Worship Design Group

We have a Worship Design Group here at the Gaylord E-Free Church (GEFC) that is the creative and logistical brainpower behind our worship services as a church. This group is headed by Joshua Rupp, our Worship Arts Director.

The goal of the team is to plan and execute worship services here at GEFC that are compelling, meaningful, and even unexpected, so that those who attend grasp the truths of God's Word presented while having an enthusiastic desire to talk about their experience at church with those they engage with during the week. Here is how the group works:

Yesterday I sent out to the team my overviews for my messages for August. This gives the team several weeks on their own to read this information and the related Scripture passages and to prayerfully began brainstorming about creative ways that we can present these themes and principles in our Sunday morning worship services.

We will then meet as a group on a Saturday morning in June for a 2.5 hour brainstorming and creativity session. At this meeting we will list any and all ideas that have popped into our heads. Sometimes we have to ask for the "umbrella of mercy," which I will talk about in my post tomorrow. We then narrow down the ideas we would like to attempt for our sermon series using the following three questions as a filter:

Does the idea fit the theme of the morning naturally? If it doesn't really fit the theme, or if we have to force the fit, than it ill not be as effective as we desire it to be, no matter how good the idea is.

Is the idea too far outside of the box? Here at GEFC we have both a traditional service and a contemporary service. Though we desire variety and even the element of the unexpected to be part of our contemporary service, we realize that if an idea is too extreme in nature, it can be more of a distraction to the service than a tool to reinforce the theme of the morning.

Can the idea be done with excellence (especially on a limited budget)? My old band director in High School at the Christian School I attended would say, "If it's Christian, it ought to be better so shoot for excellence in everything you do?"

But our work doesn't end after this creative meeting. A smaller portion of this team also meet every Tuesday morning at 8am for a logistical meeting. We take time at this weekly meeting to evaluate the previous Sunday and to plan out all the logistics and final details of both the contemporary and traditional services for the upcoming Sunday. It is amazing how Sundays roll around with such regularity.

I am looking forward to working closely with this amazing group of people.