The Case for Sunday Brunch
Is your worship service a banquet or a bust?
Nancy Beach
July 1, 2005
Three distinct paradigms have been evident for Sunday morning services in the past 30 years. These designs are not about style of music or teaching. I am not referring to whether the hour is traditional or contemporary, boomer or postmodern, free flowing or liturgical. These paradigms pertain to how integrated the arts portion of the service is with the teaching or sermon portion. To understand the differences, consider Sunday morning a meal we prepare and serve to the congregation, longing for God's Spirit to use it to transform human lives. An a la carte meal
The church of my youth was an a la carte experience. If the sermon can be described as the main course, whatever preceded it was a random selection of menu items. The congregation sampled one distinct taste after another, without any intentional connection between them. I doubt whether the worship leaders who prepared songs, solos, segues, and readings had even communicated with one another. Rather, individual cooks each whipped up their course, and surprised all of us who gathered with their portion of the meal. God still showed up in that church, and we were sometimes moved. We loaded our worship plates with the assorted foods of a potluck in the hope the diverse elements would somehow work together and some transcendent truth would become evident. But walking back to our cars afterward, we had no sense that we had been guided through an intentional, integrated experience. The two-course meal
My second experience was more like a two-part dinner. The arts portion serves as appetizer and side dishes coordinated to come alongside the main course, biblical teaching. This approach certainly is more cohesive. The pastor offers information in advance to the arts team, who view ...
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