Some Changes in Our Sunday Corporate Worship Order

From the Pastor’s Desk (231)

The Leadership Team and I have been discussing for some time how we can make our Sunday corporate worship service even better than how it is now. In the course of past few years, a suggestion has been made to me several times that we drop off our children at NLK before worship starts in order to have a continuous flow of praise, without a break in the middle, to enhance our worship experience. This was very difficult for me to accept because one element of our worship service that I wanted to keep was the first set of praise that we do together with our children.

From New Life’s inception, worshiping with our children has been a very important conviction of mine because I believe in teaching our children through modelling. We can’t teach our children what we don’t practice ourselves. Therefore, I desired all New Life parents to show up at church on time joyfully and gladly ready to worship God with their children. And during worship, I wanted all the parents to lift up their voices and raise their hands to praise God realizing that our children often observe us and will learn from watching what we do.

However, during our discussion on this topic in the recent past, I was made aware by our Leadership Team members that parents do in fact praise God with and in front of their children during their house church and in NLK when they serve. Therefore, we have all agreed to try this new worship format starting from the first Sunday of February.

We came up with three slightly different orders of worship and have decided to try the following format at least for a few months to see how it will go.

• Greetings
• Shepherd’s Prayer
• Praise
• Message (Baby dedications, graduations, testimonies will happen during this time before the message)
• Time of Commitment
• Giving back to God
• Benediction

In order to implement this change as seamlessly as possible, please remember to do the following:

One, if you are serving as the Purple/Red, Pre-K, and Blue Room Leads or check-in volunteers, please come to church at least 20 minutes before worship begins so that you can get all the rooms and check-in area ready.

Two, if you are scheduled to serve at NLK for the month, please be sure to come to church at least 15 minutes before worship starts to be prepared to receive children to your classroom. I am aware that some parents who are members of New Life and some NLK volunteers are not arriving on time to serve in NLK at times. NLK is a partnership between parents and volunteers to raise our children to be the next generation of Christ followers, and everyone must do their part to help make NLK as impactful as possible for our children. Let’s remember that when we do ministry alone, it gets tiring. However, when we do it together with others, it becomes a joyful activity.”

Three, if you are a parent and need to drop off your child to NLK, please complete the check-in process at least five minutes before worship begins so that you will not be late to worship service not missing anything and also be able to respect others’ worship experience.

Four, if you are scheduled to do Shepherd’s Prayer, please come to the back stage 10 minutes before worship begins so that you can pray for the worship and also receive the prayer from worship leaders.

Five, please remember that your worship experience will be very much affected and determined by the way you live your life from Monday through Saturday. Often, I hear some people commenting that the worship was awesome when some others complain about it. It was the same worship service that they participated in but with two different hearts. Your heart before coming to church on Sunday matters.

Let’s faithfully live our lives for God throughout the whole week so that we can experience all that God has in store for us on Sunday! : )

Your pastor,

Eric