A practical, user-friendly, and low-budget guide to starting a blended worship service. This volume is ideal for churches poised to explore blended worship - traditional liturgy integrated with fresh, contemporary elements. This practical, easy-to-use guide gives laypersons - an often untapped source of creativity and innovation - the push they need to move from the pews to the forefront of blended worship. With the guide's easy-to-follow text and examples, laypersons will gain the knowledge and confidence they need to go full speed ahead with visuals, graphics, and even videos.

Planning Blended Worship: The Creative Mixture of Old and New is a guide to planning creative worship for congregations that follow the traditional fourfold pattern of worship (gathering, word, table, and dismissal), or those who prefer a free-church, evangelical style, but who are also interested in the core practices (space, texts, and so forth) that have characterized Christian worship throughout the centuries. Robert Webber designed this volume to show pastors, music directors, and other worship leaders the practical, structural, and theological steps for designing worship services characterized by biblical depth, historical awareness, and contemporary relevance. The author includes charts and forms at the end of each chapter that clearly show how music and other arts can be integrated with liturgical texts.

Ancient-Modern Worship is a practical guide for planning blended worship services (worship that incorporates elements of both traditional and contemporary worship styles). Through the use of the metaphor "worship as drama," Martin Thielen demonstrates that the script of worship is similar to a five-act play, with the five acts or movements being: gathering, service of the word, response, service of the table, and dismissal. Key Features: * Step-by-step guide and practical advice on adding contemporary worship elements to each act of the traditional worship service. * Offers historic perspectives on the use of various worships practices. * Includes suggested prayers, responses, and scripture readings; sample worship services and drama sketches; and a sample worship script. * Offers help on recruiting laity for participation in worship, adding visual impact in worship, and changing the existing order of worship. Key Benefits: * Readers will discover new ways to make the worship experience more meaningful for the entire congregation. * Enables readers to respond more effectively to the needs of congregations with diverse worship tastes. * Facilitates the planning of worship services that allow congregations to experience worship through a variety of styles and practices.

Accelerating diversity of lifestyles has created a crisis for worship designers. One size does not fit all. No worship service can be “blended” to address the complete needs of a congregation. Moreover, church “shopping” is ending as people are choosing a worship service that directly meets their fundamental anxieties about life (regardless of style). Learn to use lifestyle information in worship planning to design a service that truly reaches the people in your community. This book explains why people worship and guides leaders to design relevant worship services that address people's sense of urgency. It is both practical and theological. The decline of worship attendance in all denominations, and across all “traditional” or “contemporary” styles, is reshaping the quest for relevance. Church leaders are turning away from methods to outcomes. People will only participate in worship if it really matters to the fundamental issues that they face.

In this timely and important treatise, the author relates personal experiences and shares astute obvservations that show how worship--the joyful celebration of the work of Christ--can break down the barriers that separate humanity from God's presence.

Worship professor and practitioner Constance Cherry shows how to create services that are faithful to Scripture, historically conscious, relevant to God, Christ-centered, and engaging for worshipers of all ages in the twenty-first century. More than 150 colleges and seminaries have used or currently use the first edition as a required text. In this new edition, each chapter has been substantially updated and revised, including illustrations, key terms, examples, technological references, and suggested resources for further reading. A new chapter on global worship and a new appendix on live-streamed worship are included.