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How To Create Organic ServicesOne of the biggest surprises I had while observing and interviewing postmodern pastors for my book The Future Church:Ministry in a Post-Seeker Age, was that many of them did not preach narrative sermons.They didn’t preach prepositional sermons either—they were more like Bible teachers.The first time I sat down with Dan Kimball, pastor of Graceland in Santa Cruz, California, he used words like “organic” and “earthy” to describe the service. He didn’t make artificial distinctions like “song service” and “sermon,” rather, his goal was to design a service that communicated a truth and led the congregation to worship, not use music to “prepare the hearts of the people for the sermon.” As he talked, I flashed back to a walk with my older
brother Ted through a Botanical garden.I
thought Ted would really enjoy the garden since he is a Botanist, but he
didn’t—he thought it was fake.“Flowers
don’t grow in straight rows in colorful arrangements.”He
said.
Ted
was right.In the wild, flowers grow
in random patterns.Hedges aren’t
manicured, there are no fountains shooting water to multi-colored lily
pads.In their natural environment,
flowers have a different impact than they do in flowerbeds, vases or botanical
gardens.It isn’t that they aren’t
beautiful in those environments; it is just that the environments aren’t
natural.
As Kimball spoke, I began to see the parallel between
the botanical gardens and the kinds of worship services I usually plan
and Graceland’s services and the ways flowers grow in the wild.Worship
services, as I knew them began with a “Call to Worship,” a song which announced
the beginning of the service, followed by an “Invocation” a prayer where
the Pastor invited God to be present in the service.After
the prayer, the people greet one another and the Music Minister leads the
congregation in a few more songs before the ushers collect the offering.After
the offering, the choir or a soloist sings, the Pastor preaches, we sing
an invitation hymn and then go home.The
service has a very incremental feel to it.One
element led to another, which triggered the next.I
don’t want to say that the service is fake, but it certainly isn’t natural.The
service has artificial boundaries and arrangements.
The
more organic, earthy services that I observed at Graceland, Mosaic, Westwinds
and other Future Churches didn’t have the same compartments and
divisions.They mix music, visuals,
prayer, dance, art, speech, readings, interviews, silence, and other elements
to communicate a truth and usher the worshipers into God’s presence. Instead
of having the elements separate and distinct, the different elements blend
together to form a tapestry of inspiration, instruction and reflection.The
worship planner doesn’t separate “the song service” from “the sermon,”
instead; she uses the different elements of the service to follow a plot
line.
Our
morning worship service is still fairly linear, more like the botanical
garden, but our evening service is organic.For
our Memorial Day Service this year, we sang patriotic songs followed by
uniformed members of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, who gave tribute
to members of their branches that died in the line of duty, followed by
me giving a brief devotional and extending an invitation.Rather
linear.But in the evening service
we approached the same subject organically.
I
began the service by reading Joshua 4:3-9. “and command them, saying, 'Take
up for yourselves twelve stones from here out of the middle of the Jordan,
from the place where the priests' feet are standing firm, and carry them
over with you, and lay them down in the lodging place where you will lodge
tonight.' [4] So Joshua called the twelve men whom he had appointed from
the sons of Israel, one man from each tribe; [5] and Joshua said to them,
"Cross again to the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan,
and each of you take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number
of the tribes of the sons of Israel. [6] ‘Let this be a sign among you,
so that when your children ask later, saying, 'What do these stones mean
to you?' [7] then you shall say to them, 'Because the waters of the Jordan
were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord; when it crossed
the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off.' So these stones shall
become a memorial to the sons of Israel forever.’
[8]
And thus the sons of Israel did, as Joshua commanded, and took up twelve
stones from the middle of the Jordan, just as the Lord spoke to Joshua,
according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Israel; and they carried
them over with them to the lodging place, and put them down there. [9]
Then Joshua set up twelve stones in the middle of the Jordan at the place
where the feet of the priests who carried the ark of the covenant were
standing, and they are there to this day.”
After
a few comments on monuments and the importance of remembering, our band
led in singing a couple of hymns.During
my next talking segment, I started talking about the day I proposed to
Susan to be my wife.On the screen,
I projected a picture of the bridge that we stood on when I proposed to
her and told about how we went back to that place a few weeks before on
our twentieth anniversary.I talked
about the restaurant we ate at, what we did.Really,
the tone was more like I was telling a friend about the day instead of
preaching a sermon.My goal was
to get the people to relax—to think that we weren’t really going to do
any work today; we are just going to chat.
Then
I showed a picture of the monument I bought that the Parks Department placed
next to the bridge in honor of our wedding.
The atmosphere
was very relaxed. I jabbered on some more. Then I said, “Sometimes we build
monuments because we want to remember what God has done for us, (like Joshua
did) sometimes we build monuments to celebrate a relationship, (like Susan
& I did) but sometimes we build monuments like these…At
that moment I clicked the projector and showed a very small picture of
the grave markers at Arlington National Cemetery on a black screen. For
a moment I said nothing and let the power of the graphic sink in.After
about 30 seconds, I broke the silence and said, “Never forget the price
that men and women have paid for your freedom.Sometime
tomorrow while you are enjoying your day off and the barbeque, take time
to remember the price that others have paid so you can live in freedom.And
take time to teach your children, too.”We
broke up into prayer groups and prayed for five or ten minutes, then the
band led in an extensive time of worship, beginning with reflective songs
interspersed with scripture readings then ended on a note of celebration. Though
the sermon I used wasn’t narrative, it was really straight Biblical exposition
followed by an illustration, yet the service followed a plot line.The
service, not the sermon was narrative.Notice
the elements of plot in the service:
I
try to do more than plan a service; I try to plan the events of the day.
Really, this evening, organic service could not have been as effective
without the more linear service we had that morning.The
sight of military personnel in uniform reading a tribute to a fallen comrade,
following the singing of patriotic music was powerful.The
events of the morning gave context for the evening service. I
find that I preach narrative sermons in our morning, linear service; but
in the evening I design an organic, narrative service, and usually do straight
expositional teaching throughout two or three segments that are separated
by song, video clips, table talk (small group studies), prayer and art.
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