Longish post from Tony Payne at The Briefing in which he explores ‘The Why And How Of Running Sunday Meetings’. There’s a lot of thoughtful and useful material.
I was interested to see that his basic schema for a ‘meeting’ is:
Good meetings have conceptual flow
Like sermons or books or articles or speeches, a church meeting should go somewhere. It should make some sort of sense to those participating in it, because that’s the way our brains work. Things have more impact for us when there is a movement of thought, when one thing leads naturally and logically to the next.
This was one of the strengths of some of the classic liturgies of Reformed Christianity, such as the Morning Prayer service from The Book of Common Prayer. It has three main movements:
- Movement 1 starts with a scriptural call to repentance, and an exhortation, followed by confession of sins, a declaration of forgiveness and a response. We are preparing to listen to God’s word.
- Movement 2 exhorts us to listen obediently (via Ps 95), and then moves into the first Bible reading, a responsive hymn, the second Bible reading, and a second responsive hymn.
- Movement 3 focuses on the response of faith, with the recitation of the creed, various prayers and the thanksgiving.
Now this is not a divinely inspired movement of thought, or the only way to do it. But it does make sense. It makes gospel sense, because the flow of the service takes us repentantly to God to listen to his word and then calls on us to respond joyfully with faith.
Do your meetings have any conceptual flow to them like this? Or are they more like a TV chat show: “And now we have… and now we have… and now we have”. (Mind you, good TV chat shows also have their own logic, but that is a point to pursue another time.)
At mgpc we order our service of worship following almost the same pattern, owning the reformational concept of a covenantal dialogue between God and His people. It’s interesting to see the similarities between the services as Payne advocates and the historic reformed model, as devoid of reformed motivation for worship he finds himself reinventing the wheel and justifying the wheel through pragmatic reasoning on the basis of how it educates and benefits the people who are present.
We worship primarily as obedience, thankful for the privilege of gathering to do so.
Read the whole post at The Briefing.
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