Customer Reviews

Engaging Worship: 20 Blueprints for Experiential Church Services

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As a someone involved in music ministry, and I have never come across a book that was so helpful in programming a creative and experiential service. Engaging Worship published by Group Publishing provides twenty various church services that can be reproduced and used effectively in small and large congregations. While Willow Creek and Ginghamsburg have been at the forefront of this new and successful phenomenon, this book is more practical and achievable with a modicum of resources.

Various youth, executive, and music pastors from Illinois, Michigan, and Alabama contributed to pull this book together. Each of them incorporates various elements and senses into their own weekend worship services.

The layout of Engaging Worship provides two sections for each of the twenty chapters. The first section details how to produce an experiential worship time in a simplistic, not extravagant, way. It enables those congregations with few resources to carry out a powerful, multi-sensory, and experiential worship service. Then the second section is geared toward larger congregations, presenting more tactics for filling up a larger stage, or involving more congregants.

The beauty of this book is its practicality. It is quite simple to transpose the ideas into a weekend service. Each chapter is equipped with a theme, goal, Scripture, mood, and synopsis. In order for this book to be fully effective, the teaching pastor would need to be flexible, incorporating elements that he initially may not have planned when preparing his sermon. In any case, this book is still a necessity for your bookshelf, as it offers ideas that can be incorporated or get creative juices flowing.

This book also outlines a step-by-step process on worship service preparation, and contains a list of the props needed to utilize the environment. What impressed me greatly was the multi-sensory section in each chapter (i.e., see, hear, smell, taste, and touch). It was refreshing to find a book that incorporated ideas and elements for memorable experiences using the five senses. I have been designing services for the past couple years using this method, but had nothing to show my planning team that was already published in a simplistic way.

I would recommend this book to every worship pastor and planning/programming team to use as a road map, or as stimulation for ideas; ultimately, this affords their congregations to experience worship that is sensory, effective, and memorable. My only two suggestions would be to have an order of service and all five senses incorporated into each chapter. All in all, Engaging Worship will enhance worship ministries as people experience a more powerful and remarkable worship service. - Kelley Reid, Christian Book Previews.com

This book is compiled extraordinarily well! I picked up a copy for our new Creative Worship Team. Now, instead of having to create everything from scratch or pull from a variety of sources, they can find everything they need in one resource. Actually, they will find MORE than everything they need, because this book offers enough options for the user to pick and choose what best fits their congregation and need. From songs, clips, sermon tips, goals, summaries, and more. The added bonus is the CD-ROM; no more searching for the "just right" clip! The topics chosen are excellent and will be able to be used by any congregation.