How to Find Powerful Moments in Your Worship Set

“Don’t just sing songs . . . create moments!” That’s the advice that I received several years ago while attending a Tom Jackson’s Expressive Worship Conference.

I couldn’t agree more. In fact one of our core values here at The Journey has always been to not just ‘execute the service’, but to create moments of life-transformation in our worship services. It’s not enough to just play good music or teach a good message. We need to plan our services so that there are intentional moments where people can connect with God and experience life transformation.

This idea — creating moments — is central to the third question that you want to ask in preparing your music plan each week.

Here’s the question:

How can we create a moment of life-transformation in the time that we have?

There’s a misconception when it comes to creating great moments in worship. It goes like this:

“The longer my worship set, the easier it is to create “moments” where people connect with God.”

Trust me, time is NOT the primary factor in discovering great moments of worship. Those moments can be created in a 5 minute set, and just as easily squandered in a 50 minute set.

The question isn’t really, “How much time do we have?”, but “How can we use the time available to help people draw near to God?”

This week as you plan your worship set here are 3 things you can do to bring out those powerful moments:

#1 – Ask God to help you discover the moments of life-transformation in your worship set.
Psalm 33:3 says, “Sing to him a new song…” Note that it doesn’t say, “Sing to him that same old tired song you’ve sung a thousand times…” Sing something fresh!

Maybe it’s a well-placed scripture, testimony, story, or video. Maybe it’s just a new way of singing an old song. Whatever it is, find a way to freshen it up, and watch as it takes on new life and engages your congregation in worship.

#2 – Talk with your Pastor / Worship Pastor and TOGETHER plan how you will creatively draw that moment out of the Worship Order.
As the old Japanese proverb states, “None of us are as smart as all of us.” There’s wisdom in working together to create these moments in your worship set. I can’t tell you how many times my plans were set, and then upon spending a few minutes with Nelson discussing them, he gave me an insight on how we could more clearly draw people into a deeper moment of worship.

#3 – Don’t stop with this Sunday, but work to find those moments every week.
Don’t create a “one-time” moment… take these lessons and begin praying about them, working with your pastor or team on them, and plan these powerful moments of worship every week.

Listen – moments of life-transformation are in EVERY worship order. They just need to be discovered. You do that through prayer and planning. Starting this week, don’t settle for “just another song set” again.