The Entire Service is One Message
Because of what I do, I get to sit in many different services in many different churches. I’m surprised at how very little connection I typically see between the various elements of the services in many churches. It’s as if there was no planning — I’m guessing everyone prepared their portion of the service separately. The message stands alone. The worship stands alone. The announcements stand alone. The videos stand alone. The special music stands alone.
On the other hand, there are churches that understand the value of communicating one message throughout the entire service. Every element is connected. It flows from beginning to end. In fact, if you were to pull out a particular element on its own, you may ask why would a church include that in a service? But, in the context of the entire service, it helps communicate a powerful message. This video is a good illustration of this.
Last week at the East Paulding location of West Ridge Church, the band played “Black Dress” by The Normals. It’s a song about adultery. It’s accompanied by a video that visually captures a man wrestling with sexual temptation. On their own, either one of these elements would be completely inappropriate for a worship service. In combination with everything else including the Bible teaching that follows, though, it provided the foundation for the one message that was communicated in the service. Check out the video:
Among other things, let me highlight…
- Chris Fenner did an amazing job with the video. He’s incredibly talented. We’re grateful to have him on our team.
- The video shares an unfortunate trend we’re seeing: People are putting their marriages at risk by engaging past relationships through Facebook. It’s a real life issue that needs to be addressed.
- Paul Richardson immediately comes out to connect the message of the song and video with the message he’s teaching — it’s the same message.
I love the intentionality of creative arts programming like this. We’re fortunate to have many of these resources in-house at West Ridge to accomplish this. However, there are many resources available so that churches of any size can integrate every element with the one message in a service.
Are you being intentional about communicating one message through your entire service? This article on 10 Ways to Improve Series Planning may help you think about how you can improve your planning to improve this aspect of your services.
Be sure to keep an eye on the West Ridge Vimeo page. The HD version of the above video should be avallible early next week.
Our church is and has bee failing at this in the past. Recently we have become more cognicizant of continuity. We are trying to use visual aids along with sermons and molding the worship portion more closely to the message so we get the whole effect. The problem becomes that our pastor frequently will change his message at the last minute, leaving a worship team with two options. Wing it and hope we don’t mess up, or continue with the planned service and hope all goes well. I would be interested to see how other churches improvise to deal with a preacher who doesn’t write sermons and preaches what he feels led to, even if it is a last minute change.
Our weekend services have always been a unified whole. Today’s service was about how heaven sees Jesus. Our worship was centered around scripture predicting Jesus, His birth, death, and resurrection. Finally, we shifted to scripture from Revelation. When we talked about people from every tongue, tribe, and nation. The following verses were read in Spanish, French, Chinese, Bosnian, etc., with subtitles. We finished with “Revelation Song.” Then the pastor talked about Jesus, reading more from the Epistles.
It was very powerful.
We typically do the same thing no matter the topic. When we did a movie series, we talked about Napoleon Dynamite. The topic was being who God made you to be. What worship did we do? “Finding Who We Are”
For a sex week, we did a medley about popular songs on the topic and then talked about what the Bible says in opposition.
Paul
I almost forgot. Those of us who do programming think of the upfront as a way of advancing the message that the pastor wants to give. We want the pastor to be as close as where he wants to be as possible.