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I’m teaming up with Jason Hatley (Pastor of Worship Arts at The Journey) this week to bring you 4 BIG worship planning principles from our new book, Engage: A Guide to Creating Life-Transforming Worship Services. These principles can help you relieve the stress of weekly worship planning and maximize your worship services every Sunday.
This series of posts is for BOTH Pastors and Worship Pastors (after all . . . we’re in this together) so be sure to share this with your Pastor / Worship Pastor. Let’s get started today with what we consider to be the #1 enemy to effective worship planning . . . The Sunday-to Sunday Mentality.
There’s a fine line between Sunday afternoon and Monday morning. If you’ve been a teaching or worship pastor long, you know exactly what I mean. You spend all week planning, preparing and praying for your Sunday services and then, when they’re over, you barely have a minute to breathe before it’s time to start planning, preparing and praying for the next week’s services.
Sunday comes along with amazing regularity. Each time it gets here, you are expected to have biblical yet original material prepared for your attenders – something that will resonate with them and send them back into the world better than when they walked through your doors. You can’t preach the same message you preached the week before; you can’t sing the same worship songs. The people sitting in front of you will be hungry for something fresh and new.
With the tapestry of this pressure hanging over your shoulders, it’s easy to fall into the trap of a Sunday-to-Sunday mentality. That is, to feel like you are always just trying to get through the next Sunday, then the next Sunday after that, then the next Sunday after that… constantly behind the eight ball and making it up as you go every week. Can you relate?
Here’s some good news: You don’t have to live and die by the weekly grind.
You can break the week-to-week mentality that sabotages so many well-intentioned teaching and worship pastors. By putting a strong, biblically sound worship planning system in place, you will be able to maximize not only this Sunday, but every single “next Sunday” to come.
The key to getting out of the tailspin and cooperating with God to do church at a higher level can be summed up in one word: planning.
Over the course of the new few days, we’re going to talk a lot about worship planning. But unless you decide to break the Sunday-to-Sunday mentality, you will never be able to plan your worship services effectively in advance. Sure you may get excited about some of the ideas, try them and even see some immediate success. But without a change in mindset, new excitement soon returns to old habit.
So as we start this series of posts on worship planning, here’s what I want you to do. Pray and ask God to give you His insight into planning. Break the cycle of Sunday-to-Sunday thinking and start asking right now, “What can we do to communicate the timeless truths of God’s word to our church next Sunday?”
Nelson
PS – The best way to break the Sunday-to-Sunday mentality is to sign-up your Worship Leader for Jason’s new Worship Leader Tele-Coaching Network starting March 16.
In the tele-coaching network your worship leader will receive monthly hands-on coaching from Jason, including over four hours of training on how to establish the worship planning systems we talk about in Engage in your church.
Learn more and Apply Now at www.worshipleaderinsights.com/coaching.
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