When churches meet to worship God, they structure the meeting in a particular way. Some call the structure of a worship service an “order of service” or “order of worship” or “liturgy.” Every church has a liturgy. Along with many other Protestant churches over the centuries, we deliberately order our worship service in a gospel-shaped sequence:
If you are not familiar with the way we structure our worship service, then it may take some time to get accustomed to, and that’s okay. We want our liturgy to reveal and shape what we believe and value. We do not want it to become a mindless ritual. We deliberately follow the same basic structure to remove distractions so that we can focus on encountering God. Here’s how C. S. Lewis puts it:
- Call to worship. God calls us together to worship, and we praise him in song, in reading Scripture, and in prayer.
- Confession. We confess our sins corporately and then pause for a moment of silence for us to confess our sins individually. Then we receive assurance from the word of God that he has cleansed us through Christ’s sacrifice. Then we confess the faith by reading a selection from a creed or doctrinal statement. We also baptize believers and add them (along with believers who have already been baptized) to our church as they confess to follow Jesus and covenant with our church.
- Consecration. We devote ourselves to God as he speaks to us and we respond. (Consecration refers to devotion or dedication.) God speaks to us as a pastor (or a man who meets the qualifications of a pastor) reads, explains, and applies God’s word. We humbly receive God’s word with a posture that is eager to trust and obey God because God’s word is profitable to teach us, reprove us, correct us, and train us in righteousness so that we may be equipped for every good work (2 Tim 3:16–17). We respond with renewed devotion as we sing and give an offering.
- Communion. We commune with God and one another as we eat and drink the Lord’s Supper. We conclude by joyfully singing the Doxology to the tune of “Old 100th” while standing with hands raised.
- Commission. God blesses us as he sends us out to glorify him in all of life.
If you are not familiar with the way we structure our worship service, then it may take some time to get accustomed to, and that’s okay. We want our liturgy to reveal and shape what we believe and value. We do not want it to become a mindless ritual. We deliberately follow the same basic structure to remove distractions so that we can focus on encountering God. Here’s how C. S. Lewis puts it:
Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best—if you like, it “works” best—when, through long familiarity, we don’t have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping.
—C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 12.
—C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 12.
Our Plan
We plan to put in the hard work now to design the kind of worship service we think would most honor the Lord and build up our brothers and sisters. This may be new for most of the people present. But it will be way easier to make these changes at the beginning instead of trying to gradually implement them along the way. We will continually tweak it along the way but (hopefully) not in a radical and extreme way.
General
- Follow this version of the regulative principle: Scripture must warrant everything we do in a worship service. The warrant may be an explicit command (e.g., read Scripture aloud), or the warrant may be what Scripture implies (e.g., apply the principle from 1 Cor 14:40 that “all things should be done decently and in order”). That is why we include these elements in a worship service:
- Sing: “Be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart” (Eph 5:18b–19; cf. Col 3:16).1
- Pray: “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions” (1 Tim 2:1–2a).
- Baptize: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19).
- Read: “Devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture” (1 Tim 4:13).
- Teach and Preach: “Devote yourself … to exhortation, to teaching” (1 Tim 4:13). “Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Tim 4:2).
- Give: “On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper” (1 Cor 16:2a). Paul commanded that specifically to the Corinthians for the Jerusalem offering, but it is fitting given the church’s obligations to care for its pastors and for those in need (1 Cor 9:3–14; 1 Tim 5:3, 17–18; cf. 2 Cor 8–9).
- Celebrate the Lord’s Supper: “When you come together as a church” and eat “the Lord’s supper” (1 Cor 11:18, 20), do so unselfishly and sacrificially (11:17–34).
- The church’s pastors are responsible for the worship service. They should not delegate planning worship services to a musician who is not a pastor or to an administrative assistant or to a deacon. The entire worship service is a key way that the pastors feed and lead and protect the church.
- The main purpose of the worship service is for God’s people to worship God by singing the word, praying the word, reading the word, preaching the word, and seeing the word (in baptism and the Lord’s Supper). In the worship service, the vertical focus is to praise God, and the horizontal focus is to edify believers—not to evangelize unbelievers (cf. 1 Cor 14). We warmly welcome unbelievers, but our worship service is not “seeker sensitive.”
- We are committed to meeting together in one place each week in one service—not in multiple places or multiple services. (Exception: We might consider having multiple services for a limited time during a transition from one meeting space to another.)
- We plan to use the five C’s for part of our liturgy: (1) Call to Worship, (2) Confession, (3) Consecration, (4) Communion, and (5) Commission. These are the five categories for the hymns in the Treasury of Psalms and Hymns (see hymns 482–854).
- Refer to our main Sunday gathering as the “worship service,” and use the term “Worship Service Guide” to refer to the bulletin for a worship service.
- We plan to print the Worship Service Guide each week.
- On our church’s website, we plan to link to a publicly available Google Drive folder that includes our Worship Service Guide for each week.
- We plan to designate a service leader to preside over each service (which includes remaining in the front during songs). Ideally, this man would be one of our pastors. It could also be a pastor-in-training.
- Emphasize congregational singing. The music should not be so loud that it drowns out the congregation. We want to be able to hear each other sing. (A beautiful way to do this is to regularly sing a portion of a song a capella.) The music should be fitting for a congregation in its style and singability.
- Instrumental accompaniment should be helpful and undistracting. We are not producing a show. The instrumental accompaniment should appropriately assist the congregation to sing loudly and joyfully. A simple and elegant way to do this is with simple four-part piano playing.
- As a general rule, keep the service upbeat and joyful and not dragging and dirge-like. It is appropriate to intentionally slow down and have a moment of silence (e.g., for individual confession), but the tempo of the singing, reciting, etc. should be crisp in the sense of briskly decisive and without unnecessary details.
- Before we sing some psalms (particularly ones with texts and tunes that the congregation does not know well), first read/pray that psalm together (normally responsively). That way we will have the context of that psalm in mind as we sing it.
- Sing at least one psalm in every Worship Service, and plan to systematically sing all 150 psalms.
- We plan to develop a list of psalms and hymns that we think are excellent (in lyrics, style, and singability), and keep track of when we have sung them together.
- We plan to feature on our website a list of some of our favorite psalms and hymns so that members and attenders can more easily become familiar with them.
- We plan to end all songs by heartily saying, “Amen!”
- We plan to end all Scripture readings like this: (1) Leader: “This is the Word of the Lord.” (2) Congregation: “Thanks be to God!”
- We plan to include at least two Scripture readings in each meeting. One would be the sermon text, and the other would be a selection from the opposite Testament. We plan to systematically read the entire Bible aloud.
- Include at least one reading of part of a creed or confession of faith.
- Do not have “baby dedications” or “parent dedications” in which the parents and infant come to the front for a ceremony. Instead, when parents have babies, a pastor should pray during the pastoral prayer that God would bless the parents and infant.2
Call to Worship
- The service leader may make brief announcements prior to the actual worship service.
- The service leader begins the worship service like this:
- Leader: “The Lord be with you.”
- Congregation: “And also with you.”3
- Leader: “Our help is in the name of the Lord.”
- Congregation: “Who made heaven and earth.”4
- Leader: “Welcome to this meeting/gathering/assembly of Christ the King Church as we worship in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
Confession
- We may occasionally include an exhortation prior to the prayer of confession.
- For the prayer of confession, we plan to include this in the Worship Service Guide: “We invite you to kneel if able.”
- We plan to be careful in prayers of corporate confession not to confess sins that do not characterize us. E.g., we should not corporately repent as a church for the sin of abortion in our nation. We should repudiate that sin and lament it, but we should not repent of it if we are not guilty of it.
- After the corporate prayer of confession, we plan to include a brief moment of silence for individuals to pray their own silent prayers of confession.
- After the spoken and silent prayers, the service leader says something like this:
- Leader: “Be assured that when you confess your sins God is faithful and just to forgive your sins in Christ and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness.”
- Congregation: “Thanks be to God!”
Consecration
- During the pastoral prayer, we plan to thank God for cleansing us, and then make specific requests for at least the following (moving in concentric circles outwards):
- particular church members (e.g., ones with significant needs that are public; parents and their newborns)
- our church as a whole
- one gospel-preaching church in the area by name
- our city, county, state, and country
- the world, including missions and persecuted believers
- As a general rule, we plan to preach sequentially through books of the Bible. Occasionally, we may preach topical sermons that are exegetically and theologically sound.
- As a general rule, the main point of the sermon should be the main point of the text. Occasionally, we may preach a sermon that emphasizes a truth in the text that is not its main point, but if we do that, we should explain what we are doing and why.
- Sermons should be Christian sermons, but we must not connect a text to Christ irresponsibly. The gospel will be explicit during every worship service when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, so the preacher need not feel pressure to force a full-orbed gospel message into a sermon.
- After the sermon, we plan to stand to sing a psalm or hymn that responds to the sermon.
Communion
- Celebrate the Lord’s Supper every Sunday as the climax of the worship service.5
- Fence the table at minimum by including this line in the Worship Service Guide: “Christ the King Church welcomes baptized Christians who are living in fellowship with Christ and his church to participate in the Lord’s Supper.”
- We plan to use freshly baked bread. We plan to include something like this in the Worship Service Guide: “Gluten-free bread is available [***note where***]. For the cup, we offer grape juice in the outermost ring of the tray; the inner rings are wine.”
- Conclude the Lord’s Supper by singing the Doxology as we invite each person to raise both hands.
Commission
- We plan to transition immediately from the Doxology to the benediction. We plan to end the service on a joyful crescendo.
- We plan to conclude the service with a benediction from Scripture (e.g., Num 6:24–26 or 2 Cor 13:15).
1. Cf. Scott Aniol, “Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs: Assessing the Debate,” Artistic Theologian 6 (2018): 13–18. Aniol concludes, “Since ψαλμοῖς, ὕμνοις, and ᾠδαῖς are each used as translations of psalm titles in the LXX and are employed interchangeably in the NT, the weight of the evidence seems to suggest that Paul did not intend the terms to designate clearly identifiable genre of corporate song.”
2. Cf. Matt Merker: “In conversations about the regulative principle of worship, many theologians distinguish between three key terms: elements, forms, and circumstances. Elements of worship are the activities that Scripture positively calls us to perform in our corporate devotion to God. The regulative principle is primarily concerned with determining which elements of worship are biblical. Following our Protestant Reformation heritage, we can summarize these elements under five headings: read the Word, pray the Word, preach the Word, sing the Word, and see the Word (summarized and depicted in baptism and the Lord’s Supper). Forms of worship refer to the manner in which we go about the elements of worship. … Should we read corporately or responsively? Should we sing in a major or minor key? Should we pray extemporaneously or prepare our prayers in advance? …Circumstances are the practical aspects of how a church organizes its worship gathering: when and where we meet, the layout of the chairs, whether we use air conditioning or not....What about baby dedications? This is a tricky one! You could make an argument for baby dedications as a form of prayer, since they usually involve praying for the child. I would observe, though, that a baby dedication feels a lot like a separate element of the service. The child is brought up front. The parents and congregation often say vows. It’s a special event. To be honest, as a Baptist, a baby dedication seems to me like an infant baptism without the water. It’s a ceremony, a ritual with its own choreography. Now, don’t get me wrong: I love babies, and I love the intention behind baby dedications! But if the point is to pray for the new children of the congregation, I would suggest that churches should do just that. Pray for babies, but don’t perform a special ceremony that might violate the consciences of believers who see no valid basis for such a practice in Scripture.” Matt Merker, Corporate Worship: How the Church Gathers as God’s People, 9Marks (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 81–83, 90.
3. Jeff Meyers explains, “By the end of the third century it [i.e., that greeting and reply] had become an almost universal practice in the liturgies of the churches. It was the greeting that signaled the beginning of the worship service. Aside from the obvious fact that it is more dignified and reverent than ‘Hello’ or ‘Good morning,’ this salutation has a meaningful function in the inauguration of the Divine Service. When the minister says, ‘The Lord be with you,’ he declares his intention to lead the people in worship: he desires and prays that the Lord would bless the congregation as they worship under his leadership. The minister acknowledges that he will be the instrument by which the Lord is present with and serves His people during the service. When the people respond, ‘And also with you,’ they verbally affirm their pastor’s leadership as well as their desire to see him blessed as he performs his pastoral office.” Jeffrey J. Meyers, The Lord’s Service: The Grace of Covenant Renewal Worship (Moscow, ID: Canon, 2003), 173–74.
4. Jeff Meyers explains, “The salutation is normally followed by the votum. Votum means ‘prayer’ or ‘petition’ in Latin. The votum is a short initial prayer expressing our need for the Lord’s help in order to worship Him properly. The minister says, ‘Our help is in the name of the Lord,’ and the people call back, ‘Who made heaven and earth.’ These are the words of Psalm 124:8. By reciting this Scripture at the beginning of the worship service we confess that without the Lord’s assistance we dare not enter His presence.” Meyers, The Lord’s Service, 174.
5. Cf. what I write in my commentary on 1 Corinthians: “We should be less dogmatic, however, regarding how frequently the church should celebrate the Lord’s Supper. The early church apparently celebrated the Lord’s Supper weekly (e.g., Acts 20:7), but in Scripture Jesus did not command his people to celebrate it weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. He said to follow his pattern ‘as often as you drink it’ (1 Cor. 11:25). Paul indicates in this passage that the Corinthians took it ‘when [they came] together.’ So there is latitude regarding how frequently a church celebrates the Lord’s Supper. I favor weekly celebration. The most common argument for not celebrating the Lord’s Supper weekly is that people would become so familiar with it that it would no longer be as special and meaningful. But that argument is not persuasive, for otherwise the church would not have weekly praying, singing, Scripture reading, or preaching. Why would we not want to eat and drink spiritually every week by celebrating the Lord’s Supper to nourish and sustain the church? The celebration would not need to be exactly the same each week. A church could focus on different aspects of the Lord’s Supper (see the six aspects listed in this Response section).” Andrew David Naselli, “1 Corinthians,” in Romans–Galatians, vol. 10 of ESV Expository Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 236n202.
2. Cf. Matt Merker: “In conversations about the regulative principle of worship, many theologians distinguish between three key terms: elements, forms, and circumstances. Elements of worship are the activities that Scripture positively calls us to perform in our corporate devotion to God. The regulative principle is primarily concerned with determining which elements of worship are biblical. Following our Protestant Reformation heritage, we can summarize these elements under five headings: read the Word, pray the Word, preach the Word, sing the Word, and see the Word (summarized and depicted in baptism and the Lord’s Supper). Forms of worship refer to the manner in which we go about the elements of worship. … Should we read corporately or responsively? Should we sing in a major or minor key? Should we pray extemporaneously or prepare our prayers in advance? …Circumstances are the practical aspects of how a church organizes its worship gathering: when and where we meet, the layout of the chairs, whether we use air conditioning or not....What about baby dedications? This is a tricky one! You could make an argument for baby dedications as a form of prayer, since they usually involve praying for the child. I would observe, though, that a baby dedication feels a lot like a separate element of the service. The child is brought up front. The parents and congregation often say vows. It’s a special event. To be honest, as a Baptist, a baby dedication seems to me like an infant baptism without the water. It’s a ceremony, a ritual with its own choreography. Now, don’t get me wrong: I love babies, and I love the intention behind baby dedications! But if the point is to pray for the new children of the congregation, I would suggest that churches should do just that. Pray for babies, but don’t perform a special ceremony that might violate the consciences of believers who see no valid basis for such a practice in Scripture.” Matt Merker, Corporate Worship: How the Church Gathers as God’s People, 9Marks (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 81–83, 90.
3. Jeff Meyers explains, “By the end of the third century it [i.e., that greeting and reply] had become an almost universal practice in the liturgies of the churches. It was the greeting that signaled the beginning of the worship service. Aside from the obvious fact that it is more dignified and reverent than ‘Hello’ or ‘Good morning,’ this salutation has a meaningful function in the inauguration of the Divine Service. When the minister says, ‘The Lord be with you,’ he declares his intention to lead the people in worship: he desires and prays that the Lord would bless the congregation as they worship under his leadership. The minister acknowledges that he will be the instrument by which the Lord is present with and serves His people during the service. When the people respond, ‘And also with you,’ they verbally affirm their pastor’s leadership as well as their desire to see him blessed as he performs his pastoral office.” Jeffrey J. Meyers, The Lord’s Service: The Grace of Covenant Renewal Worship (Moscow, ID: Canon, 2003), 173–74.
4. Jeff Meyers explains, “The salutation is normally followed by the votum. Votum means ‘prayer’ or ‘petition’ in Latin. The votum is a short initial prayer expressing our need for the Lord’s help in order to worship Him properly. The minister says, ‘Our help is in the name of the Lord,’ and the people call back, ‘Who made heaven and earth.’ These are the words of Psalm 124:8. By reciting this Scripture at the beginning of the worship service we confess that without the Lord’s assistance we dare not enter His presence.” Meyers, The Lord’s Service, 174.
5. Cf. what I write in my commentary on 1 Corinthians: “We should be less dogmatic, however, regarding how frequently the church should celebrate the Lord’s Supper. The early church apparently celebrated the Lord’s Supper weekly (e.g., Acts 20:7), but in Scripture Jesus did not command his people to celebrate it weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. He said to follow his pattern ‘as often as you drink it’ (1 Cor. 11:25). Paul indicates in this passage that the Corinthians took it ‘when [they came] together.’ So there is latitude regarding how frequently a church celebrates the Lord’s Supper. I favor weekly celebration. The most common argument for not celebrating the Lord’s Supper weekly is that people would become so familiar with it that it would no longer be as special and meaningful. But that argument is not persuasive, for otherwise the church would not have weekly praying, singing, Scripture reading, or preaching. Why would we not want to eat and drink spiritually every week by celebrating the Lord’s Supper to nourish and sustain the church? The celebration would not need to be exactly the same each week. A church could focus on different aspects of the Lord’s Supper (see the six aspects listed in this Response section).” Andrew David Naselli, “1 Corinthians,” in Romans–Galatians, vol. 10 of ESV Expository Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 236n202.