Call to Worship
Every Wednesday at noon these days I walk to the other end of the Willow Campus from my office at the Willow Creek Association to join the creative team at my church who are entrusted with planning the weekend services.
What is different from the past (20 years or so!) is that I don't have a responsibility to lead that meeting, but simply to show up with ideas. Over lunch, this team of about 8 people, including Senior Pastor Bill Hybels, wrestle with what all church creative teams wrestle with - how to engage the hearts and minds of people in a Sunday morning worship experience. Lately, we've been exploring a variety of ways to call people to worship - to help move them from a place of neutrality or even passivity toward a posture of readiness for the presence of God and anticipation for what might happen.
Our experience has been that launching into a run of music for several minutes without grounding our people with a perspective brought by Scripture, or a personal story, or any other way to arrest their attention often results in less engagement, sort of a routine kind of singing together that lacks passion and focus. We are brainstorming all kinds of ways to surprise people sometime in the first 10 minutes to focus their minds and invite their full participation. As the weeks go by, I will share some of our experiments. But for today, I would love to ask what some of you have experienced at your church - in what specific ways have you intentionally called people to worship? What are you learning?