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Main point: Service orders work best when they’re thoughtful, purposeful, and clear.
Service order. Not two words which set many hearts racing…
Some churches have a set order, which never changes. Some decide the order five minutes before the meeting begins each Sunday! Some change the order on the principle that variety is the spice of life.
But the order of the various elements in a Sunday meeting can both add greatly to, or detract from, a church family’s worship; and of their understanding of and response to the gospel teaching.
We’ve all seen parts of services which don’t really work. A song where no one knows why they’re singing it. The prayers after the sermon which don’t mention the teaching. The Communion which takes over half an hour to administer. Service orders need thinking about!
Two questions are helpful to ask of any part of the service: “Why are we doing this at this stage?” “Would someone in a pew/chair know why we are doing this at this stage?”
In other words, what is the purpose of each part of our time together?
Sometimes, neither gets asked. And often, if we’re honest, the service leader knows the answer to the first question, but no one else does!
If you’re taking this purposeful approach, at some stage in the week before the service, you need to list the various elements of your service—teaching, singing (including how often to sing, what to sing, and perhaps the “tone” in which it’s to be played), praying, notices, possibly Communion, perhaps a time to give financially. What will guide the order in which you write those elements down?
The single summary sentence of the teaching (see the post on gospel teaching) drives the service order. The beginning of the service recaps on the previous week, and/or introduces the theme, or the issue, or the question, that’s being spoken to by the Bible passage (and summed up in the sentence). The middle part teaches the summary sentence. And the last part applies it, enables people to respond to it, and/or reinforces it.
One week, the main teaching slot might be very early on, because there needs to be lots of time for discussion, prayer, thinking and application of what’s been said. Another week, the whole meeting might build up to the teaching, which therefore comes near the end—less time for considering application, but more for outlining the issues the passage addresses.
The summary sentence is the centerpiece of the meeting—virtually everything else in the meeting points to it in some way.
In a great book called “Worship by the Book”, where three pastors discuss how they order their gathered worship, Tim Keller (of Redeemer in New York) explains his three-part order to services.
i) Adoration
Christians arrive at church from a week in the world, where in some ways they’ll have forgotten who the real God is, and worshipped false gods. The first thing we need to do is to adore the true God, remembering and focusing and loving who He is.
ii) Renewal
This will lead us to see that we haven’t worshipped the true God in the past week. We need to renew our relationship with him, to seek and receive his forgiveness as His people.
iii) Commitment
Having renewed our grace-based relationship with the true God, we are ready to commit ourselves once more to his service, to consider how we will do that in the week ahead in His strength.
A time of confession and assurance of forgiveness slots into Part Two of the service—the rest can go pretty much anywhere. The teaching can be placed according to what the passage is. It can go early if it’s adoration-focussed, in the middle if it’s forgiveness-focussed, and towards the end if it’s more a call to action of some kind. But the whole service order leads the congregation through a narrative arc, from who they are when they enter (failing Christians who’ve forgotten God in some way) to who they are when they leave (forgiven Christians who’re leaving to serve God).
Those are just two possible approaches. Do add others that you’ve seen work well in the Comments below. There’s no “right way” of ordering a service. But being deliberate, thoughtful, and clear—answering both those “why” questions—will help avoid wrong ways.
Practical suggestion: Next Sunday, ask yourself the “why” questions after the service. And then scribble down how things would have been ordered according to the two approaches set out above.
Carl is Editorial Director at The Good Book Company and is a member of Grace Church Worcester Park, London. He is the best-selling author of The Garden, the Curtain and the Cross and God's Big Promises Bible Storybook, and also serves as series editor of the God's Word for You series. Before joining TGBC, he worked as a journalist and then as a teacher, and pastored a congregation in Hull. Carl is married to Lizzie, and they have two children. He studied history at Oxford University.
