Dare to Dive In!: Strategies and Resources for Involving Your Whole Church in Worship

Dare to Dive In!

Worship resources to help small to mid-sized congregations make worship more engaging, interesting, and inviting. Mainline churches cannot continue with “business as usual” and expect that they will be able to revitalize. Nowhere is this more true, the authors say, than in worship, where too many churches communicate their depression about the fate of their congregation more clearly than they do the joy and hope of the Gospel. There is a tremendous hunger for any kind of worship resources that will help small to mid-sized mainline congregations make worship more engaging, interesting and inviting to new visitors and younger members, and yet it seems few such resources exist. Too often, conferences and workshops on worship revitalization end up discouraging church leaders because the tools used and the methods described are often too expensive and too elaborate. The authors have put together a variety of worship pieces that were rooted in their church's current realities but which gently stretched their congregations to open up to new forms and new ideas in worship. Church leaders can put these skits, monologues, liturgies, and other worship resources to use right away, even if their congregations are small, and even if they've done very little “new” in worship before. These resources have been tested in various congregations, and each congregation where these resources were used has experienced a growth in vitality of worship, increased worship attendance, and increased membership during that time. More important, they raised their congregation's expectations of worship. They no longer expected to be bored, but rather came to worship ready to be engaged, challenged, renewed, and inspired.

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Heather Kirk-Davidoff and Nancy Wood-Lyczak have been writing and leading worships as a team since 1999. Heather Kirk-Davidoff lives in Columbia, USA. Nancy Wood-Lyczak lives in Winchester, USA.