The Church Lobby Ep 068: The Small Church Worship Advantage, with Teresa Stewart
Have you ever felt like your church is “less than” because you don’t have a worship experience with the talented musicians you’ve seen in larger churches? According to Teresa Stewart, not only is that not needed for an excellent worship experience, but the small church actually has advantages that are not always available to our big-church friends.
In this conversation, Karl Vaters talks with Teresa Stewart about some of those advantages, including:
- The Happy Birthday Effect
- Seeing and adjusting our aesthetic cues
- Stone Soup planning
- The value of small-church symbols
- How to ask better questions about our worship experience
- And so much more
Teresa Stewart is the author of The Small Church Advantage: Seven Powerful Worship Practices that Work Best in Small Settings.
Teresa’s approach is simple, practical, and applicable in most small-church settings. She challenges some of the ways we’ve thought about small-church worship, offers viable alternatives, then gives some wonderful step-by-step advice about how to curate worship to be more participatory without letting chaos reign.
Links from this Episode:
Bonus Content
The Role of Conversation in Small-Church Worship, with Teresa Stewart
Karl Vaters talks with Teresa Stewart about conversation can be incorporated into the small-church experience. She encourages us to start slow and small. And she helps us curate the experience so it doesn't become a free-for-all. As Teresa wrote in her book, “Conversation in worship is not an anything-goes pursuit. It should serve and deepen the worship. Begin by curating worship in one element of your usual order.”
On a very practical level, Teresa talks about the three levels of questions and conversation. Knowing these levels will help you approach this with wisdom and patience, allowing people to participate while maintaining a sense of direction.
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