WorshipCentral

As thousands of courses start up across the world, I take a look at how to introduce sung worship on The Alpha Course.

Alpha is a ten week evangelistic course, designed for people who are not Christians. There are tens of thousands of courses running in churches of all denominations in over 150 countries around the world, and over 8 million people have attended an Alpha Course.

Surprisingly perhaps, worship plays a central role in an Alpha Course. It is a vital part of the ingredients of Alpha. But, the key question is how on earth can you ask a bunch of people who don’t believe that God exists to worship?

The Father Seeks Worshippers

Evangelism is about restoring correct worship. Worship is one of those things that everyone does instinctively: it’s a first order human activity, like breathing, eating and sleeping. Jesus came to restore right worship, so that everyone on this planet can find purpose and meaning in a loving relationship with their heavenly Father.

The Westminster Catechism says ‘the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever’. At what point do we let people know this? When they’ve been hanging around church for a while? If our main deal is to be worshippers, then worship must be at the heart of our gospel message: worship and evangelism go hand in hand.

Worship Draws People to God

There’s a brilliant story in Acts 16:25, where Paul and Silas have been thrown in jail for telling people about Jesus. They start worshipping, God intervenes supernaturally, the doors of the jail are blown off and half the prison is converted. Worship has a powerful impact on people who don’t know God, because God promises to draw near to his people when we draw near to him.

Worship Is What We Do

We’re the church. We worship. It’s a fact. From the start of our story, it’s just the way it is. People know this about us. There’s no point in pretending we don’t worship. We do. Because we’re the church.

Now, when people come and hang out with us, wanting to find out a little bit about what we believe, and have room to think for themselves, we don’t start pretending the things we really value aren’t important to us. That would be lacking in authenticity.

We want our evangelism to give people a taster of what church is like, and ‘what-you-see-is-what-you-get’ is a really important principle. So we don’t need to try an pretend we don’t love to worship, because we do. We do however need to have a little think about how we introduce people to worshipping Jesus, given that the whole worship-earthquake-chains-coming-off thing is quite rare.

Worship on Alpha

We introduce worship on week one of Alpha. We’ll just call it a ‘couple of songs’ because to most people, that is what it is. We’ve tried not having worship, and that’s hard because by the end of a ten week course people have pretty much formed their understanding of what Christians do, and then they rock up to church and you’re all there singing. It’s weird then. We’ve tried introducing worship on the weekend away, and it’s weird then, because people already have enough going on with the whole thing of going away with a bunch of strange Christians. So, we ended up shooting for the first night, because at least then everything is weird.

Nicky Gumbel, who leads our course, will introduce the evening with a welcome, a joke and then introduce the team running the course. Then he’ll introduce whoever is leading the worship on that term’s course, which is usually Tim or myself.

Nicky will say “in a moment we’ll be having a time of singing. People often ask me why on earth are we having to sing on the first night of Alpha. At the end of the course we ask you to fill out a little questionaire to help us run the course better. Two of the questions are ‘what did you enjoy least’ and ‘what did you enjoy most?’ Time and time again we get them back and the thing people enjoyed least was the singing. People write ‘I hated the singing on the first night, it was terrible’. Then for the question ‘what did you enjoy most’, people write ‘the singing: by the end of the course I found my voice had a purpose, I love the times of singing. The strange thing is that these are not different people, they’re the same people! Of course you don’t have to sing, and no one is going to prod you if you don’t. Now, this is Al, who sill be leading our singing.”

Let’s rewind about forty five minutes… the guests on Alpha arrived for the meal, and out of the corner of their eyes they saw a guitar on a stage, thought to themselves ‘this could be my ultimate nightmare. Some naff Christian is going to make me stand up and sing horrible naff songs and shake a tambourine’. Then they see me lurking by the stage, and to their horror I pick up the guitar.

So I say this: “Hi, my name is Al, I am your worst nightmare, a Christian with a guitar.” And they roar with laughter, because it’s true. Then I say “would you like to stand, we’re going to sing together…” I sing two songs and say “would you like to take your seats.” That’s it. I don’t pray, start explaining stuff (“Yeah, I wrote this next song the day my dog died…”) or ‘coach’ people in worship. John Wimber always used to say “worship is better caught than taught” and there’s a lot of truth in that. People will figure it out, and the teaching material of the course covers worship, so there’s no need to add an extra five minutes each night beating the sheep and trying to harrangue them into looking and sounding like your Sunday night crowd. Let them be. They probably won’t sing for weeks.

Choosing Your Songs

If you look at the fifty top songs your church sings, they will fall into two loose categories: objective songs (He is good) and subjective songs (I love You, Lord). For the first few weeks I would use a mixture of well known familiar hymns and contempoary objective songs. By the weekend, I would begin to introduce some of the more personal songs from our church life, as people now have an understanding of what a personal relationship with God looks like.

So a sample playlist for us might look like this:

Week 1
How Great Thou Art (Hymn) [A]
Forever (Give Thanks) [A]

Week 2
Holy (Lift Up His Name) [E]
Amazing Grace [E]

Week 3
Forever (Give Thanks) [G]
Here Is Love Vast As The Ocean (Hymn) [G]

Week 4
Amazing Grace [E]
Here I Am To Worship [E]

Week 5

Open The Eyes of My Heart [E]

Here is Love Vast As The Ocean [E]

Introduce At Weekend
Happy Day [C]
All To Jesus I Surrender [C]
Blessed Be Your Name [B]
How Great Is Our God [B]
Worship The Lord [G]
Everything [B]
Living For Your Glory [E]
Love Came Down [E]
Glorious [E]

Then from then on we tend to repeat this stuff, with perhaps a couple of new songs that are coming through the church at the time. We try and keep the songs in step with the course, so ‘Here I Am To Worship’ tends to come the week after Nicky has spoken about Jesus being the Light of the World.

We used to just lead with one acoustic guitar and voice, maybe with some percussion thrown in, to avoid over complicating things. We now use a well-rehearsed band, as the group is a bit too big for just one guitar.

People often ask us what should we do with a small Alpha Course, if there are just ten of us in a front room. Of course there comes a point where it is just not practical to do worship, but if you can do something to reflect the values I’ve been talking about here, it will really help ground people in worship. Perhaps see if you can borrow a worship leader? Perhaps play a DVD or song, or have worship playing in the background, just to introduce people to the concept of worship.

Don’t worry if it feels really awkward: it still feels really awkward with hundreds of people. The only difference is that there are more people feeling awkward. We’ve also got to take the long view. This is a ten-week course that for all of the people who come to faith may be the start of a life-long journey. The times of worship on Alpha are never (superficially) the most inspiring, but in many ways they are the most significant times for our church’s life. Behind the scenes even if people look like they’re having a horrible time, the Spirit of God is at work breaking captive hearts out of jail.

We love leading worship on Alpha because it is the most exciting place of worship in the church. I would rather lead worship on Alpha than anywhere else in the church life. On a Sunday you see people who know and love Jesus move from 8/10 to 10/10, but over the ten weeks of Alpha you may see people move from 0/10 to 8/10, and that is a far more significant and exciting journey.

Bring it on!