Does worship in your church seem unfocused? Do you sense that you’re just skipping from one element to another, without fully developing any particular idea? Do your congregants have a somewhat shallow experience of worship, skimming the surface week to week? Do they seem unchanged? Integrated liturgy might be the missing link.

Integrated liturgy refers to worship that is centered on a particular theme. All the individual elements of the service are based on and shaped by the theme. It is most impactful when an overall theme runs through the weeks of a sermon series, and a narrowed version of that theme runs through each weekly worship service.

So, let’s say the overall theme for a three-week sermon series is God reveals God’s self to us in Jesus Christ. The three weeks of the series would each focus on a specific aspect of that overall theme, for example, Week 1: Jesus is loving and compassionate and brings reconciliation to us and to the world. Week 2: Jesus is a daily life-changer, and shows us how to live. Week 3: Jesus is righteous and just; he erases our human-made boundaries of power.

You can see how the central thread runs through each week of the series. This sort of worship is focused, ideas are allowed to develop, and worshipers experience something significant.

Ron Man, a musician and teacher, describes some benefits of integrated liturgy. He points out that this sort of worship is:

• Lingering: the service (and the series) has a single-minded focus, allowing the worshipper to zero in on one part of God’s story
• Learning: the worship event (and the series) serves a catechetical function, and the worshipper’s knowledge of God is increased
• Savoring: the worshiper has time for reflection, so that the experience begins to sink in
• Responding: the service includes a provision for response, so that the worshipper can do something with what she has experienced, which deepens and cements the experience as a whole
• Uniting: the service has a unifying, God-centered focus, as the community of worshippers centers its attention on God
• Cultivating: the single-theme focus prepares the worshipper to hear the preached Word

What happens to a person who participates in this type of worship service week after week? It seems to me that this integrated liturgy leads to a deeper, richer, more powerfully transformative experience.

Better communication

The single-thread worship planning approach also helps us communicate more effectively, which is a basic objective in worship.

In worship, we are to communicate the story of God’s saving acts throughout eternity, the meaning of those saving acts for us and for all creation, and God’s invitation for all of us to join together with Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, in community with the Triune God and with each other. That’s a tall order. And it doesn’t happen by accident. It takes real work, intentionality, and time.

But, all too often, we make things complicated! We forget that simple can be good. We think that in order to offer great worship we must have complex media projects, or dramatic presentations, or announcements that are loaded with too much information. We want people to get it! And so we sometimes beat them over the head, until they walk out of our worship services unable to remember or respond to anything that just happened.

In your worship service next weekend, what’s the one thing you want to say, the one thing you want people to walk away with? It starts with clear and cohesive communication, a single thread.

A biblical model

There’s another reason I think this single thread method is important: it seems biblical to me.

The Scriptures don’t tell us everything about ancient worship, but they do give us some good looks at it, like a door that opens up for us to peer through every now and then.

One of those scriptures is Exodus 13 verses 3-10, just after the Israelites have been delivered from slavery in Egypt. Moses tells the people to remember this day…perform this ritual in this month…explain it to your children…discuss it often…and follow this regulation at its appointed time.

God, through Moses, has instructed the church to remember the redemptive events on a regular basis, so that the people will remain focused on God’s saving acts, and on God’s plan. God is very specific and is concerned that the children, all generations, are instructed, so that they remember, so that they stay focused, too.

This tells me that order, regularity, and focus are all important aspects of our worship because they are in God’s own instructions.

So, what would happen if, as you sit down to plan worship this week, you were to focus on communicating clearly just one part of God’s story? What if you focused on that one thing for three or four weeks, examining it from a different angle each week? What if everything in the worship service worked together, pointed in the same direction so that the people in your church remembered and re-enacted that part of God’s story in such a way that they could not forget it?

Efficient

Finally, single-thread worship planning saves you time and maximizes your best ideas and skills. Instead of coming up with everything new each week, you can generate one set of ideas and use them multiple times as part of a sermon series. Choose one key image, for instance, and use it for bulletins, projection screen graphics, and your website for an entire month. Decide on one structure for your pastoral prayer—a bidding prayer, for example—and use it each week for four weeks. This approach allows you to focus your creative energy with intentionality and purpose, and then to leverage that work over a period of time. That’s good for you.

But the most important benefit is for the worshipper, whose experience in worship can be truly transformational. No more worship whiplash.

A version of this article previously appeared at Ministry Matters.