3 Essential Resources for the Worship Leader
Many worship leaders find themselves serving in a vacuum. They don’t have a robust staff of worship leaders and interns to bounce ideas off of or pray with on a weekly basis as they plan one of the most catalytic events of a Christian's week: the Sunday gathering.
When it comes to thinking through and writing liturgy, we can all get stuck. One of the graces of our modern age is that resources are everywhere and here are 3 of my favorite when thinking through planning a Sunday worship gathering.
1. The Worship Sourcebook
The Worship Sourcebook is a collection of more than 2,500 prayers, litanies, and spoken texts. From the Call to Worship to the Benediction, this resource is full of great helps. Early on you’ll be cutting and pasting like there’s no tomorrow.
After spending some time in this book, you might find you use it less and less because the examples will teach you how to go to the Scriptures yourself and pull out confessions, prayers for illumination, and other readings for the congregation.
2. The Valley of Vision
One of the greatest needs of the church is to pray in public gatherings. So often it is difficult for people to form their own words, so praying as a congregation can be a powerful means to help others express what is in their heart. We see this all through the songbook of Psalms in the Bible. When I don’t know what to pray, I can lean on those who have gone before me.
The Valley of Vision is a collection of Puritan prayers and devotions going back to the sixteenth century. This is one small excerpt from a prayer entitled “The Broken Heart”:
Grant me to hear thy voice assuring me:
that by thy stripes I am healed,
that thou has been made sin for me
That I might be righteous in thee,
that my grievous sins, my manifold sins are all forgiven,
buried in the ocean of thy concealing blood.
Although some of the language is antiquated, the richness of these prayers is fertile soil for our personal devotional times as well as our congregational gathering.
3. Rhythms of Grace by Mike Cosper
What a gem this book is. Mike has dedicated so much of his life and work to helping the church understand what worship is, why we worship as the body of Christ corporately, and how to practice the rhythms of grace God has given us to be transformed by the beauty of the gospel story.
This book is full of the theological foundations of worship and how to plan services designed to embed gospel movements into the everyday lives of congregants. If liturgy is something new to you, this would be the book to start with. Whether you are re-reading it again or picking it up for the first time, you will be blessed.
Concluding Thoughts
As you study and use these resources, don’t forget the basics.
Pray and ask God to awaken your heart towards Him and His truth.
Pray for your people to catch a vision of God’s love for them that is greater than they can imagine.
And pray for the Holy Spirit to stir affections to love Him more and more.
Casey Smith is a native Midwesterner who works as Harbor Network’s Communications Director. He also works as the worship pastor of Trinity Community Church, a Harbor Network church in Columbia, Missouri. Prior to joining Harbor Network, he managed banking centers for Bank of America and worked with Acts 29 in the US and Western Europe.
