We’ve moved in this series from the fixed and permanent things to the more flexible things. Every church should sing and preach the Word. But churches can go about that differently. I’ve known of churches where the congregation requests songs on the spot. That’s not what we do but that’s one way to do it. In this post I’ll outline how we design our worship services.

We’re using the metaphor of church architecture as a way of thinking about the design of our Lord’s Day services. We rightly put care into how we design a church facility. In fact, at Heritage we’re entering a master planning process for our own building. We’re talking about the parts and the flow of our building.

This is the first in a three-part series, How Does The Gospel Shape Our Gathering? Read, “Part 2: Our Liturgical Form,” and, "Part 3: Our Design Workflow." **** You might have seen a church whose architecture was the shape of a cross. It's called cruciform...

Settle in and allow me to explain. Greg Gilbert wrote a helpful piece for pastors a little over a year ago. Some of his concluding words have stuck with me: This is a hard year to be a pastor. There’s the pandemic. There’s the frustration, for many of us, of not being able to gather with the church as normal. There’s the vaguely ridiculous prospect of preaching to a congregation whose faces you can’t see because they’re all wearing masks. There’s the livestream you launched literally two weeks after you publicly called down God’s own curses on yourself if you ever consented to a “video venue.”

We haven’t passed the plate in over a year, yet our lights are on, our pastors are paid, and giving has increased. Let’s talk about that. COVID gave our elders an opportunity to test-drive something we had been pondering informally for some time: giving without plates. How has it gone? Just fine. Actually, measured in terms of the church’s generosity, it’s gone great.