Emerging Worship: Creating Worship Gatherings for New Generations

by Dan Kimball, David Crowder and Sally Morgenthaler (Foreword by)

Overview

Churches are aging. Even among megachurches with their modern technology and huge number of members, whole generations are now missing. In order to reach the 18-35 year olds, churches need to incorporate alternative worship services into their ministries that meet the unique needs of the emerging generations. In a conversational, narrative style, author Dan Kimball guides church leaders on how to create alternative services from start to finish. Using anecdotes from his own experience at Graceland, Kimball presents six creative models, providing real-life examples of each type. Emerging Worship covers key topics including • Developing a prayer team • Evaluating the local mission field and context • Determining leaders and a vision-based team • Understanding why youth pastors are usually the ideal staff to start a new service • Recognizing the difference in values between emerging worship and the rest of the church • Asking critical questions beforehand

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780310256441
Publisher:	Zondervan
Publication date:	02/15/2004
Series:	emergentYS
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dan Kimball is the author of several books on leadership, church, and culture. He is on staff at Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California. He also is on faculty with Western Seminary and leads the Re Generation Project which is encouraging theology and mission to be part of younger generations lives and churches. He enjoys comic art, Ford Mustangs, and punk and rockabilly music. His passion is to see the church and Christians follow and represent Jesus in the world with love, intelligence, and creativity.

Read an Excerpt

Emerging Worship

Creating New Worship Gatherings for Emerging Generations

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By Dan Kimball

Zondervan

Copyright © 2004 emergentYS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-310-25644-5

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Chapter One

What is an emerging worship service gathering?

Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker. -Psalm 95:6

Worship is certainly a popular word these days. There are now several major "worship" conferences every year. Now that it is easier to locally record and duplicate CDs, many churches and youth groups are putting out their own worship CDs. Stacks of "Best of Worship" compilation CDs are promoted on late night television stations. Many popular Christian musicians - who normally never recorded worship songs - now have come out with "worship" CDs of their own. Even John Tesh, former co-host of Entertainment Tonight, has put out his own worship CDs.

Worship has been quite the rage lately. But what is "worship" and what is a "worship gathering"? These are critical questions to ask before we even think of discussing

Emerging Worship Is Not Just Singing

This book is titled Emerging Worship: Creating New Worship Gatherings for Emerging Generations. It is all about creating worship gatherings where new generations come to worship. But what does "worship" look like?

I believe to the average person, and even to most pastors, music is what primarily comes to mind. In fact, in many churches worship pastors lead the singing portion of the worship service. Like me, you've probably heard individuals say with great passion, "I love to worship!" Almost every time, they are talking about singing.

As you read this book, you will find it has little to do with singing and music. Like many others, I desire to see worship - and worship gatherings - change from primarily singing to something a lot more holistic and a lot more biblical.

Emerging Worship Is Not a Worship Service

We usually call the weekend time when a church family gets together a "worship service." Ironically, this term used to mean a time when the saints of God all meet to offer their service to God through worship and their service to others in the church. Over time, however, the title has slowly reversed. The weekend worship "service" has become the time of the week when we go to a church building much like a car goes to an automobile service station.

Most people view the weekend worship service as a place where we go to get service done to us by "getting our tanks filled up" at the service station. It's a place where someone will give a sermon and serve us with our weekly sustenance. In automobile terms, you could say it is our weekly fill-up. We come to our service station to have a song leader serve us by leading us in singing songs. All so we can feel good when we emotionally connect through mass singing and feel secure that we did "worship."

We go to the weekend worship service and drop off our kids - that way they too can get served by having their weekly fill-ups. We are especially glad that our weekend service station now serves coffee in the church lobby - it's as convenient as our automobile service station's little mini-mart.

Not a Local Automotive Station

I admit that I'm being somewhat sarcastic with the service station analogy. But I'm not joking when I say we need to recognize that going to a worship service is not about us, the worshipers. It is not about God's service to us. It is purely our offering of service and worship to God - offering our lives, offering our prayers, offering our praise, offering our confessions, offering our finances, offering our service to others in the church body.

The description of a church gathering in 1 Corinthians 14: 26-27 says: "What then shall we say, brothers? When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church."

This was not "come together to sit and receive" like at a gas station. This was everyone gathering to offer service to God and others in worship. The gathering was not primarily about meeting the needs of the individual, but centered on the worship of God and the strengthening of the whole church.

In the New Testament, the English word "service" (as translated in the New International Version) is used to speak of an act of giving, not receiving. Paul spoke of his ministry by saying, "Therefore I glory in Christ Jesus in my service to God" (Romans 15:17). Paul talked quite frequently about his "service" to the saints, which meant Paul was serving them.

Nevertheless, the "worship service," where the focus is supposed to be us bringing our services to God by worshiping him, has been subtly changed to focus more on us getting served by going to the meeting.

Because of the subtle misuse of the phrase "worship service," I don't use it anymore. I try to always say "worship gathering" instead. Theologically, this communicates what we are doing much better. Once again we can be the church gathering to worship God and bring our service and offerings to him and others, not individuals who come to a service to receive something. There is a big, big difference in people's expectations between the two ways of looking at what we do when we meet together for worship.

So, the more we in leadership can communicate that this is a worship gathering (not a worship service), the more it will shift people's expectations of what the goal is when we meet together.

Emphasizing "worship gatherings" is vital for the emerging church.

Emerging Worship as a Lifestyle

Worship is "the act of adoring and praising God, that is, ascribing worth to God as the one who deserves homage and service." The most frequent Greek New Testament word for worship is proskuneo which stems from pros ("toward") and kuneo ("to kiss"). This is an act of reverence and devotion, and in biblical times often involved bowing, kneeling, and lying prostrate in reverence before a great and holy God. Worship is the way to express our love and praise to Jesus, who first loved us and gave himself up for us (Ephesians 5:25).

In a worship gathering, we create a place where we can express love, devotion, adoration, and praise to God. This should shape our planning and design. But worship is not something we do only once a week on Sunday morning or evening. Worship is a lifestyle of being in love with God and in awe of him all week long (Romans 12:1-2). It is offering our love, our adoration, and our praise to him through all of our lives.

We are to adore the Lord all week, not just at "worship gatherings." Our minds, our hearts, our bodies, our marriages, our families, our jobs - everything should be offered to him in worship. This includes what we think about, what we do, what we say, what we eat, and what we spend time doing - they are all acts of worship.

It is so important to make sure we know worship is a lifestyle and those in our churches also know it! How extremely sad that we have trained people to think that worship primarily happens when they come to church and sing.

It is my hope that the emerging church will be extremely careful to embrace and teach a biblical view of true worship.

Reclaiming a Holistic Form of Worship

This book is specifically about emerging worship gatherings. Our focus will be on exploring different ways that emerging generations are now coming together to adore, praise, and ascribe worth to God.. A refreshing thing is that - virtually across the board - we are moving away from a flat, two-dimensional form of worship in our gatherings. There is a definite move away from worship services simply composed of preaching and a few songs. We are now moving toward a much more multisensory approach comprised of many dimensions and expressions of worship.

We now see art being brought into worship, the use of visuals, the practice of ancient disciplines, the design of the gathering being more participatory than passive-spectator. Instead of the pulpit and sermon being the central focus of worship gatherings (at least in most evangelical churches), we now see Jesus as the central focus through a variety of creative worship expressions. True, every preacher says that Jesus is the center of their preaching! What I mean here is that teaching and learning in the emerging church happen in various ways; it's no longer only one person standing on a stage preaching to everyone else.

I realize some people's blood pressure may begin to rise as soon as I mention moving away from a preaching-and-singing-a-few-songs worship service model to a multi-sensory approach to worshiping God. Someone actually told me that younger people only need preaching verse-by-verse through the Bible. He insisted that anything else is distracting and useless. Some individuals have warned me that emerging churches are going all experiential and throwing out God's Word. Other individuals have leveled the criticism that emerging churches are wrongly changing the historical way the Church has worshiped.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Emerging Worship by Dan Kimball Copyright © 2004 by emergentYS. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

	A Foreword	iv
	A Foreword	vi
	Acknowledgments	viii
	Introduction: The Emerging Restlessness That Cannot Be Ignored	ix
Part 1
1.	What Is an Emerging Worship Service Gathering?	1
2.	The Paradox of Creating Alternative Worship Gatherings	13
3.	Why This Is a Dangerous Book to Read	25
4.	Reasons to Create a New Worship Gathering	39
5.	Critical Questions to Ask Before Starting a New Worship Gathering	49
6.	First Steps Toward Starting a New Worship Gathering	63
7.	Common Values in Emerging Worship Gatherings	73
8.	Planning and Creating Multisensory Worship Gatherings	99
Part 2
9.	Approaches Churches Use to Start New Worship Gatherings	115
10.	Starting a Life-Stage Outreach Gathering	127
11.	Creating Life-Stage Worship Gatherings	141
12.	Creating Multi-Congregational Worship Gatherings	155
13.	Starting a New Kind of Church	167
14.	Starting House Church Worship Gatherings	195
15.	Alternative Worship Gatherings in England	209
16.	Is Emerging Worship Simply Creating a New Generation of Christian Consumers?	225
	Cever Image Descriptions & Photo Credits	232
	Appendix of Worship Resources	233
	Additional Chapters Online
	A Personal Plea to Senior Pastors
	A Personal Plea to Emerging Leaders Starting New Worship Gatherings

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

'How does the church change in a world that is rapidly changing? In a very helpful way. 'Emerging Worship' challenges us to address the changes we are facing by embracing the restlessness of emerging generations and culture and rethinking what we do in worship.' — Rich Muchow, Pastor of Creative Arts