When worship works

Worship doesn’t always work. It doesn’t work when your student pianist can’t get through a whole hymn verse without stopping and starting three times. Or when the toddler who accidentally bumps his head drowns out your sermon’s climactic crescendo with his screams. Or when your congregation, who faithfully shows up Sunday morning after a long weekend of mission projects, only has enough energy left to go through the motions. Worship experiences are certainly not all under our control.

I work hard at worship, though, because I believe it deserves my hard work. Nothing, in my mind, better inspires or better pulls a community together than good worship. Every year I tell my students that worship done well can transform a person’s faith. Worship done poorly can kill it.

In my position as chaplain at Monmouth College my students and I lead weekly chapel services all year long. In addition to these, we design and lead special services annually: Christmas convocation, Ash Wednesday, Holy Week, and baccalaureate. Seeing as the baccalaureate service is our church-related college’s premier worship moment, it gets planned a year in advance.