🗣️ Worship — Unit 7: The Spoken Elements

I. The Call to Worship

Worship has spoken elements as well as sung ones, and the spoken elements are among the most important parts of the service, yet they are too often the least prepared. We begin with the call to worship. Its purpose is twofold: to call attention to God, and to call the people to participate in the service. People arrive distracted, their minds still on the week behind them and the week ahead. The call to worship is designed to remove those distractions and create a mood for worship, turning the congregation's focus from the world outside to the God they have gathered to meet.

II. The Reading of Scripture

The reading of Scripture is one of the most neglected elements in worship, and one of the most important. It probably takes less time than the announcements, yet it is far more important than the announcements. The reader should read acceptably, which means practicing aloud beforehand, neither with exaggerated elocution nor with careless mumbling. He should announce the passage and locate it so the congregation can follow along. Some have rightly called the reading of Scripture itself a form of preaching, for when the word of God is read well, God speaks through it. Do not treat the reading casually.

III. Prayer and Its Six Elements

Prayer sets the tone of the entire service. William Taylor said that the prayer gives the tone of the whole service and holds in itself the success or failure of the day. That is a weighty claim, and it is true. The Lord's Prayer is our model: it hallows God's name, seeks His will, and brings both our material and our spiritual needs before Him.

Prayer has six elements, and a full prayer moves through them rather than collapsing into a list of requests. They are: adoration, praising God for who He is; thanksgiving, gratitude for what He has given; intercession, prayer on behalf of others; petition, prayer for our own needs; confession, acknowledging our sin and seeking cleansing; and dedication, surrendering ourselves to God. Note carefully that intercession and petition are distinct. Intercession looks outward to the needs of others; petition brings our own needs before God. Keeping them separate guards us from a prayer life that is nothing but a list of things we want.

IV. The Service Is a Large Prayer

Here is a beautiful pattern worth pausing over. The five moods of the service that we studied in Unit 5, recognition, praise, confession, illumination, and dedication, run parallel to the six elements of prayer. The same God-ward movements, adoration, thanksgiving, confession, dedication, shape both the structure of the whole service and the structure of a single prayer. In a real sense, the service is a large prayer, and a prayer is a small service. Worship has one shape at every scale, whether you are looking at the hour-long gathering of the whole congregation or at the two-minute prayer of one believer.

This means the leader who prays in public is doing something weighty. He prays on behalf of the whole congregation, leading them as surely as the song leader leads them in singing. So public prayer must be prepared. The leader should think through what he will pray, include the elements of true prayer, and remember that his prayer sets the tone for everyone. The spoken elements, the call, the reading, and the prayer, deserve the same careful preparation we give the sermon. Guard them; they carry more of the service than we often realize.

Submit Exam & Check Pass Reset Unit