One of the things that I hear from time to time is that I don’t “believe” in public worship services. Apparently, because I believe in more organic expressions of church life as well as more organized expressions, this means I couldn’t possibly embrace public worship services. Perhaps that’s what happens when you are tagged with the “organic” label?

I, of course, find this particularly amusing as someone from the Anglican Church.

Now I’ve written on my thoughts on the need and uses of public worship before (most notably, here), but as we have just started a local worship service on Sunday nights in Pawleys Island, I thought this might be another good way of highlighting how the organic and organized work together. And in particular, why we are starting a worship service.

Sally and I moved to Pawleys Island four years ago this upcoming December. For the first few years, there were 3-4 families that made up 3DM in Pawleys (there was more team spread throughout the country). We have some pretty simple rhythms that guide our life together as a team:

• We meet together every weekday for worship, prayer and teaching for 30-40 minutes. That’s how we start every day. Whether there are 3 people or 50 people. (You can read a bit more about that here.)
• We get together as a team once on the weekends with parents, kids, visitors, etc. This can be brunch at someone’s house, time at the beach (yes, it’s nice to live at a beach!), bowling, etc. Sometimes there is spiritual content, sometimes not. But we’re a family together.
• We regularly have people moving houses or moving into town and the whole team shows up.
• We regularly attend a worship service, as different people in the team attend a few different local churches.

Over time, our team has grown to a lot more than 4 families and we’ve done what we always do: Start local Huddles and Missional Communities. So while we have team that work for 3DM, we now have a larger connected family of more than 100 people.

There are two deciding factors for us in starting a weekly local worship service:

ONE. We need to disciple people (train) in how to lead and craft the environment for public worship. In the same way that we train people to lead Huddles and Missional Communities, we need to train people in how to lead public worship as it can be different when you have these other organic expressions. There are people on our current team and people cycling through Pawleys each week that are looking for this kind of training.

TWO. With more than 75 people connected to our extended family, it feels right to have a celebration of what God is doing in a larger group way that didn’t feel right at a smaller size. But again, it’s for training so they can be sent out again.

We will not judge this service by whether it grows or not, but by whether we are successful, through worship, teaching, ministry time and practical training, to send people out to their mission field each week. (By ministry time, I mean the time of response following a teaching where people can participate in communion, continue worshipping, receive prayer for all kinds of physical or spiritual needs, decide to becomes disciples of Jesus, etc. It’s a time of repentance and orienting all of our hearts and minds towards God.)

In taking this posture, we believe it allows us to continue working with local churches. We encourage local pastors to attend as well. We encourage attendees to continue in the life of their local church and to give their tithes and offerings there.

Our hope and prayer is that this can be another step in resourcing, supporting and encouraging the pastors and communities in Pawleys Island.