Make the Main Thing the Main Thing on Sundays

If everything in a church needs to change, where should a pastor start? I want to offer a convictional testimony for making the Bible the main course on Sunday. Every other change should follow.

When I arrived at my church, it had a solid theological foundation, a history of expository preaching, and a membership that was eager to serve. Still, it was awash with so much transition that every ministry was crying for attention. As the new pastor, the situation felt overwhelming. But I was convinced that the table we set on Sunday would determine the whole ministry, and our main course had to be the Word of God.

Preach the Word

What a preacher does on Sunday with the Bible will determine how the rest of the church will treat the Bible. Thin sermons, thin church. Robust sermons, robust church. Therefore, if I don’t shape my week around study and preparation, I will be dominated by other urgencies, leading to inconsistent and insignificant exposition.

Prioritizing Sunday’s exposition has been the catalyst of comprehensive change. A growing disparity between how the Word was handled in the sermon and how it was handled in other areas of ministry became evident. As the Word changed people, their expectations and approach to ministry changed. Making expository preaching the main course every Sunday influenced every other side dish on our congregational table.

Sing the Word

When the Word of Christ dominates God’s people, they begin to sing the themes of Scripture to one another before the Lord (Col. 3:16). When I arrived, I did not find the lyrics of our songs to be unbiblical, but we sang so many songs each year that their biblical content could not “richly dwell within us.” Further, our musicians did not share a common view of Scripture, the local church, or the purpose of congregational singing. As a disparity began to grow between how the Bible was handled in the sermon and how the Bible was sung on Sunday, the expectation of those being shaped by the Word changed.

In my first year, I taught through Revelation 4 and 5, showing what heavenly worship emphasized and asking us to consider how heaven’s worship might impact ours. Those sermons became foundational for material and conversations that led us to reexamine what we sang, how we sang, who should lead our singing, and how we would emphasize the congregation singing.

Today, an elder oversees a biblically faithful and congregationally committed group of musicians. They all possess a serious approach to Scripture and devotion to the local church and our singing together.

Singing the Word on Sunday has spread to other ministries, too—like families at home and small groups before they discuss sermon application. We have even sung Sunday’s songs at the bedside of a dying member. A Word-dominated Sunday shapes lives well beyond it.

Pray the Word

Preaching and singing the Word also made the elders reconsider the centrality of Scripture in corporate prayer. We studied how Scripture calls the church to pray and produced a guide for the elders to use in their public prayers. This provided members a model of how to pray throughout the week.

Every aspect of our Sunday morning gathering is connected to Scripture and prayer. A psalm calls us to worship, and we respond to its content in prayer. An elder uses a specific passage to shape his intercessions. The sermon text is read, followed by a plea for God to give us collective understanding. The sermon is preached, and we ask for grace to apply it.

Our Sunday evening gathering is designed around Jesus’s instruction in Matthew 6:9–13, with emphases of adoration, intercession, confession, and submission, each connected to a passage of Scripture that guides how we pray. As we have prioritized praying biblically on Sunday, we have witnessed our members prioritizing prayer in their small groups and as they disciple one another.

Display the People of the Word

Paul describes baptism as our immersion by the Spirit into the body of Christ, made visible through our immersion by water into the local church (1 Cor. 12:13). He also describes the Lord’s Supper as a corporate sign of the body of Christ as we partake of the bread and cup together (1 Cor. 10:16–17). Yes, the ordinances require a personal faith to participate, but they declare who the corporate people of faith are.

In my first year, we observed the Lord’s Supper only three times, with more emphasis on an elaborate distribution of the elements than their meaning. In most minds, baptism was disassociated from church membership and was offered to some who could provide little credible evidence of conversion. Some thought requiring baptism before participating in the Lord’s Supper was a strange new doctrine I had deceptively introduced, though it had been explicit in our doctrinal statement from the church’s beginning.

That year, I intentionally preached passages on the corporate aspects of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We changed the frequency of observing the Lord’s Supper (to at least monthly) and lingered longer in how we participated. I also started to ask those being baptized to publicly share evidence of their conversion.

Members are now eager to invite non-Christians to attend when we baptize, and the congregation is exuberant when a new Christian is connected to the body in baptism. We underestimate how the ordinances enhance the witness of the church and display the people of the Word.

Make the Word the Main Course

Making the Word the main course on Sunday has transformed everything in our church. The transformation among us is not a result of our own ingenuity or creativity. The Word has done the work.