Short and Sweet
The importance of the one-hour service to CTK.
While there is no God-ordained length to a time of public worship, there is a
“sweet spot” that we have found at CTK – the one-hour service. The one-hour
service has become an important component of the CTK strategy.
What Happens in an Hour
For Christian leaders, an hour service can been viewed as short, if not restrictive.
For the culture we are trying to reach, an hour is long, if not excessive. What
happens in modern culture in an hour or less?
• Doctor’s visits • Class periods
• Business meetings • Television shows
In our “microwave culture” events that go longer than an hour – like school
commencement ceremonies – are increasingly frowned upon. Even weddings
and funerals have become more of an “in and out” affair.
What the Seat Can Endure
Loss of attention span is well-documented as a modern phenomena, but there
has been an ancient proverb that “The mind can absorb only what the seat can
endure.” Yet for many unchurched people, the church stands for every
commandment, except this law of common sense. For some, childhood
memories of boredom flood back with just the mention of the word “church.”
It’s Not About Us
The mission of CTK is “To create an authentic Christian community that
effectively reaches out to unchurched people in love, acceptance and
forgiveness so that they may experience the joy of salvation and a purposeful life
of discipleship.”
The key word in our mission statement is “that.” “That” says it’s not just about us.
Our mission calls us to be intentional in how we conduct ourselves for the sake of
the lost. For the same reason that we have chosen to be sensitive to the hang
ups of the unchurched around certain subjects (like money), and styles (like
organ music) we have chosen to be disciplined in our use of time.
The Rubber Meets the Road
The one-hour service is “where the rubber meets the road” for our commitment to
reach the lost. It is much easier to say “I am committed to reaching out” than to
say, “Because I am committed to reaching out, I am going to have a one-hour
service.” The one-hour service is a very tangible way that we can do something
to meet the needs of lost people.
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Put Yourself in Their Shoes
Imagine that you are lost. You have been invited to go to church, but you don’t
know if you want to do that, or not. You begin putting up objections: “I don’t have
anything to wear….I think my kids have a soccer game on Sunday.” Your friend
insists that you can come as you are and that the services are only one hour.
You walk through the door on a Sunday morning a few minutes late, but the
service is already underway. Though you do not know any of the songs being
sung, the musical portion of the service is well-paced and reasonable. The
teaching begins without delay – relevant, Bible-based, interesting. Before you
know it, the teaching is brought to a conclusion, as is the service. You walk out
pleasantly surprised, ready for a second dose. Later, when your friends or family
ask you about your experience you cite your surprise that “I was out of there in
less than an hour.”
If the church can deliver consistently on the promise of a one-hour service, you
have equipped your “bringers and includers” with an important counter to one of
Satan’s greatest allies, busyness.
Start on Time, End on Time
A mantra for CTK leaders is “Start on time, end on time, do the right things in
between.” This is a challenge at every level of convention, from small group to
worship service, but the local pastor has a disproportionately important role in
modeling this behavior publicly. If the Sunday service is boundary-less, it sets a
tone for the entire ministry, that time is not “of the essence.” If a service that is
supposed to start at 10:00 AM routinely starts at 10:10, what time do you think a
1:00 staff meeting, or 7:00 PM small group will begin? The cumulative effect of
Sunday’s sluggishness in your ministry is hundreds of wasted hours each week.
It’s Not Easy
Conducting a one hour service is not easy. Most things worth doing aren’t easy.
It will require psychological and practical daring. The pastor may need to send
out a note to everyone involved in the worship service that “we are going to make
starting on time and ending on time a point of emphasis, beginning this Sunday.”
He may need to apologize publicly for services running over time. He may need
to trim his teaching notes from 8 pages to 5. He may need to specify a five-song
set to the worship team. Five minutes prior to the service, he may need to walk
up to the worship team leader and say, “I’d like to get started in a couple
minutes.” Three minutes prior to the service he may need to ask, “Ready to go?”
He may need to bring conclusion to a delinquent pre-service prayer time. He
may need to put up a clock so that everyone is on the same page. He may need
to “cut in” on the worship team when they go long. He may have to forego one of
his points in order to finish on time. He may need to say “No” to certain public
announcements that people want to make. He may need to have lights in the
auditorium that signal transitions in the service. He may need to have an
uncomfortable conversation with a worship leader about the length of their
prayers. He may need to keep a “score card” of the number of weeks each
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month where services ended within the hour time frame. In any case, change
isn’t change unless something changes. Changes to the service format will
typically only come at the explicit direction of the pastor.
The Right Things In Between
What does a one-hour service look like? A sample 10:00 AM worship service:
9:45 Pre-service Prayer
- This needs to be started well in advance so as to not “bleed”
into the start of the service.
9:57 Opening Song
- The service should start with an upbeat music selection. This
song is not a worship song per se, but a song that engages
people to get ready for worship.
10:00 Welcome, Opening Prayer
- This should be direct and brief.
10:01 Worship Music
- Either a four song set with larger anthems, or a five song set
with smaller choruses.
- Important that there be little or no conversation between songs.
10:20 Pastoral Prayer
- The 20 minute mark is an important one to hit in order to assure a
one-hour service.
10:21 Greeting
- If you take a break, you need to allow more time here, but
remember is has to come from somewhere, either before or after.
10:22 Teaching
- Teachers should shoot for a 25 minute message, with a very brief
“talk before the talk”: “It’s good to be with you, etc.”
10:50 Closing Prayer
- The 50 minute mark is an important one to hit in order to assure a
one-hour service.
10:51 Q&A, Announcements
- There should only be one or two announcements. Other items
should be in the program.
10:55 Closing Song, Offering
- Ask people to “stand after the bucket has passed them by.”
- Important to delay the taking of the offering until well into this
closing song to allow people to fill out cards and checks.
10:59 Closing Blessing
- Just one sentence, with music to resume immediately.
Where To Find the Time
Activity expands to fill the available time. If your services are routinely 1:15 or
1:30, no doubt there are things (good things probably) happening to fill that time.
The secret of concentration is elimination. Something(s) will have to go. Here
are some typical time-stealers, and what you can do to deal with these culprits.
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Service-Related Culprits
1. Late start. When the service gets started 5 minutes late, you can pretty
much count on it: The service is going to go over time, at least that
amount. It may be necessary to commission someone from the worship
team to be the timekeeper, and ensure that the service is started 2-3
minutes early. If you go from starting a service several minutes late to
starting a service a few minutes early, you can achieve a swing of 5-10
minutes easily.
2. Announcements. Don’t do them, or be very deliberate about limiting them.
Train people to read the program. You will be surprised that if you cut out
announcements, you will probably find another 5-10 minutes in your
service. If there is a lot to announce, get it in writing so that people can
read and reference it. If you allow someone else to give an
announcement, understate the amount of time they have to do so. If you
tell them 1 minute, they will probably take 5. If you tell them 3 minutes,
they’ll take 10. Remember also, it takes time to “announce the
announcer” and then follow up with your own comments when they’re
done.
3. Long sets. On average each song takes 4-5 minutes to sing. This means
that a five song set is 20-25 minutes. Many newer worship anthems trend
longer than older choruses. This makes a five-song set, including the
opening song, a safe rule of thumb. The pastor should be prepared to
come up at the 20-22 minute mark if the set goes long. If the pastor will
do that consistently, the worship team will have all the incentive it needs to
start 2-3 minutes early. Trimming long music sets can reclaim 5-10
minutes.
4. Long prayers. This is a delicate one to address, but the Bible actually
beat me to it. Long, public prayers were a point of caution for Jesus.
Shorter prayers can save you a 1-2 minutes.
5. Too many transitions. Valuable time is “wasted” in a service with every
transition between elements. It is better for flow to have three transitions
(say between worship / prayer / teaching / worship) than nine (say
between welcome / worship / prayer / worship / prayer / announcement /
teaching / announcement / worship / prayer).
Teaching-Related Culprits
1. Long introductions. Many teachers actually have a 25 minutes message,
just with a 10 minute introduction. Drop the introduction and get into the
topic quicker. “Get into it, get through it, get out of it.” Instead of
beginning, “I was driving by the school the other day, and that got me
thinking about how its been a while since I spoke on the topic of
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children”….say, “Today, we’re going to be talking about children.”
Trimming your introduction to seconds, can save you 5-10 minutes.
2. Repetition. Old deductive teaching theory was “State, illustrate, restate.”
New inductive teaching theory is “illustrate, state.” If you’ve already said
it, you’ve already said it. Don’t use a battleship of words to get across a
row-boat thought. Trimming repetition can save 5 minutes out of a
message.
3. Too much content. The best sermons only have one “big idea.”You’re
your message has more than one big idea, consider breaking the
message out into a series. Better to preach three leisurely 20 minute
messages, than to try to squeeze an hour of material into 40 minutes.
Streamlining content can save you 10 to 15 minutes.
4. Too many points. Beware of the temptation of laundry list teaching: “10
ways you can….” Long lists take extraordinary time to get through if for no
other reason than you have to manage your location in the list (“the sixth
reason is”….“that brings me to the eight reason”). Structuring the teaching
to limit “time spent maintaining the structure” can save you two to three
minutes.
5. Talking too slow. People can hear at a much faster rate than most talk.
Listen to a tape and see if you occasionally wish that the speaker would
“pick up the pace.” If your cadence is slow and steady, consider stepping
on the gas pedal, at least occasionally. Getting out of second gear could
save you a couple minutes.
6. Sluggish conclusions. Precious time can be wasted when teachers “circle
looking for a place to land.” Script your closing remarks, so that when it’s
time to close, you can bring the teaching time to a succinct conclusion.
This can save you a couple minutes.
Taking advantage of just half of these recommendations could trim 20-30
minutes of fat off your service, without any appreciable loss in impact. On the
other hand, allowing these culprits to continue insures that your services will “run
long.”
Special Focus: The Long-Winded Preacher
Someone has said, “No doubt the problem is you.” One of the reasons that
many pastors do not make a commitment to the one-hour service is that they
resist the personal discipline that would imply. It takes more preparation and
focus to deliver something meaningful in 25 minutes than in 40 minutes. It might
require an additional hour of preparation to remove every minute of extraneous
stuff. If you can’t fit your message into 25 minutes, you may either be not trying
hard enough, or trying to cram two messages into one. As someone has said,
“With the availability of modern word processors, any fool can write a five
hundred page book and often does.”
“When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus
brevity is a by-product of vigour.”
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- Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr and E B White
“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
- Hamlet
“I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the
time to make it shorter.”
- Blaise Pascal
“When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds take in quickly what
you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is
unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind."
- Cicero
"A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad
marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a
handful and throws in hopes he may hit."
- English lexicographer Samuel Johnson
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the
necessary may speak."
- Hans Hofman
Don’t ask others to do what you are not willing to do. For a pastor to ask the
worship team to be finished in 20 minutes, and then to take 40 minutes for the
teaching, is not good leadership. On the other hand, when others can tell that
you are “walking the talk” you will find that they are more than willing to do their
part.
Time is the Medium
In a public worship service we are tempted to think that the medium we are
working with is words. It’s not. The medium is time. People are giving us their
time, and we have to do something meaningful within that time. If we think that
words are the medium we tend to think, “I have a lot to say. I wish I had more
time.” When we come to understand that time is the medium we are inclined to
ask, “What do they need to hear? How can I boil this down?” This is a
fundamental, philosophical shift demanded by outreach.
Yeah, but….
OK, I know that there are objections, because I’ve had them and heard them
over the years. Here are some of the best, and how I respond to them.
1. “This is going to limit the Spirit moving in our services.”
• “Do you really think that God needs more time to do his thing?” I believe that
God’s Spirit can speak a lot to our hearts in the course of an hour. I also trust
that the Spirit is at work during the week leading up to the service in a
powerful way. We most definitely need the Spirit’s help when we are trying to
choose a worship set, or pare down a message to its more salient points.
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• “Do you think we will be able to accommodate God’s agenda better if our
agenda is shorter, or longer?” I actually think that a one hour service is much
more ready for the possibility of God “showing up” than an hour and half
service. By being disciplined we have headroom.
2. “Our services go over an hour, but we are still growing.”
• “Are you growing by conversion growth?” Our mission calls us to reach out
to unchurched people – people who are not acclimated at all to attending a
weekly church meeting. I do not deny that transfers from other churches may
be used to, or even enjoy, a longer service. But the longer you perpetuate an
elongated service, the more you run the risk of being hostile to the very
people you are wanting to reach.
• “Is it possible that you are growing in spite of your longer service, not
because of it?” Through the years, I have seen CTK centers grow with
shorter services (of less than 45 minutes) and with longer services (over 1
hour, 15 minutes). But overall, the sweet spot, has been an hour or less.
• “Could you grow even faster if you streamlined your services?” Very few will
not come because “the service is too short.” More will not come because “the
service is too long.”
3. “People say they want more.”
• “Good. They’ll probably come back next week.” When you hear this, and I
hope you do, remember that this is a compliment, not a criticism. Some
people will actually beg you to lengthen either the worship time, teaching
time, or both. It is preferable in my opinion to have people leave, wanting
more, than to dump the entire truck load on them, and have them skip the
next couple weeks while they digest it.
• “People who truly want more, can get as much as they want in their personal
devotional times.” Our public services are designed with the person at the
other end of the spectrum in mind: the doubter, the skeptic, the prodigal, etc.
4. “I feel like having a longer service and I am going to do what I want
to do.”
• “It’s not about us.” There are a lot of sacrifices we make at CTK for the sake
of the mission. Churches cease to grow when they are no longer willing to
pay the price for that growth. It costs us something as believers to reach out
effectively to unchurched people. A commitment to the one-hour service is
not a high price to pay. If you cannot pay this price, I would question your
ability to pay higher prices to come.
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5. “Starting late is part of our culture.”
• “Do you consider it a good part of your culture?” Maybe the culture of the
community needs to be changed. A culture that rewards those who come
late, reinforces that behavior. If you start to hold services on time, you will
reward and reinforce the behavior of those who attend on time. Change the
culture to serve the greatest number of people.
Planning Ahead
When a Worship Center has only one service, there is not always an urgency to
see the service be an hour or less. But there are reasons to make a commitment
now to the one-hour service to prepare for growth in your Worship Center.
1. Service Schedules
With growth, a Worship Center adds additional services to create capacity. Every
Center should be planning ahead for the possibility of 4-5 weekend services.
With multiple services, you will be glad that you established a one-hour format.
The one-hour service can easily accommodate three services on Sunday
morning, while an hour-and-a-half service only allows two. With one-hour
services, you are able to offer more services at the “prime times” people most
like to attend – Sunday mornings.
2. Travel Time
With growth, a Worship Center adds additional sites to create capacity. Every
Center should be planning for the possibility of launching 4-5 new Centers.
Some new launches may involve a pastor going back and forth between two or
more Centers. Service times become more critical when you have to factor in
travel time. Some examples:
Dave Browning going from a 5:30 PM Saturday service in Oak Harbor to a
7:15 PM service in Anacortes.
Dave Browning and Steve Mason leading five 50 minute services in two
locations (Bellingham and Laurel) that were started at 45 minute intervals.
Sam Middlebrook leading worship for both Burlington and Sedro-Woolley,
a possibility because one service started at 9:45, and the other at 10:30.
Dave Browning teaching between Mount Vernon and Burlington, with
services in Mount Vernon at 9:00 and 10:30, and Burlington at 9:45.
3. Energy Levels
With multiple services and sites, worship personnel and teachers are often asked
to do “double or triple duty.” With two or more services, differences in service
length become significant. Having taught five times per weekend for two years, I
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can tell you that the only way I was able to sustain that output was with 20-25
minute messages, and one-hour services. 5 times 40 minutes would not have
been sustainable.
4. Childcare
A key group of people who are grateful for the one-hour service are volunteers
who serve in children’s ministries. One hour is easier on both teachers and kids.
The programming requirements to keep the attention span of a group of kids
beyond an hour is challenging. If you ask workers to “serve at one service and
worship at the other” you are asking for 2.5 hours of time with 2 one hour
services; maybe 3.5 hours with longer services. If you don’t think that this
difference is significant, ask a children’s worker.
The CTK Brand
At CTK, there is “freedom with handrails.” The handrails are our beliefs and our
brand. The one hour service is part of the CTK brand. I remember well the first
service I ever attended at CTK in Bellingham. The service started on time. The
band began to play, and led an uninterrupted series of 5-6 songs. The pastor
came up to pray, and then sat on a stool to speak. He spoke for 20-25 minutes
in a clear and concise manner. The service closed with another song led by the
band. There were no announcements. No “special” musical numbers. No
comedy. No drama. No video. Yet it was extremely engaging. Almost startlingly
so. The word of God was presented in a clear, compelling way with an obvious
sensitivity to the unchurched. The service was done in an hour. It was a very
concise, meaning-full service for which CTK has become known. Since then,
thousands of people have been drawn to CTK’s worship services.
Conclusion
The power to act is never released until a decision has been made. The pastor
of all people must decide that a one-hour service is what he wants. He must cast
vision for a preferable future (“preferable” for the unchurched people we are
trying to reach). He must hold everyone accountable to do what needs to be
done.
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