Emerging Worship: Creating Worship Gatherings for New Generations

By Dan Kimball and David Crowder and Sally Morgenthaler

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Jul 27, 2009
• ISBN: 9780310858508

Dan Kimball

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 ReGeneration 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.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

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 creating emerging worship gatherings.

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.

Jesus was born of a virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilate, died on the cross and rose from the dead to make worshipers out of rebels!

—A. W. Tozer

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 multisensory 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.

You alone are the LORD. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship You.

—Nehemiah 9:6

When I hear these types of comments, I question whether that person has truly ever studied church history. I wonder if they have ever looked in the Bible at the various ways worship gatherings happened. I know I might have felt the same thing they do—if I had never begun taking a biblical and historical look at worship through the ages.

Embracing the Historical Diversity of Worship

For the longest time, I assumed that the only biblically sound worship gathering was the tradition I had experienced in my evangelical, conservative church: a few songs, the sermon, a closing song, and communion thrown in once a month.

As I studied church history and the history of worship, however, I was amazed. The way I had personally experienced and defined a worship gathering was by no means what has been happening throughout the history of the church and the history of Christian worship.

It is critical for emerging church leaders to take the time to step outside of our personal or denominational view of what church and worship gatherings are supposed to be. When we back out and begin to open our eyes to other denominational approaches to worship and differing global approaches to worship, we will find so much beauty in the diversity of ways that people worship God.

I highly encourage church leaders to study and explore the history of worship. I highly encourage church leaders to ask why you even do the things you currently do in your worship gatherings. You may be surprised to discover that many things you do are forms of your denomination’s origin culture and not from the Scriptures themselves.

It will be interesting in heaven because worship there probably won’t be the worship we are used to in our local church! I think it is important to realize this, so we won’t judge other churches who worship differently than we do. There is more than one way to worship God in a church gathering. We need to recognize and celebrate that! In fact, many forms of worship emerged throughout biblical history.

Emerging Worship Is Not New

It is important to understand that emerging worship is not simply the new thing, nor is it simply the hip, new way to worship. As we read the grand story of the Bible, we see that culture and time have changed worship throughout history. Various forms of worship have emerged throughout the story of God and man. Until Jesus returns, we will see many new expressions and forms of worship change in churches within various cultures.

The Bible repeatedly talks about new emerging forms of worship. This cannot be considered trendy. We are simply part of another time period undergoing change in how emerging generations ascribe worth and praise to God. This type of change has been happened over and over throughout history.

In Genesis 4, Abel gave God fat portions from the firstborn of his flock and Cain gave God some of the fruits of the soil. Although Cain’s worship was not pure, we see these brothers already had an established form of worship.

In Genesis 8:20, we see Noah worship by building an altar and sacrificing burnt offerings. These offerings were different from the sacrifices that Cain and Abel offered. Another form of worship emerged right after the flood.

In Genesis 13:18, Abraham built an altar to the Lord as an act of worship. He created a sacred space and used memorial props as a form of emerging worship.

In Genesis 28:22, we see another form of emerging worship. Jacob took a stone and set it up as a pillar. He poured oil on top of it and called the stone God’s house.

In different time periods throughout the Bible, all types of sacred spaces and structures have emerged for worship. The tabernacle was designed as a sacred space of worship. It had several courts with furnishings used for worship, including the ark, the table of showbread, and the lamp stand. It also had an altar for animal sacrifices. This place of worship was movable and traveled with the people.

The temple in Jerusalem was built many centuries later. This ushered in even more advanced and elaborate worship. The temple itself only dimly reflected the real heavenly dwelling (Hebrews 8:5), but again a new worship pattern was emerging.

In Malachi 1:10-11, we read about how worship emerged not just in the Temple in Jerusalem, but everywhere, with incense and pure offerings brought to God. The paradigm of worship shifts again!

The New Testament is full of emerging worship. Jesus shook up everything! He taught that worship is not attached to a location or space. Instead, true worship is done in spirit and truth (John 4:23-24). Jesus taught that God does not look for specific acts or rituals of worship. The heart behind the worship matters most to him.

Immediately after Jesus’ ascension a new form of worship was birthed when the Spirit indwelled believers (Acts 2). The Spirit was no longer in the physical sacred space of the temple, but in believers. Our bodies became the temple where the Spirit dwells (1 Corinthians 6:19). Our entire lives are now spiritual acts of worship (Romans 12:1-2). We don’t go to a certain place—we worship God with all we do!

The practice of gathering at the temple for rituals and complex sacrifices moved to the simplicity of gathering in people’s homes (1 Corinthians 16:19, Colossians 4:15, Philemon 2). Each church gathered to share a meal, sing, read Scripture, and pray. The New Testament worship service (worship gathering) became very simplistic. There were no pulpits, no 45-minute four-point sermons, no worship bands, no ushers. Instead, everyone was prepared to participate. They set aside time for singing, teaching, discussion, and the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:17-34). They also gave each other a holy kiss (1 Corinthians 16:20).

As the church developed and grew and the surrounding culture influenced worship over the next few centuries, the church moved from meeting in homes to larger buildings based on the architecture of the Roman Basilica (the law court). Pews were brought in along with pulpits and choirs. These elements were already common to the Roman and Greek cultures and the pagan religions of that time

Reviews for Emerging Worship

[mckaori · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Should be read by all, especially those who can't see why people want to experiment with new, (and old) forms of worship. I think it provides a good understanding of why a counter reformation inj worship forms could bless us all