In this video, Aaron Ivey talks about how the Word of God is the most important part of a worship ministry. If you take the Word out of it, we’re just singing fun songs and getting together and eating chips and queso.
Here are a few of Aaron’s main points:
Aaron Ivey: In every single facet of worship ministry it all hinges on the word of God. Without the Word of God, we have no compass. We have no gauge. We have no hope. We have no tangible written word or voice of God speaking to us. If you take the Word out of it, we’re just singing fun songs and getting together and eating chips and queso.
The Word has to be central to everything because that is life. In every single gathering that we do and every meeting, the Word of God has to be an essential piece of it all. If you’re just talking about Sundays, this is really good for our people and our team to be reminded of. Everything is centered around the Word of God being preached on a Sunday.
There are different ways of looking at Sundays and different ways of looking at liturgies for us. The Word of God and the preaching of the Word of God is the very most important thing that happens in a Sunday gathering. We believe that the Sunday gatherings are primarily for the believer, not for the unbeliever. The Sunday gathering is aimed at preaching the Word and equipping believers to know, to read, to study, and then to apply the Word as they leave. Everything focuses on the Word and then is a response to the word.
Here’s how it plays out with liturgy building for us: our highest aim on a Sunday is not creativity or innovation. Our highest aim is that people would be focused toward the hearing of the Word of God, and then they would leave with application to obey the Word of God. That’s the highest aim for a Sunday gathering.
Here’s what’s crazy: when you aim at preaching the Word and you aim specifically at the Word of God being proclaimed to believers, the beautiful thing that happens is that when unbelievers are there, they also hear the Word of God and actually have something to take hold of and leave. If we don’t offer that, we’re not offering our people much of anything at all – just an experience.
So in building Sunday liturgies, we know what the Sunday sermon is going to be and we ask this question: What’s the one thing, the one story, that we’re trying to tell this week? What’s the main passage? What’s the thing we want them walking out of here talking about? Then, that whole Sunday is built around that one thing.
For example, two weeks ago we were in the book of Exodus. The main thing we talked about was the splitting of the Red Sea and God offering his people salvation. The point of the book of Exodus is salvation. God saves his people. On that specific Sunday, the entire liturgy focused on that. That’s how we worked backwards and built from the beginning. The first song, the call to worship, the next three songs, the sermon, and then the songs after the sermon being a response and a reflection of that word that was preached. And then all the way down even to the announcements at the end. “Hey guys, based on what the Word of God had to say for us today, here’s the application. You can get involved in doing this. You can do this. Here’s how you know about salvation. Here are classes on this.” Everything basically centered around what the Word of God was proclaiming that specific week. That’s kind of high level for Sundays, but that filters down into every single part of our gatherings.
