A great deal of our worship habits have to do with control: hence command-and-control preaching. The preacher was the controller: of the space, what was said and when, the order, the flow, the timing, the outcomes. Parishioners had very little influence over the course of the ser vice and almost no influence within the sermonic space. When I first started out in ministry myself, I used to demand total control over the worship ser vice, even when carried out by other persons (staff or lay). Though the “harmony” of the ser vice may have been “tighter,” I’ve since learned that turning folks loose
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