Planning a worship service is far more than just choosing songs and seasonal images. Helping people to genuinely worship God requires creating an experience through which people can enter into the presence of the divine. Discover strategic insights for creating and integrating powerful God-experiences into your own setting. Discover how a real-life worship team interacts, champions creativity and creates powerful God-experiences, one week at a time. This descriptive book offers practical direction for building and leading teams, empowering creative ideas, and guidance for handling conflict and overcoming serious obstacles.

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.

Much more than a "how-to" for worship planners. Drawing on more than two decades of collaborative worship planning, as well as numerous conversations with other worship planners. Pastor Howard Vanderwell and musician Norma de Waal Malefyt lay out a thoughtful, field-tested process for planning, implementing, and evaluating life-enriching weekly worship. Well over a dozen field-tested tools and a selected bibliography round out this invaluable resource for worship planners.

The Worship Workshop, rather than providing simply another manual for doing worship, offers instead an interactive workshop that helps worship teams develop more meaningful and memorable worship for the congregation. By combining liturgical history and the creative process, The Worship Workshop encourages worship teams and staff to break out of the traditional worship box in order to create diverse ways to present the Good News in worship. Through a variety of activities, ideas, and informational handouts, The Worship Workshop helps worship committees, planners, and designers evaluate the state of their current worship, get more people involved in the planning and designing process, explore the diverse designs of congregational worship, learn the history of worship, and utilize the arts and artists in worship.

As campus designer for Ginghamsburg Church, in Tipp City, Ohio, Kim Miller has observed that when a church gets serious about Jesus' call, there is always a design element to be addressed. Kim asserts that physical space transformation is simply a backdrop for authentic people transformation. Change the space and the opportunity and environment to change the world emerges. This comes as a fresh challenge for churches and ministries struggling to present a new look to match their relevant message. An emphasis on spatial design is an incarnation of Jesus’ call for new wineskins and is emerging as a key means to create community and the opportunity for transformation for a creative generation. This book is a practical guide for church leaders to transform their physical space into a ministry asset. Filled with pictures, tutorials and stories of spaces and lives transformed, Divine Rooms offers close-up snapshots of design-on-a-dime style looks, providing readers with usable ideas and how-tos that are supported by stories of real-life change from Ginghamsburg’s diverse community and the many congregations with which Kim consults.

Black uses shared stories, blended music, and the arts to enliven worship in culturally and linguistically diverse congregations. She provides biblical and theological foundations and practical methods and models for creating culturally-conscious worship.

Have we replaced the glory of God with our church programs. If so, is there anything we can do to get the glory of God back into our gatherings and individual lives? While we have good music, well-written songs and history to learn from, we can still miss having the presence of God in our meetings the way it was in Bible times. In this challenging and often provocative book, Jarrod Cooper deals with these important questions. Providing plenty of biblical illustrations to support his concerns, Jarrod shakes up more of our conventional thinking on the subject or worship. Can we for example only worship in the presence of the microphone, worship leader and powerpoint. What if all these were stripped away and it was just God and us? What would our worship be like then?