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So what's going to happen in the environment you've just dreamed up?
Because alternative worship is both multi-media and 'multi-tasking' (in other words, lots of things may be happening simultaneously) you need to develop your structure on a service grid. One example is shown in this pop-up window - it's there as an example, don't expect to be able to understand all of it. It was based on a service Sue Wallace, Mark Pierson and I put on during the Convocation on Worship and Evangelism at SEJAC in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, on 17th January 2001.
Although alternative worship services are multi-tasking, it's important that at each point in time, the different things happening should have some kind of relationship to each other.
Without this, it will be absolutely impossible for people to have an idea where the service is going. So you need to work out roughly what you want people to be thinking/feeling/seeing/doing during the different stages of the service, but to try to do this without restricting the numbers of possibilities down to a single point of focus or media, except on those rare moments when you want to narrow everything down to a single point.
It's also very important that people have an opportunity to do different things for themselves at points throughout the service.
It's easy to get so caught up planning for presentational things that huge spaces of the service time leave most people as passive onlookers at media. When this happens, you've got it wrong! Often, since a lot of effort goes into producing the media, not enough thought and imagination has gone into designing things that people can do for themselves, or with others - and this should be more than just singing!
So keep thinking what everyone's doing and not just on what is being presented. The 'Action' column should be one of the most important ones in the service. But even this must be qualified - we try to avoid prescribing that people act in certain ways. Many postmodern people are weary of churches which seem to dictate that everyone behaves and feels exactly the same way in worship. They like the 'space' of alternative worship. So you need to strike a balance in planning between leaving everyone as passive observers, and being over-dictatorial.
Beginning and Ends are important, as you've got to negotiate the relationship between worship time/space and ordinary time/space.
In the section on Environment, we've seen how you can design a 'way in' to the worship space which helps people prepare themselves for worship. You also need to give people space to tune into God at the beginning of a service. Also, when it ends, people need to slowly appropriate the worship experience into the rest of life which follows, and so a gentle ending is good - as also is a good steady increase in the beat of the background music.
Since many groups design their services by 'brainstorming', at some point - normally when you put together the structure - you're going to have to do some editing. Remember not to throw away the stuff you don't use, but save it up for use at some later service. Try to edit verbal material first, as it's the most time-consuming way of engaging people in the worship. Image and action are far higher-impact, and should only be cut after the blue pencil has been put through the words.