Natural Church Development assesses a church in eight different quality characteristics. With this post, we will take a quick look at one of these characteristics – Inspiring Worship.
Natural Church Development defines healthy Inspiring Worship as: Inspiring worship is a personal and corporate encounter with the living God. Both personal and corporate worship must be infused with the presence of God resulting in times of joyous exultation and times of quiet reverence. Inspiring worship is not driven by a particular style or ministry focus group—but rather the shared experience of God’s awesome presence.
For leaders whose churches have this as one of their lower points, NCD offers the following starting points as a means of improving this area…
- Leaders need to model being a worshiper.
- The celebration leader will need to provide appropriate transitions between the components of the service.
- Plan the service prayerfully and carefully.
- Illustrate the main points of your sermons with examples taken from the life of the church.
If you want your church body to become better worshippers, you need to raise the bar. The majority of the people who call your church home will look to you as the standard of how to worship. You would do your church right by seeking God on a more intimate level.
Transitions are important. Whoever your celebration/worship leader is, he needs to be able to handle the transition moments during your services. Poorly handled transitions can inhibit the move of God. Your responsibility as the leader is to have open dialog with your leader about her spiritual walk and how that impacts her leading the congregation.
The old saying is so true, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” There is nothing wrong with having your order of service laid out ahead of time. In fact, this will help with your transitions. Now, the key to this is to have a service but also be sensitive to God. If He wants the service to go a different direction at the halfway point, let it. Your walk with God is crucial to the being able to respond to how God moves during your services.
As your church grows, ministries will start to loose sight and/or contact with each other. Parking lot crew has no idea what happening in the nursery. Kitchen workers have no idea what the parking lot crew is doing. Not to mention, the people in you congregation who are not involved in anything. They need to hear what is happening within your church. Excitement breeds excitement. If you are excited about something, it is contagious. Use that to your advantage.
As a coach, I can come alongside of you and assist your in church’s growth in this area.