What is a themed worship service? I don't know if "themed" is the best adjective, but it is the one I use. A themed worship service is a church service planned around a theme. In other words, every song, every Scripture, the message, etc. is chosen with the theme in mind. This is good preaching taken to the next level. Every good sermon has one main idea. Whether the sermon has three points or a ten-step list, the sermon centers around one main idea. (By the way, do you know what listeners hate the most about sermons? When sermons get off track, listeners will furrow their brows and ask, "where is he going with this?" At that point you are done!) Taken to the next level, themed worship service planning then designs the entire worship service around the main idea!
I first heard about Dave and Jon Ferguson, brothers and pastors of Community Christian Church, when I read their book Exponential. I was inspired beyond description and purchased two other books by them. I previously wrote about The Apprentice Field Guide. That short volume is a training manual for raising up new leaders. The other book I picked up was The Big Idea. In this book, the brothers Ferguson tell about the process they use to plan worship services.
The best part of this book for me was the theoretical foundation. The authors propose that real discipleship is lacking for two reasons. First, we know much more than we do. As Christ-followers, we memorize Bible verses, we study background information about Bible passages, we learn about prayer, and we often learn in place of doing. In other words, we have too much information and not enough transformation. Secondly, in our experience of church, and especially of church services, we encounter too many small ideas. They suggest that we might receive over 20 disconnected teaching points, or instructions, or ideas, in a given service. No wonder we don't apply all of them - they are too many and to small! Their solution? Every worship service has one Big Idea. And the entire service is designed to help teach and reinforce that big idea. Beyond that, they form their adult small groups around the big idea so that what gets taught on Sunday gets discussed on Tuesday night! Even their kids and youth programs work with the big idea! At this point, this book is gold!
These guys do not just lob a great theory in the air and then expect us to catch it and run with it. They have done the hard work to create a process that gets a lot of input from everyone on the team, with plenty of time to implement the various pieces of each service. In this respect, they also highlight another roadblock to effective worship planning. Just as preachers discover, when you are working week-to-week, there is simply not enough time to make videos, work up the perfect song, etc., in 5 days. In response, Community Christian Church works through a long and complicated process that begins with a planning retreat at the beginning of a year, followed by meetings and further planning sessions where the leaders, teachers, small group leaders, worship leaders, tech guys, etc., get involved and begin planning.
I have to admit, the second half of the book was a bit tedious. That was probably because we are so far away from that level of planning that I had a difficult time getting into it. But this would be great stuff for a church considering a move to this level of planning.
I know that with many book review I say, "You gotta read this book!" Well, with this one, I am not so sure. If you are a church leader, you really need to start with Exponential. Now that is a book that you gotta read. And if the on the big idea in that volume gets your attention, then you might want to get a copy of The Big Idea.
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