Using Service Builder
Good leaders want to help congregations grow in their grasp of the gospel and love for Christ, to welcome visitors and newcomers, so that everyone might find church an appealing and edifying experience.
In the section of this website entitled Learning from the Prayer Book, it was suggested that there is educative and pastoral value in adopting 'menus' and 'courses' that have been prepared by those with some expertise, together with prayers and forms of praise that have been tried and tested in various contexts.
Of course, to suit local needs on particular occasions, an order of service may need to be constructed from scratch and filled with local content. Every meeting does not need to contain formal liturgical elements to be honouring to God and helpful for those who gather. But there should always be an emphasis on hearing God's word, responding in prayer and praise, and ministering to one another in love.
At this basic level, and in more detailed ways as well, the principles, patterns and contents of the Prayer Book and its successors remain a helpful guide and resource. So the ServiceBuilder and the Resources sections of this website allow you to choose material from a number of Anglican liturgies. Various structures for services are suggested in the Practical Guidelines section, with suggestions about a range of elements to include at different points.
Model services can be found in the ServiceBuilder section of the website, where you can easily add different elements to familiar structures and print the results.
Service leaders could adopt these in a regular pattern over a month, or use the Resources section to construct orders of service from scratch, according to their own context and needs. The Downloads section provides Powerpoint versions of prayers, creeds and other elements for constructing services.
ServiceBuilder QuickStart
ServiceBuilder is a tool that helps create God-honouring, meaningful and biblical gatherings. It allows you to arrange 'resources' (like confessions, creeds and prayers) into services that glorify God and edify the church.
You can use predefined 'templates', or you can adapt the standard templates to create your own. Once you have built your service on-line, the service can be saved in MS Word format, ready for use in church.
ServiceBuilder can output a "Detailed" and a "Summary" version of your service. The summary version might be useful (for exmaple) as the version that you provide to the congregation, which would contain only the congregational responses. The detailed version would be the version used by the service leader.
Click here to start ServiceBuilder