As all the evangelical pointers continue to signal a continued shift toward worship expressions which are more rooted and liturgical, I’ve noticed an increased re-engagement with that archaic piece of print material known as the “order of worship.”  Others call it an “order of service,” a “printed liturgy,” or simply a “bulletin.”  Screens in worship have served well many functions, but one thing they cannot get away from is that the words and ideas they project are fleeting.  You can’t (usually) know what’s coming next in a worship service with screens.  You can’t meditate on any portion of the worship service when the screens constantly change text before you.  You can’t take a screen home with you for reflection.  (I'm sure there are iPhone apps out there to remedy that, but until every last person has an iPhone, it's still wishful thinking.)

In some respects, then, I think the resurgence of interest in a printed order of worship is not only an attempt to be more “liturgical,” but a recognition of the deficiencies of screen-usage.  Hear me out, I’m not against screens.  I just think we’ve lived long enough with them in worship to feel the effects of what they do not offer.  (Marva Dawn has a helpful discussion of the pros and cons of screens vs. hymnals in A Royal "Waste" of Time [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999], 289-293.)

In an earlier post, I argued for the importance of branding and corporate imaging in churches.  Some people react that this just seems too off course from the “main thing” churches are supposed to be about.  I argue that we uphold the main thing when we eliminate unnecessary (the key is unnecessary) distractions that keep the watching world from seeing, hearing, and knowing the main thing that we attempt to preach and live.  One of those barriers to our mission is that some of us are ignorant about how our printed media comes across to a culture that is awash in marketing and design theory.  We are inundated with well-designed ads, well laid-out mailings, and perpetual exposure to various corporate identities through all the various media.  When our print and electronic material is a mishmash of oddly juxtaposed fonts, awkward spacing, inconsistent margins, and out-of-date design concepts (e.g. clip art), it actually creates a barrier toward achieving our end as we plan and lead worship services.  Our end is that people might exalt and glorify our Triune God as they glory in the Gospel, and the concern is that an ugly bulletin distracts from that end.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned.  I am by no means a design and layout expert.  I didn’t study this stuff.  So if any professional wants to veto some of my tips, no problem. 

• Realize you don’t need a pro designer to do this.  So many features in our standard programs are available that, once we understand them, we really do have 80-90% of what we need to make a great bulletin.  As I describe what is below, just Google some of these terms and concepts if you feel you’re in the dark.  There’s enough web material out there to conquer this.
• Pick two contrasting fonts (ideally, they are fonts which are used in your church’s print and digital material, to maintain a unity in your visual identity…again, so as not to distract from what’s most important—the glory and mission of God).  Contrast is usually achieved when one font is more rounded and one is more blocky.  One of the ways these fonts are often set apart as “serif” and “sans-serif” fonts (a “serif” is a flourish, or those little tails at the end of letters; see this wikipedia article for more info).  A good example of the contrast is Times New Roman (serif) vs. Arial (sans-serif)…though I wouldn’t recommend using those two (too common...it looks like you've put no thought or originality into it).  In the example of our order of worship, we’ve chosen to contrast Dominican (a purchased, non-standard serif font) with Century Gothic (a pretty standard sans-serif font).
• Decide what fonts to use where.  Typically, you’ll want to simply and cleanly juxtapose fonts.  Don’t overkill it.  Simplicity looks better.  Perhaps you can set apart the main elements of the liturgy by making them a different font.  Everything else may be some form of the other font.  This seems to me to be more art than science, so you should poll a few people you trust about how it looks.  Your visual goals are very much in line with your liturgical ones.  What are the primary elements of our worship service?  What do I want to emphasize the most?  Those emphases should be accented visually.  You can do that with font differentiation.  You can also do that with size (next point).
• Think also about font sizes.  Things are set apart visually not only by font selection but size selection.  Again, you don’t want to go crazy here, but size changes help others easily see what things are more important.  (See the example's size differentiations below.)
• Be consistent about what information goes where.  I see this problem a lot.  Sometimes the song title is right justified, across from the heading.  Sometimes it’s underneath the heading, slightly indented.  Sometimes composers/songwriters are put in different spots.  Sometimes instructional material (“stand up/sit down”) is left justified and sometimes it’s indented.  This is all visually confusing.  If your composers are right justified, they should always go in that spot.  If your song titles are in quotes, they should all be in quotes always.  If your instructions are indented an inch, italicized, and 8 point font, they should all be that way.  Create “locational categories” for all your information.  Everything should be in the same spot.  When it’s not, it’s hard to follow.  
• Utilize the “style” features in your word processing or design programs.  Even if you’re using Microsoft Word, and definitely if you’re using Publisher, Quark, InDesign or some more high-powered design program, you have access to something known as “styles.”  You can set any one feature of your bulletin (whether it be a liturgical heading, a composer’s name, a song title, or an instructional note) to always appear a certain way, with certain design parameters (e.g. spacing between it and the next line, its size, font, and justification [whether you believe in Piper’s brand or Wright’s brand…kidding…a little theological joke], etc.).  Setting and utilizing styles ensures that your bulletin has a consistent layout and feel.  And the beauty of this is that you’re not reinventing the wheel when you’re doing the bulletin next week.  Once you have your styles set, you can use the previous week’s doc as your template.  You’ve cut your layout time in half, if not more.
• Be anal.  I’m a firm believer that when someone is anal on the back end, people aren’t anal on the front end.  People notice when something’s wrong, but when it’s right, people don’t notice it.  And that’s our goal, right? We don’t want people fixated on a piece of paper; we want them captivated by God.

There might be some who don’t care for our order of worship in style or design.  Even more important, our style and design may not fit every context, so you definitely want to think missionally about what kind of design and look is appropriate for your demographic, neighborhood, or region of ministry.  Nevertheless, I think the guy who set this up (it wasn’t me) did a really good job achieving some of these goals, so I offer one of our bulletins as an example.  You can click on this image, which will take you to a PDF file.  (It's a folded booklet, so it might take you a second or two to figure out how it runs.)

Review of Jim Belcher, Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional (Downers Grove, IVP: 2009)
Chapter 7, "Deep Worship"

Our pastoral team has been reading through Deep Worship, by Jim Belcher.  We were intrigued by the subtitle, because we felt it captured our vision for our local church: “A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional.”  Most of us had the opportunity to personally meet Jim a few weeks ago when he spoke at St. Gabriel the Archangel Episcopal Church just down the road from us for a conference on church, culture, and mission.  Our musicians were part of a joint worship service (you can read about our experience), and Jim actually got our CD and took it home to his folks.  Nice!

Deep Church is a book about church, culture, and mission…not worship, necessarily.  However, he does have one chapter that intersects with worship in a significant way, and I felt that it was worth chewing on.

He begins the chapter by recounting the worship wars in which many churches have been entrenched for decades.  As Belcher listened to both sides, he laments:

“I had grown weary of the thinness of contemporary worship, which seemed so lifeless and often done by rote. But I didn’t want to return to the traditional style I grew up with, which seemed devoid of the real presence of God and focused on the passing on of information” (p. 124).

While these are broad-brush generalizations, I believe Belcher captures the heart of how many young evangelicals feel about the state of worship in our churches.  In fact, I believe that this sentiment is at the heart of the hymns movement and the resurgence of interest in liturgy.  This has led Belcher and others to search for a third way, which he calls “deep worship” (playing off the “deep church” theme borrowed from C. S. Lewis).

Belcher explains the reaction of the emerging church.  He discusses Dan Kimball’s book Emerging Worship, and pauses to reflect on Kimball’s concept of multisensory worship.  Belcher then recounts his oddly “normal” experience visiting the church where Kimball is pastor--Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, CA.  Belcher describes the service as God-focused and Christ-centered, with singing, a meaty sermon, candles, and lots of visuals (I am simplifying).  Belcher mentions that it is important to emerging leaders like Kimball to re-introduce a sense of the sacred into worship spaces and that the sacred can be felt and understood through interaction with all of one’s senses.  This longing for the sacred, again, is at the heart of the rebirth of explorations in liturgics and hymnology among evangelicals.  Belcher would also admit (as I would want to point out) that Kimball’s brand does not come close to representing the broad-sweeping emerging church.  Some emerging churches are house churches who know nothing of “sacred sanctuaries” (except that, by the Holy Spirit, their homes have become such). 

As in other chapters and topics in Deep Church, Belcher then presents the opposing side’s reaction (he calls the opposing side the “traditional” church, though that word should not necessarily link one’s thought to traditional styles as popularly understood but rather the traditional ways of “doing” church).  He cites several authors critical of emerging worship, though he points out that the authors have built straw men rather than accurately representing the heart of the emerging movement.  Belcher’s conclusion to all said so far is interesting:

“The emerging and traditional churches have the same Achilles’ heel—a faulty view of tradition.  Both are committed to the low-church view of church-tradition.  This has locked them into a model of worship that is dated and severely influenced by the Enlightenment.  They are handcuffed by a style of worship contextualized during the Reformation that no longer connects with postmodern people” (p. 133).

A powerful indictment! He goes on to argue that we as evangelicals have pitted tradition against the sufficiency of Scripture, which we need not do.  After diving into tradition for the last 10 years of my life, while still being a committed sola Scriptura Protestant, I have to agree with Belcher’s assessment.  It reminds me of a recent conversation I had with someone in my church responding to the fact that we were going to be utilizing acolytes (children candle-lighters) in our worship services.  She had commented, in a humble, confessional kind of way, “It feels so Catholic,” as if just because something were rooted in a non-Protestant tradition it is somehow challenging our sense of Bible-centeredness.  There is so much value in recovering tradition, because we connect with believers across time and realize that the Church is bigger than this present age. 

Belcher then goes on to something that intrigues me and which I have wrestled with in regards to the free utilization of tradition.  From Jonny Baker (author of Alternate Worship), he borrows the pop-music concept of “sampling” as a metaphor for the way the emerging church has utilized tradition in worship.  “Sampling” is taking a musical segment from another song and inserting it, often repetitively, in a new song (think of Notorious B.I.G.’s “Mo Money, Mo Problems,” or 2Pac’s “Changes”).  From Baker:

“Post-modern cultural savvy, combined with an evangelical tendency not to defer to high church regulation, led alt worshipers to treat this treasure chest [i.e. tradition] as a kind of dressing-up box.”

It’s as if we’ve taken bits and pieces of liturgy from various traditions and played dress-up with them.  This certainly is cutting and provocative.  Belcher’s ultimate point is that when liturgy is sampled as such, it is being stripped of what makes it meaningful and powerful, namely, the “Great Tradition,” as Belcher calls it.  Belcher, having studied well the philosophical underpinnings of postmodernism, fears that the postmodern tendency to construct meanings will be at play here…We’ll take this aspect and that aspect of liturgy and give them a new spin or new significance they were never intended to have.  It would be similar to taking a Scriptural quote and using it out of context.

What I can’t figure out from Belcher is whether or not he is totally against sampling of this sort or whether he’s against uninformed sampling.  Personally, I can’t imagine that one would rule out all sampling.  I don’t see how taking an Anglican confession of sin from the Book of Common Prayer and utilizing it in a Presbyterian liturgy is somehow reconstructing its meaning.  A confession is a confession.  The text speaks for itself.  Perhaps Belcher is referring to certain types of sampling.  If so, I would like some clarifications or examples.  As I see it, the positive side of sampling is that it tears down some of the walls of our denominationalism without compromising our distinctives.  I would be uncomfortable with some aspects of Eastern Orthodox liturgy (e.g. certain ways of relating to the saints and Mary), but I’ve found many aspects of Orthodoxy worth incorporating (e.g. the “Phos Hilaron,” or one of their liturgies of forgiveness and reconciliation).  Is it somehow disingenuous to that tradition to do so?  Again, I’m betting that Belcher and I do not disagree, because his concept of the “Great Tradition” is really the notion of what all Christians rally around in belief and practice (for instance, the Apostles’ Creed).  But if that’s the case, then I don’t understand how sampling violates that Great Tradition.  Perhaps I have misunderstood Belcher at this point.  To give him the final word on this:

“If we are serious about reclaiming the Great Tradition, we must look beyond our own experience to the formative eras (apostolic or patristic) of the faith and not just for the practices” (pp. 135-136).

Belcher’s next section exposes the truth about tradition:

“There is no golden time to return to…There is no return to the pristine church, no true historic form; it never existed.  And it does not mean converting to Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy” (p. 136).

This is an important point, and as I have said before (and noted by many others), some disenfranchised evangelicals have abandoned the contemporary church, not for other more traditional evangelical churches, but for what they perceive as a more ancient and rooted brands of Christianity—Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy.  Belcher quotes theologian Thomas Oden:

“All of the traditions have an equal right to appeal to the early history of Christian exegesis….Protestants have a right to the Fathers.  Athanasius is not owned by the Copts, nor is Augustine owned by North Africans…The Orthodox do not have exclusive rights over Basil, nor do the Romans over Gregory the Great.  Christians everywhere have equal claim to these riches and are discovering them and glimpsing their unity in the body of Christ” (p. 136).

I used to feel “temporally inferior” as a Presbyterian Protestant, because I was not heir to the Great Tradition in a way that Catholicism and Orthodoxy were.  Then I read Hughes Oliphant Old’s The Patristic Roots of Reformed Worship, and I was given a glimpse into a larger view of Protestantism.  As is the case with Presbyterian worship (as argued by Old), it is the case that, with every Protestant tradition, while there may be varying levels of discontinuity with the past tradition, there are still points of continuity which link even us newbie Protestants to the one holy catholic and apostolic church.  And we have a rightful claim to that tradition.

Belcher ends the chapter by describing worship at his church.  He’s quick to point out that it’s not about showing off his church; it’s about showing how one Christian assembly attempts to flesh out “Deep Worship.”  His seven descriptors are:

1) Ancient and new – incorporating old elements and new elements (this makes me think, by the way, that I have misunderstood his critical comments on “sampling” above).  Here, to my pleasure, he mentions the major players in the hymns movement (Indelible Grace, Red Mountain Church, and Sandra McCracken) and looks favorably on what we love: setting old hymns to new music.

2) Biblical drama – liturgy reenacts the drama of the Bible; Belcher groups his worship in “calling, cleansing, constitution, communion, and commission”; I like this!

3) Joy and reverence

4) Priesthood of all believers – minimizing the disparity between “those on stage” and “those in the audience”…love it!

5) Profound but accessible sermons

6) Weekly Communion

7) Guest-friendly—doxological evangelism – a phrase taken from Tim Keller, carrying the idea of worshiping before the nations (Ps 47:1), such that the praise of God, because of its vibrancy and authenticity, becomes attractive.

Overall, this was a very good chapter that I think is worthy to be read by all worship leaders, at least throughout the next ten years as the emerging church continues to exert its positive and negative influence.  Perhaps if there were one thing I could wish for more of throughout Deep Church, it would be scriptural argumentation and interaction.  Belcher’s strong point, in engaging this debate between the traditional church and the emerging church, is his extremely thorough study and understanding of both sides.  More than that, he is intimately acquainted with many emerging leaders and has, in a sense, “grown up” with them as he was acquiring his theological chops.  However, in a thorough discussion like this, I would want a bit more scriptural interaction.  I know its insinuated and that Belcher’s primary concern is to dialogue with the voices on the issues who have done that interaction, but in positing a third way, I was hoping for biblical argumentation to be a bit more overt.