FaithHighway’s BJ McCurdy writes about Church Media:

Many churches these days have ventured into the world of incorporating technology into their worship services. Most often, this comes in the form of videos and presentation software to put song lyrics on screens. Here are a few suggestions about effectively using media during your worship service.

1. Don’t overuse videos. I know of churches that use a pre-service video every single week. This approach weakens the effect a church can have by using videos. People get so used to a video playing as they walk into the auditorium they start to tune them out. Use videos at key points of the year and as sermon illustrations to get maximum effectiveness out of videos.

Continue reading.

David Murrow writes about the lack of men in church:

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a shortage of young single men in church today. And things seem to be getting worse.

First-grade Sunday school classes have just as many boys as girls. But over the next dozen years, young men melt away. By their senior year, girls are 14 percent more likely to have participated in a youth group than boys. And they are 21 percent more likely to have stayed involved in youth group all four years of high school. Congratulations: the stage is set for the female-heavy church of the future.

Why is this happening? Before we dive in, let me state the obvious: Many a man’s religious reticence is his own fault. Some men are proud and want to be their own god. Others are captive to sin. A few have been wounded in church or deeply troubled by churchgoers’ hypocrisy.

But let’s be honest: Women suffer from these things as well. Nothing in Scripture suggests women are less prone to sin or pride than men. Women are just as likely to be abused or wounded in church.

I believe our modern church system screens out a certain type of boy. The screening continues through the upper grades of Sunday school and actually accelerates during the teen years. This screening process makes it harder for a typical guy to stay interested in church.

My last article explained how the screening process works and why it sends many dateable men for the exits. In this article, I’ll share some tips on how churches can win their young men back – and the role single women can play in that revival.

Star Student

Have you ever thought about the “rules” of Sunday school? For more than 150 years, they’ve been: sit in a classroom, look up passages in books, read aloud, memorize and listen to a female teacher. If you plop a typical 7-year-old boy into an environment like that, will he excel? How about the girl sitting next to him – will she do better than he does?

Fortunately, a new model of children’s ministry is emerging. Here’s what it looks like at my church in Alaska: Kids of all ages assemble in a large room full of fun things to do. It’s 15 minutes of barely controlled chaos. After the kids get their wiggles out, they gather in rows to sing a few fun praise songs (complete with body motions). Next the lights dim, and a professionally produced video appears on a large screen. The video employs a modern metaphor to introduce a spiritual truth. Finally, the boys and girls separate into same-gender small groups — boys with male teachers, girls with female teachers. The lesson time is brief and usually built around an object lesson (related to the video they just saw). Once the instructional time is done, the teacher may ask students to share prayer needs. The teacher prays for each request or has the students do it. Then it’s on to more free play until the parents arrive.

Churches around the country are experimenting with similar models. Whereas girls usually “win” in the old classroom-style Sunday school, the new model advantages neither gender. It plays to male strengths: activity, body movement, visuals and objects. And boys respond better to male teachers. Although there’s not a lot of heavy Bible study in the new model, boys may actually absorb more of the teaching because they stay more focused and attentive.

Even traditional Sunday school curriculum is changing. A company called Next Righteous Generation (NRG) has created custom curricula for boys and girls. Lessons, activities and illustrations are tailored for each gender.

One other wrinkle: my church in Alaska has dropped the name “Sunday school.” It’s been redubbed, “Adventureland.” The new moniker makes it easier for boys to invite their friends.

So children’s ministry is definitely headed in the right direction. I believe we will see more adult men in church in about 10 years … that is, if they survive youth group.

Revamping Youth Group

Children’s ministry may be getting friendlier to boys, but youth ministry seems to be going the opposite direction. As I noted in my last article, youth group is quickly evolving into a music-driven experience. Group singing is consuming more and more time in youth group. This is great for musicians – but for the rest of the boys, lengthy praise sets can be a drag.

Here’s the problem with young men and praise-singing: The average 16-year-old boy is not grateful to God yet. He hasn’t experienced much spiritual victory, so praise means nothing to him. Trying to make the typical teenage boy sing praise songs is like trying to make a pig knit. Asking him to stand in a darkened room for 25 minutes, singing songs of appreciation he doesn’t feel is pointless at best. At worst, he feels somewhat defective. He secretly wonders, Is there something wrong with me? Why don’t I feel the way I’m supposed to?

As an example of how to do youth group right, I’d point to Young Life. Their weekly meetings consist of a couple games, a handful of simple songs, a brief Christ-centered talk and a chance to respond. The formal content is usually wrapped up in less than an hour. This is by design; Young Life has learned the most effective ministry time is not the formal programming, but the personal interaction between students and leaders before and after meetings. Young Life is still very effective at reaching boys – particularly the ones who didn’t grow up in church.

Also in my previous article I mentioned several dating customs that have swept the church in the past decade, including supervirginity and the “kiss dating goodbye” movement. Some Christian women have adopted a standard of purity that exceeds that of the Bible. Young men may conclude it’s just too complicated to date church girls; they come with too many rules and regulations.

I encourage single Christian women to date Christian guys. Dating is a good thing for those who are mature enough to handle it. I encourage women to show affection toward the ones they like. Sexual intimacy is clearly out of bounds for unmarried Christians, but that does not mean all physical contact is unholy. Women who erect too high a fence around themselves should not be surprised when men walk away.

What Men Want

If you’re looking for a church with young, single men, they’re generally harder to find in small, traditional congregations, and easier to find in megachurches. This is no accident: These jumbo congregations work hard to make guys feel at home. Megachurches have nixed many of the feminine cultural elements ingrained in traditional churches: group hugs, handholding, emotive displays, personal testimonies and prayer-and-share. They’ve removed the banners, quilts, curtains, doilies and flowers from their worship spaces. Some have zapped every “Jesus is my boyfriend” song from their worship sets.

Megachurches are into excellence – and so are men. Guys love a challenging sermon that doesn’t stray into condemnation or moralism. They like mind-stretching discussions and healthy debate. Men appreciate a nice facility that’s well kept.

If you want to meet young men at church, find a congregation that specifically targets them. Mars Hill Church in Seattle is built to reach the young, urban, coffee-and-computer crowd. Pastor Mark Driscoll unashamedly goes after these dudes. He addresses them each week from the pulpit. He uses metaphors they can relate to. His preaching is edgy – Driscoll is not afraid to present Christ’s harsh, demanding side. As a result, Mars Hill is brimming with young single men – in one of America’s least-churched cities.

This will warm your heart: Driscoll encourages his young men to stop prolonging their adolescence and get married. He praises young men in his congregation who land a job, buy a home and commit to a woman. Driscoll says, “The real question of manhood is not, ‘Can you take a punch?’ It’s ‘Can you keep a job?'”

Now, don’t book your ticket to Seattle just yet. There are plenty of churches across America that have begun targeting men. That’s bringing them in the doors – but is it bringing them to faith?

Men do not follow religions or teachings or philosophies – they follow men. They need mentors – heroes in the faith – even more than women do. But churches have neglected their laymen for so long that there is now a shortage of older men who are willing to mentor the young. Male Sunday school teachers are in chronic short supply; male youth leaders are often hard to find. Does your church have even one mature man who’s mentoring the young adult men?

And things are only going to get worse; the “pedophile priests” and “creepy coaches” scandals will cause more men to shrink from personally mentoring boys. Men will fear being falsely accused – or being seen as perverts themselves.

What Women Can Do

So what can you, as a single woman, do about this?

If you volunteer in Sunday school or youth ministry, speak up for boy-friendly curriculum, activities and lessons. Don’t make your boys do things that embarrass them. If you notice the girls outperforming the boys, change activities.

If you want to influence the direction of your church, get organized. Meet with your girlfriends regularly to pray for the men in your lives (and in your congregation). Prayer is powerful, especially when “two or three agree on anything.”

Most pastors would love to make their churches more man-friendly, but they’re afraid of opposition from the ladies. So here’s an idea: Gather some women, go to your church leaders and tell them you’ll support efforts to make the church more guy-friendly. When the matrons of the congregation start freaking out over the removal of the quilts, flowers and banners, invite them for coffee and explain the situation, woman-to-woman. Take some of the heat off your pastor and elders; they’ll love you for it.

* * *

Used car prices are up 30 percent since 2008. Why? During the economic collapse of 2008–2010, auto companies cut back drastically on production. As a result, there’s currently a shortage of used cars – which has increased their value.

In the same way, churches unwittingly cut back on their production of young Christian men in years past – which has created the shortage we see today.

The only way to correct this imbalance is to produce more – if not for the current generation of women, then for the next.

Worship leader Mark Snyder offers tips on worship songwriting:

Worship songs are an area of vastly differing opinions. Evaluating what works and what doesn’t can be very subjective. One sentiment I hear and read all the time is ‘let’s take the focus off of us, or I, or me, and put it on God, where it belongs.’ In many ways, this is a push back on the effects of a ‘generation me’ culture. But, to figure out why a song leaves this impression is not as easy as it sounds.

As a career software engineer who is also a worship songwriter, I try to allow my analytical side to influence what I do musically. When I am songwriting or considering songs for my set list or recording projects, I like to think in terms of an analytical measure of a song I call the God Quotient (or GQ for short). GQ is a way to look at a song and try to evaluate its real focus.

Each song we use for corporate worship has a certain amount of creative energy expended to write it, and a focus it brings to the congregation. It is useful to examine where the creative energy of a song is strongest. Assuming a song is well written, theologically sound and grounded in Biblical truth, I like to then evaluate a song along several scales to look at its GQ.

I look at each lyric, especially focusing on the pronouns that describe me, or us, but also the ones that describe God. Repeated lyrics get more weighting. I also look at where the song has its strongest musical moments (typically the chorus and bridge) and what those are saying. Continue reading.

Megachurch leaders discuss how they manage their creative teams. Continue reading.

Taylor Burton-Edwards discusses the differences between “Ancient-Modern” and “Blended” worhship:

Ancient-future and “blended” are very different kinds of animals, at least as those two terms are usually used.

Ancient-future reflects the work of really two separate 19th and early 20th century ecumenical movements that were mostly parallel, and then came to interact– the liturgical renewal movement growing out of the “re-un-earthings” of a lot of early Christian liturgical materials beginning in the late 19th century (some of which were a matter of having discovered how to translate some of these early languages again) PLUS the significant turn in the larger global mission movements toward what folks like Lesslie Newbigin would popularize as “indigenous mission.”

The result of the liturgical scholarship-liturgical renewal movements was we now had a much firmer handle on the basic patterns and practices of earlier Christian worship, West and East— pre-Middle Ages, pre Reformation, and in some cases pre-Constantine/ Theodosius. The discovery and subsequent publication of reams of scholarship on these texts made it clear that Christians could be worshiping now far more in line with what early Christians knew and experienced. This scholarship also made available to many, for the first time in English, the rich treasury these texts were and could provide.

Parallel with all of this was the growing awareness in mission circles that simply trying to import the ecclesiological and liturgical practices of the “mother country/church” and particularly, simply translating such texts into the language(s) of the “receiving country” was actually doing violence to the incarnational nature of the gospel itself. Not to mention, it didn’t really work– unless, perhaps, you thought having identical worship worldwide was essential to keeping your empire together (as Britain certainly thought for a time!). What was needed instead– and so what came to be developed– was to find ways for the local culture to DO what Christian liturgy was DOING from within their own idioms and sensibilities– i.e., do liturgy that is deeply connected to the patterns of Christians in all times and places– but that just as deeply reflects and expresses the lives of the people and cultures who actually offer it now in real time.

So we have beginning by the middle of the 20th century multiple instances of such “ancient-indigenous” liturgical development going on “in the mission field” (primarily among Protestants) worldwide. And we have, in the work of people like Lesslie Newbigin and organizations like the World Council of Churches, what was at the time sort of a gradual “leaking back to America” of how this was proceeding in various places around the world.

While to be fair, there were all sorts of “ancient future” experiments with liturgy happening pre-Vatican II in the Roman Catholic world, including in the United States, it was primarily Vatican II that mainstreamed the process of moving Roman Catholic worship to earlier patterns and more vernacular expression. Nearly all of the “mainline Protestants” followed suit, creating new resources for worship now with language and technologies that speak of now on the same ancient “Basic Pattern of Worship”– Entrance, Word/Response, Table, Sending– that early Christianity seemed to have followed nearly everywhere, despite great diversity in local expression in terms of just how they followed it.

“Ancient-Future” is the term Robert Webber used (and possibly coined) to describe this confluence of ancient texts and practices with current indigenous missiology when he sought to explain these things among primarily Evangelical audiences, particularly folks whose roots were more in the Reformed and the 19th century holiness and early 20th century Pentecostal and “free-church” traditions. These persons and traditions, out of which Webber himself had come, generally had had little if any introduction to or involvement with the scholarship on early Christian liturgies OR the more widely ecumenical (and “mainline”) movement toward indigenous mission (and therefore also indigenous liturgy).

While appeals to “tradition” or “liturgical scholarship” or “ecumenical mission movements” might have little currency among his primarily evangelical audiences, the term “Ancient- Future” could ring true. Evangelicals could appreciate the value of what was ancient– very close or at least closer to the time of the Bible– even if they may have difficulty with the idea that liturgy might have some fixed written texts and ritual that mattered. They could also appreciate a drive toward future– and not just present– given the importance eschatology continued to play as a centerpiece in much of their theology and preaching, even as it was downplayed very often in “mainline” Protestant circles.

This is why one usually finds examples of what gets called “ancient-future” worship more openly called that among Evangelicals than among mainline Protestants in the US. I would also suggest that the more or less “free church” nature of many of these Evangelical traditions may have helped those who have found Webber’s way of talking about these things appealing to develop worship practices that were at once far more ancient and far more innovative than examples we may more typically see in mainline Protestant contexts.

The principle here, whether called “ancient-future” or something else, is basically the same. It’s about going deep and wide at once– about profound rootedness in the ancient (connectedness) and equally profound commitments to expression here and now (indigenous). It’s about submitting to old, old patterns (including at times old, old technologies, such as candles and incense) and at being ready to incorporate bleeding edge expression at the same time.

As such, “Ancient Future” worship is more of a “discipline” than a “style.” It isn’t about trying to please preferences or tastes of worshipers. It about a commitment to offering worship that is both deeply faithful and deeply relevant at onces. Put another way, ancient-future is not and done right cannot be a “consumerist” act done to “attract” others because it suits their tastes. Rather, it’s a very participatory act in which the assembly and its leaders seek to go deep, following ancient practices of our ancestors in the faith, and at the same time offer the best we have of ourselves today.

There are a few instances of this in the United Methodist Church– but they are the exception. I would observe they are also the exception in the ELCA, the Episcopal Church, and AMiA (Anglican Mission in America) as well, although the liturgies and liturgical sensibilities of these denominations are typically formed on the “ancient” side of “ancient-future” at least.

Blended worship, by contrast, as that term is most typically used, has generally been marketed (I mean that term!) as a “strategy” for worship used to try to “please” folks who “prefer” either “contemporary” or “traditional” worship, but who find themselves in congregations that may not be able to pull off either of those separately for whatever reasons. In nearly all the literature I’ve seen on this strategy over the years– mostly generated from within the “church growth consulting industry”– “blended worship” has been promoted explicitly as a consumerist strategy, a way to try to “satisfy every customer” at least a little. It has also been presented as a compromise strategy in the “worship wars” that marketers of the “brands” “traditional” and “contemporary” created and still, to some degree, sustain.

But it represents neither a cease-fire nor a real solution, long term. Nor can it, when its premises are still, all too often, about making sure different “market niches” can get some of what they’re looking for OUT of worship. The Bible has a name for worship focused on something other than offering ourselves to God, as the intense focus on “preference driven worship style” has become: idolatry.
Biblical worship by contrast to idolatry focuses on helping all people (not consumers!) offer (not get and consume!) the best of all their gifts to God in worship. We are, as Paul reminds, the body of Christ, gifted very diversely, not so we can get what we want, but so that in the offering of all of our gifts, including in worship, the body functions as Christ’s body to bless and transform the world.

That’s why I, like my predecessors in Worship office at GBOD, Dan Benedict and Hoyt Hickman, am fairly adamant about pastors doing what they can to move congregations away from any approach to worship design and planning that is about consumerist assumptions and toward an approach to worship that helps the whole assembly offer its best gifts to God. Call it “liturgical renewal,” or call it “ancient-future” or call it “connected and indigenous worship”– this basic approach embodies far better who we are and whose we are as the body of Christ, connected in a communion of saints and offering our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to God, than any labels such as “traditional,” “contemporary” or “blended,” can ever hope to do.