In most churches you might attend, the basic element of a service are all likely to be largely the same. Most of us are going to preach the Word, pray, sing and share communion. There aren’t usually any massive surprises. There are things the scriptures mandate and we’re all going to be doing them in some form or other,

However, an awful lot of what we do is culturally and contextually bound. So, though we are called to preach the Word, there is no specific mandate in scripture on the best or most appropriate way to do that. Topically, systematically or whatever. Those are acceptable means, we are left to use our own wisdom as to what might be best. So it is with the kind of songs we sing (modern, old, mixed, accompanied, unaccompanied, etc, etc), our approach to prayer (led, open, one at a time, all together, etc, etc) along with a host of other options. We may cite principles, we may have a sense of what we feel is best, but these forms are really not mandated and so we must hold them with a looser hand.

One among many of these kinds of discussions is whether it is best to have a service that all ties together, with each bit building on another or it is better to have a series of standalone elements whose only real connection is the Christ to which they all ultimately point. Does everything in the service have to reflect the theme of the sermon or might it be good to have different elements doing something a bit different? It bears saying again, the Bible simply doesn’t say. We have to use our wisdom, our understanding of our context and our sense of what might work best in order to decide, without that knee-jerk sense that everybody else must be doing it wrong if they don’t do the same as us.

With that said, we try to tie the elements of our service together. We think it is most helpful to hear from God’s Word pretty early on in the service – trying to strike the note that we want to hear from the Lord before we do pretty much anything else – and then let the other elements of the service all function to reinforce the Word or serve as our response to it. This helps us remember the key themes and ideas, to recall what the Word specifically means for us and encourages us to think of the rest of the service not as a separate adjunct to the preaching, but as something that really flows out of the preaching of the Word.

Naturally, if we are to do this well, it means the order of service matters too. The preaching can’t be – as it is in many traditional models – at the end of the service. I fully understand – and think entirely legitimate – the case that it is the last Word people will remember so we want them to go home with the preaching. Nevertheless, in our setup, if we are going to respond to the Word we must get into it early, preach it early and let the other elements respond to it. It has also been my experience that we retain far more of the Word preached because we not only hear it when we are at our freshest (at the start of the service) but we then have it reiterated to us repeatedly in the prayers, the songs, the time of testimony and even recalled in the communion. The Word is reinforced and then some over and again.

Of course, none of this is biblical mandate. You might think this wouldn’t work well for you or your context. That’s all well and good. This is not any sort of should. But it is something we have found helpful and useful in order to let the Word really do its work.