

Anointed One, Heal our stingy, selfish ways Silence our accusations End the worship wars The congregation is invited to offer their own prayers of confession silently We remember our faithful sist...

My friend Isaac Wardell, a pastor of worship and founder of Bifrost Arts, asks whether we think of gathered worship as being more like a concert hall or a banquet hall. If it’s a concert hall, we show...

We come to this place seeking something ... something better than ourselves; something that gives life meaning; some relationship that reaches deep into our souls to fulfill us; maybe e...

What’s at Stake in Worship? Everything. that’s what’s at stake in worship. The urgent, indeed troubling, message of Scripture is that everything that matters is at stake in worship. Worship names what...

Dying is something we mostly shy away from in Western society. But as Christians, we are called to a different way of viewing the life to come. In his inspirational and insightful book, The End of ...

But what seems to happen in our lived practice of worship is that we don’t simply enjoy the stimulation; we expect it from God. We don’t just value “positive” emotions, but in our lived experience and...

My teenage son, Justin, had been invited to an area church by a friend. Since he had grown up as a PK (pastor’s kid) and had never been to a megachurch like this before, I wondered what impression it ...