No Subject

So I've had the same problem as you, with the music and announcments.
I think it all comes down to a matter of coordination.  We have one person
who is in charge of coordinating our service (that would be me),
and all the other coworkers (pastor, ushers, worship, sound,
announcement people, etc) for that service have to go by the
schedule that is set.  Of course, the deacons and pastors have
final say in what actually goes on, but having one person in
charge makes it easier to plan the timing of things.

You really have to make a conscious effort to coach people and
be the "bad guy" to keep time.  In my situation, not keeping time
has a direct impact on other congregations and programs in
the church, so it's easy to justify keeping a schedule.  Going
overtime becomes a matter of not being good neighbors to the
other congregations in the church.  In your case, it's more
of a matter of people complaining, so you kind of have a different
issue to deal with.

As for the announcements, our current approach as of last weeek
is to make sure that the bulletin is comprehensive,
and that someone at some point in the service has to remind
the congregation to read through the bulletin.  Coach those who
are giving announcements to be brief, but not rushing.
Designate someone who has been trained to do the announcements.

We are also going to be mean (not really) to those people who
didn't have the foresight to get their announcements into the
bulletin on time and not allow them to stand up to make
announcements or get them to us at the last minute.  They'll
figure it out after they've been denied a couple of times.
We also encourage people to seek other venues to make announcemnts
such as emails or fellowship or small group meetings.

Be sure to keep track of how long your worship sessions from
week to week.  That way, when the worship service goes too long,
you'll have some real data for your worship
coordinator (or planning team) to see what activities
took too long.  The numbers won't lie.  Make a form and
get the ushers to keep track of things.

As for the number of songs in a service - unfortunately I've
had to concede to the fact that we can only do a certain
number of songs.  You just can't pack it all into one service.
So we have dropped certain things like the "special music"
during the offering in favor of a CD or instrumental only "muzak"
in order to allow more time for the main worship set.
I'd much rather have a good set of 5 or more songs together
instead of several individual songs scattered through the
service.

What this implies is that you'll have to take a hard look at
what activities you consider "essential" during your worship
service.  Sometimes we do things that are nice, but not
necessarily essential.  When you are short on time, you
have to give priority to the most essential things timewise
(in my church - worship, pastoral prayer, offering, and sermon).
The other things just have to drop by the wayside, or you
compromise those essential activities.  If you have no
influence over the worship service planning, then you'll
have to get with your pastor or whoever's in charge and work
out your vision for the worship service.  Otherwise, you
end up always scrambling to pack too many things into a service.

Now if I could only figure out how to have the setup crew and
worship team set everything up and warm up within 15 minutes...

Ken


> Message: 6
> Reply-To: <jlarson@larsoninsurance.com>
> From: "Jamie Larson" <jlarson@larsoninsurance.com>
> To: "Worship Listserve" <worship@praise.net>
> Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 08:26:30 -0500
> Subject: [Worship] announcements
>
> How do you handle announcements?
>
> Our service is billed as 1 hour 15 minutes, but is averaging 1 hour 30
> minutes.  We have been cutting worship, because people are complaining the
> service is too long.  Now we do 7 songs max and for over a month we have had
> almost 20 minutes of announcements and skits.  Worship still gets blamed for
> the length of the service.


===============================================================
               Kenneth Liu  |  kenliu@acm.vt.edu  
===============================================================
   Why do you need gcc to compile gcc?

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