Different Models for Starting a Worship Service
Here are a few different ways to start your worship service. Again, there is no “right way” and each model has strengths and weaknesses.
1. Centralized approach. Start once a month, ramp up slowly and eventually get to every week. This will put more on your people’s calendar, but if you’ve discipled them well in how to order and balance their lives, this can work really well.
2. Decentralized approach. Start meeting for your worship services more frequently and then slowly back off to meeting corporately once a month. This makes missional communities the dominant expression of your church community and truly makes the worship service an overflow, celebration event.
3. Lean into the worship service and into the tension quickly. Start meeting weekly right off the bat (after getting 80-90 adults in missional communities), knowing it will be a season of leaning into the worship service. Prepare leaders for this, but also make sure you eventually lean back to oikos, otherwise people will get the impression that all that missional community stuff was for before when we didn’t have this church service!
Again, there is no right answer. You will need wisdom from the Holy Spirit on which model (or a hybrid thereof) is right for your community. Each presents challenges and opportunities that you will need to attend to.
Here is our biggest caveat: Most church planters will plant a kind of church that is in reaction to another model they’ve seen and disliked. Either you thought there was too much emphasis on the worship service or too little. Too much emphasis on being decentralized or too little. Or you felt the worship service wasn’t done to your liking or their discipleship process didn’t work like yours will. And so you engage in “ditch-to-ditch” thinking, jumping from one ditch to the other and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
What you want to do is learn to live in the tension of embracing both the temple experience (the worship service) and the home experience (missional communities) to the degree that is right for your community, for what God is calling you to.
Choose to Live in Tension
If you’re doing this well, you will never escape navigating the tensions of time and energy once you start a centralized gathering. It will inevitably pull time and energy away from missional communities and the organic life happening there. But we would argue that this healthy organic life cannot be sustained apart from the regular celebration service.
What you want to do is learn to lean back and forth on the temple/oikos continuum so you can respond to situations appropriately without losing your balance. Lean into temple without killing oikos. Lean into oikos without killing temple. Learn what is bottom line necessary for each. Know how to do a “full-fledged” and “bare bones” version of each.
