The following was the opening post in one of our online coaching seminars.

Creating Worship For a Digital Age, Wilson and Moore

Recommended reading:
1. Wilson, Len and Jason Moore. Digital Storytellers; The Art of Communicating the Gospel in Worship. Nashville: Abingdon, 2002.
2. Wilson, Len. The Wired Church: Making Media Ministry. Nashville: Abingdon, 1999.
3. Slaughter, Michael, Out on the Edge: A Wake-Up Call for Church Leaders on the Edge of the Media Reformation. Nashville: Abingdon, 1998.
4. Sweet, Leonard. Post-Modern Pilgrims: First Century Passion for the 21st Century Church. Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2001.

Contemporary worship has finally hit the mainstream in the church. It seems that most every church we know either has one or is developing one. Drums, guitar, drama and screens are no longer taboo. Even what one friend used to call “the old blue hairs” have finally acknowledged that maybe it’s necessary to reach the yung’uns. If you’re on this forum, chances are you’re either doing contemporary worship or are thinking about it. The question: Is your contemporary worship making a difference in the lives of your people?

If not, why? Is it authentic? Is it meaningful? Does it create a powerful awareness of God’s presence? This online seminar will ask hard questions and challenge you to find ways to make worship that is both digital in the best, most progressive and relevant sense of the word, and authentic in the most deep and lasting sense of the word.

Once you’ve answered these questions, or more accurately as you’re struggling to answer them, you still have the challenge of a creating worship every single weekend. We believe digital age worship cannot be done alone. As participants and consultants in several worship design teams in the past few years, we’ve seen first-hand some of the challenges in developing healthy, synergetic team dynamics. The topic of Team will be an ongoing part of the entire seminar.

Our goal, in general and for this seminar, is not to advocate a single, specific worship style that should be used in every church across North America. Every worship service should develop its own style based on its talent, its resources, its environment, and most important its audience. While keeping true to the DNA of the digital age, your challenge as a worship designer/producer is to find the thing or things that is most indigenous, and create worship around that. This will mean going through the difficulty of defining clarity of purpose.

During the week:

As you read Digital Storytellers, pay close attention to chapter 2, “Digital DNA.” We will spend time together talking about digital culture, and how to communicate in and to it.

With that basis, we will spend time in this online seminar thinking and dialoguing about what “contemporary” worship is, and co-create some new definitions that mean something to you and your teams.

Finally, we will close with strategies and techniques for creating worship for the digital age.

Jason Moore
Len Wilson