Back in May, I started thinking about my life in the church I attend. I thought about the reasons why people go to church, and I realised the two main reasons people go to church are to worship God, and to hear the message.
I thought about how it happens at Coppenhall North Street Methodist Church. The style of worship is quite traditional - hymns and an organ. Too often when I sing hymns at church I feel I'm not worshiping God, mainly because the language used is very poetic, and so when I'm trying to fix my mind on worshiping God, I'm actually trying to work out what the hymn's on about! There are many people in church who love this style of worship, and feel they can give God the most through this style. However, I think there's a large age range who don't like this style of worship, and don't think they're able to give God the most through worshiping in this way.
I started praying about this, and I felt God was telling me to do something about it. After spending some more time in prayer, I had in mind some ideas:
- I thought of having a new church service, on a Sunday afternoon.
- The new service will add to what we have already - we have two services on a Sunday at Coppenhall North Street, which I think cater more for the older generations, and how they prefer to worship God, and so this service will be aimed at the younger generations.
- The service will be split into two parts - worship and the message.
- The worship will be lead by a worship team, and will consist of worship songs lead by a worship band, and prayers.
- The Message will be based on something from everyday life, e.g, loyalty, and then using the Bible to preach about how it applies to our daily lives. I've heard sermons which do it this way, and I feel I get more out of this style of sermon than a sermon based on a bible passage.
By the time I was ready to talk about this, our Minister was on an exchange with a minister in America (acrossthepond-anexchange.blogspot.com), and so I made an appointment with Doug, the American minister to talk about this idea.
Doug gave me some great advice on how to start everything off, and we prayed after. He also invited me over to America to work in his church for a while! We talked about this in another meeting, and we both decided this was a great idea, and an opportunity not to be missed. Whilst over there, I would be getting some real experience with working in a worship team, and seeing how 'modern' services are prepared and delivered.
A few months later, I talked to our associate minister, and from that meeting, several issues were raised:
- Sunday afternoon is not the best time to hold a service like this
- The service could not be called 'public worship' unless a local preacher or minister is responsible for the service
We talked about how to 'get around' these problems, and for the 'public worship' problem, we could hold the service as a 'house group'. This however would mean changing some of the ideas I had - mainly how we would worship God in the service. Another way, is to have a local preacher to be responsible for each service - however, since local preachers are very busy people, this would be a difficult thing to ask.
About a month later, I managed to talk to our minister. Below are the issues which were raised:
- Again, Sunday afternoon is not the best time.
- The same issue about public worship was raised.
- My own lack of experience is a problem in itself!
- I was told that preparing a 'modern' service every week is a difficult task for any preacher, let alone for someone who has 'very' little experience in preaching or preparing services.
We decided to have another meeting this coming Tuesday. I will be bringing a plan, detailing all my ideas for the service, and we will discuss them, hopefully coming away knowing exactly what is happening.
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