Creating Worship Environments

January...2007. Atlantic City, NJ. My staff and I were on a retreat, seeking God's guidance in planning our worship times. (No, we weren't fund raising!) We longed to create worship services that had a positive, weekly impact on the life of our congregation.

God gave us the concept of "Creating Worship Environments". We realized that it is impossible to orchestrate the movement of God in peoples lives to a specific moment. We simply don't know where God has each individual at a given moment. But what we could do is create an environment that put our congregation in a place with God, where all the distractions of this life were set in their proper place. Our goal became to create an environment where God could do what he needed to with our congregation; where he found them and in ways that only he could know. Too often this doesn't happen because our distractedness gets in the way.

It was a powerful concept for our team, and helped us considerably through the course of last year. As BVBC goes forward with our construction phase, there will be a whole new crop of distractions for us to deal with. I look forward to the challenge! Over then next couple weeks, I thought we could consider what it means to create distraction-free environments, both in theory and in practice. This should be a great conversation!