What Is Contemporary Worship Service

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What Is Contemporary Worship Service
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Stephen M. Newman is the author of Experiencing Worship, A Study of Biblical Worship, and Founder & Editor of ExperiencingWorship.com. Steve currently serves as Pastor of Worship, McKinney Memorial Bible Church, Fort Worth, Texas. Steve has extensive experience in both traditional and contemporary worship styles and has been serving in music and worship capacities since 1982. Steve earned a Bachelor of Music degree with emphasis in Church Music from Oklahoma Baptist University in 1986. He has also earned Master's of Worship Ministry and Doctorate of Worship Ministry from Christian Leadership Seminary, Elma, New York.
Used by permission of ExperiencingWorship.

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I am often asked to define contemporary worship . My response usually revolved around the musical definition. I never considered the full scope of what was really being asked. Although contemporary means many things to many people, let’s focus on its true meaning. Contemporary merely means “occurring in the modern” or “of the day.”
It can be a difficult thing to call worship contemporary. The true translation makes it too unclear. For the past 50 years worship was “contemporary.” It was the way people all over the world had done it…for the most part. Ideally, worship cannot be categorized as traditional, contemporary or blended. Worship is worship. It hasn’t changed since man was created. We can argue over the elements and the ways in which we worship, differentiate the outward expressions of our worship, and even label our churches to better clarify the freedoms permitted in worship. To use the terms traditional, contemporary and blended as definitions for our corporate worship styles is misleading and incorrect.
The only things that have changed in our corporate worship are the tools we use to help facilitate it. Sadly, until 15-plus years ago, the church had not been contemporary in its use of music in the church. We held too tightly to the styles, presentation and other elements of our music. At the expense of losing millions of young people to the world, we failed to become contemporary in our look and in our presentation. We have, in a sense, left them behind at the risk of becoming relevant to their desires and needs.
The terms traditional, contemporary and blended are better used in the context of musical instrumentation and orchestration. To use a pipe organ as a tool to lead worship would probably place you in the traditional category. To use a Hammond B-3 in your worship would probably place you in the contemporary category—especially if it was played correctly with the right speakers. If your church has a band, you would be considered contemporary. If your instrumentation consists of the piano and organ, you would probably fall into the traditional model.
When asked the style of worship we incorporate at our church, I often respond “traditional.” When asked what style of music do we incorporate, my response is always “contemporary.” Another oft asked question centers around the use of hymns. Hymns in themselves are neither traditional nor contemporary. It is how they are presented that makes them traditional or contemporary. Some of our more progressive musical worship bands have seen the value in many great hymns. It is their presentation that makes them contemporary. The fight over hymn and choruses takes center stage when it should have been over how they were arranged and presented. A lost person could hear Passion’s version of “O for a Thousand Tongues” and not recognize or differentiate whether it was a hymn or another great worship song. Maybe if we had made the change 20 years ago hymns would still be an effective tool in worship.
So what is contemporary worship? Simply the same as it has been since Jesus walked here on earth. It is giving honor and praise to his Father in heaven. It is living lives in obedience to His word and His call on your life. It is showing His worth to all because He is worthy. Let us not confuse worship with music. Worship doesn’t change.
In the future, I hope that we will begin to do away with labels on worship styles. There is only one style of worship…that which honors God and pleases Him.





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Do you know how to look beyond the style of a "traditional" or "contemporary" worship service to find its worship vision, structure, and theology? Ron Rienstra says it's a question more worship planners should ask and answer. A feature story exploring the planning for Contemporary Worship services.
Picture two coffeehouses. In each, espresso scents the air. Images flicker across screens. String bass, keyboard, and saxophone twine a slow rhythm that makes your shoulders relax. You forget your must-do list and let poetry, Scripture, and music soothe you.
Seen through the lens of “contemporary worship style,” these coffeehouse settings are twins. After all, they’re both doing Jazz Vespers.
Look deeper and you’ll see that neither is all about the music. “Jazz Vespers here only vaguely resembles its original incarnation at Calvin College,” says Shannon Sisco, who helped lead weekly Jazz Vespers as a college student and transplanted the idea to Wicker Park Grace Church in Chicago, where she’s in graduate school.
As Sisco and other contemporary worship leaders explain, worship is more than music. It has a structure. And the ways we worship form how we live out our Christian faith.
Sisco says the college vespers, with its dimly-lit seating, bouncy jazz, and bright stage, created a space so “those on the fringes and uncomfortable with church could draw near to God.“
She describes Wicker Park Grace as part of the emerging church movement. “A central focus in our worship is building authentic community and encouraging dialogue among participants,” she says. The typical vespers turnout is small enough that people can sit in a circle, volunteer to read from their seats, and take time to talk about the readings.
Both incarnations of Jazz Vespers fit within a definition of worship that resonates with Shannon Sisco and other former worship apprentices , such as Peter Armstrong and Dean Kladder.
Armstrong, now worship pastor at Sanctuary Christian Reformed Church in Seattle, explains that worship is covenantal, a lot like renewing wedding vows. “Within that context, worship is a drama or conversation between God and God’s people. One lesson I still think about every week is Ron Rienstra’s arrow system.
“I look through a liturgy to see where God is speaking to us (downward arrow) and where we are speaking to God (upward arrow) and where we are speaking to each other (two-way horizontal arrow). It’s a delicate balance. Making space for God may look like silence and meditation…or unique readings of Scripture,” he says.
Kladder, now a Princeton seminarian, recently completed a church internship. “ Liturgy means the work of the people . So the people should take up their work,” he says.
He’s experimented with having the pastor put the pastoral prayer (a.k.a. long prayer or congregational prayer) back in the people’s hands. “One long prayer can be broken into shorter prayers of invocation, intercession, lament, and confession and placed meaningfully into the liturgical order,” he explains.
Hearing others pray their prayers on your behalf reinforces the understanding of worship as diverse people united in the work of conversing with God.
Good worship—whether labeled contemporary, traditional, or blended—has a structure. It uses many liturgical forms, all intentional.
When Guy Higashi was associate pastor at New Hope Christian Fellowship in Honolulu, senior pastor Wayne Cordeiro always said, “Form before content.” Just as a lumber form holds concrete in place while you pour a driveway, worship structure provides the form through which content can be delivered.
“Similarly, a frame for a photograph or painting accents the beauty and centers one’s focus. It either adds or takes away,” says Higashi, now a doctoral student and continuing education program manager at Fuller Theological Seminary.
With five services and 10,000 people, New Hope needs to include all worship elements without going overtime—else traffic gridlock results. Cordeiro’s six-sermon series gives worship teams time “to think out what creative elements to use rather than spontaneously scrambling. A simple element like serving communion requires lots of coordination,” Higashi says.
New Hope values using every member’s gifts. With so many involved in planning and leading worship, a clear structure helps all teams keep the service flowing toward the same goal.
Allison Ash, director of chapel at Fuller Theological Seminary, says, “Students who embrace more contemporary forms of worship may see written prayers and formal liturgical structures as boring or dead.
“What they may not understand is that those forms have been crafted throughout Christian history with distinct intentionality. There’s a reason worshipers hear the assurance of pardon after a prayer of confession.”
She’s noticed that students find liturgical forms alive and meaningful when presented in contemporary ways. “After singing Charlie Hall’s ‘ Give Us Clean Hands ,’ try singing Billy Foote’s ‘ You Are My King ,’ which allows worshipers to sing of God’s forgiveness just after singing about ‘laying down our idols,’ ” Ash suggests.
Far from being dead, worship structures and liturgical forms offer freedom for creativity, according to Chip Andrus , a Presbyterian musician and emerging church specialist.
“For centuries the faithful have gathered together, giving praise, confessing sin, sharing peace, reading God’s Word, praying for others, giving alms, and breaking bread. In this pattern we find the freedom to express our relationship with God in authentic, relevant ways.
“We find deep connection to those who worshipped God before us. We pass on mysteries of the faith to our children in ways that will endure,” he says.
The age-old worship pattern of prayers of the people, followed by offering and communion, teaches us how to live. “If we pray for someone in the hospital, our offering might be to visit that person. If we pray for the homeless, our offering might be volunteering at a homeless shelter once a week during our lunch break.
“This pattern helps us understand that we are people who ask God for help (prayers of the people) and participate with God in answering prayers and serving others (offering). We do this not on our own but joined with Christ and one another (breaking bread and sharing wine),” Andrus says.
He explains that once you see the deep meaning, you realize that how worship structures and liturgical forms are conveyed—whether through organs, robes, PowerPoint, or worship bands—isn’t the point.
“The most important thing is to make space for Christ’s Spirit to move through us, shape us, and feed us as we offer our prayers and lives as servants of the living God,” he says.
Learn more about Chip Andrus and his work with the emerging worship movement. Listen to his music .
To learn more about principles of good contemporary worship and music, attend The Church Music & Worship Summit , in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Glean insights into how worship leaders use projected technology in worship . Check out Methodist advice on how to start a contemporary worship service. Learn why one congregation has chosen not to offer a choice between traditional and contemporary worship services.
Browse Reformed Worship articles on contemporary worship .
The prologue to The Worship Sourcebook states, “A well-conceived order of worship ensures that the main purposes of worship are carried out. In other words, a thoughtful pattern for worship keeps worship as worship. It protects worship from degenerating into a performance, into entertainment, or into an educational lecture.” The Worship Sourcebook gives ideas for every element of worship, no matter what “style” you aim for.
Talk about good contemporary worship:
What is the best way you’ve found to address and talk through principles of good contemporary worship?

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Musical Theology: Past lessons, present perspectives
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Slide Show to Planning Contemporary Worship Services

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In church culture, “traditional” and “contemporary” are terms that are frequently used to describe the style of worship in churches. But the truth of the matter is, every church does things differently. A contemporary service at one church may look completely different from a contemporary service at another church, and the same applies to traditional worship as well. However, there are a few things that most churches with these styles of worship have in common.
The lights, the fog, the big stage: these are elements many people picture when they think of contemporary worship. But not every contemporary service, or church for that matter, looks like this. The contemporary label is far more often used to describe the music included in the service, rather than other elements. Music is often a central focus in this type of worship service, as Robert Webber argues that “the acts of entrance [(or the beginning of the worship service)] are carried out almost exclusively in song with a few appropriate comments here and there.” In these services, “a wide variety of musical instruments has come to be utilized, including the guitar, the drums, and the synthesizer 3 .” Contemporary worship music has gained a lot of popularity. Many churches view the inclusion of this type of music as necessary in order to remain culturally relevant.
However, this music has been put up for speculation, as there is “criticism in some Christian circles about the “thin” theological content of contemporary church music (leading to a preference for the doctrinally “thick” hymns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries)”, however, this criticism seems to completely miss the point of this style of music, as “the intent of contemporary music is less to cognitively teach through words than it is to accomplish a corporate unity before the divine, even a cooperate ushering in of the gathered assembly into the literal presence of the living God. Singing a chorus of “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” then, may be theologically “thin,” but can be quite “thick” in providing a corporate worship experience in which the focus is less on the words of the song and more on the sense of union in the hearing and singing together 4 .” Through the incorporation of contemporary worship music, churches are placing a stronger emphasis on the corporate worship experience.
It seems in this day and age, less and less people gravitate towards singing the hymns of traditional worship music. Singing out of hymnals is slowly but surely becoming a lost art, as more and more people are unable to read music. However, “hymns serve the purposes of Christian corporate worship. Though they have value for personal devotional use, for humming on the streets, for serving as the basis for elaborate compositions for choir and organ, their primary purpose is to allow a gathered community to thank God, confess sin, ask for divine intervention, and express hope for the coming kingdom of God 5 .” Many would argue that hymns are no longer “culturally relevant,” but their relevance is defined by how we as christians honor our tradition. No one would say that taking communion is culturally irrelevant. Many churches that offer traditional services do so either because it is apart of their identity (and people come to their church seeking traditional worship) or they have (typically older) members who have been at the church a long time and want to continue worshiping the same way. It would be unfair and downright oblivious to argue or assume that traditional worship is a dying art. Certainly, in his book, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail , Robert Webber argues that young adults are moving towards a reverent, more liturgical and traditional style of worship. Indeed, there is a growing percentage of christians who desire to attend liturgical worship services. They understand the liturgy not as meaningless repetition, but as a corporate experience of showing reverence to God. While many would assume that traditional worship is only for the older population, people young and old find joy in worshipping God through hymns. To say that it is no longer “relevant” to worship through hymns and liturgy is a vast generalization.
The Contemporary and Traditional worship styles are staples in church culture. In many ways, they divide us as christians, pitting us against each other because we either prefer one over the other, or believe one to be better than the other. Yet, while there are certainly defining features of these styles, every single church worships in a different way. It may be important to understand some of the distinctions between these labels. But, at the end of the day, it is far more important to understand the intentions behind individual worship services at different churches.
1. Providence United Methodist Church. Worship Styles. YouTube, YouTube, 20 May 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei6yg4TR7t0.
2. Webber, Robert. Renew Your Worship: a Study in the Blending of Traditional and Contemporary Worship. Hendrickson Publishers, 2001. pg. 43.
3. Webber, Robert. Renew Your Worship: a Study in the Blending of Traditional and Contemporary Worship. Hendrickson Publishers, 2001. pg. 45.
4. Marti, Gerardo. Worship across the Racial Divide: Religious Music and the Multiracial Congregation. Oxford University Press, 2012. pg. 11-12.
5. Witvliet, John D. Worship Seeking Understanding: Windows into Christian Practice. Baker Academic, 2003. pg. 259.

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So " contemporary worship " means worship that is appropriate and meaningful for people who are living now, rather than people who lived 100 years ago or who will live 100 years in the future. That means that
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