When I moved to Lima and began working for BASIC we decided to attend Elim Gospel Church. Nearly 900 people attend Elim on a Sunday. It was a much different experience from the churches we had been involved in that were never bigger than about 300 people.
One thing that I quickly noticed was that the services were very organized. Everything went incredibly smoothly and looked very professional, but it never felt like the leaders were rushing to get to the next thing. When I joined the worship team at Elim I was able to see the interaction the pastors had with the worship leader and see that they had a schedule they talked over before the meeting started. Last semester Cheryl and I visited the BASIC group at the University at Buffalo and we found that they did the same thing. Before the meeting the leaders gave us a rundown of what was going to happen during the meeting and who was going to be running each part of the meeting. It was very well put together and even made it clear as to what media needed to be used when. The meeting ran very smoothly and students knew when it would end in case they had a lot of homework to get to later that night. I typically try to keep meetings to an hour and fifteen minutes for this reason.
I’ve also been to other services that were the exact opposite. There wasn’t an allotted time for anything and no one knew how to comfortably transition from things like worship to the announcements or how to properly end a sermon on time. When you’re in a meeting like this almost everything about it can feel awkward. I’m sure some of you are reading this and saying, “But there’s no opening to the move of the Holy Spirit!” The Bible says that in everything we do we should maintain order (1 Cor. 14:39-40). So, even if you don’t stay on time every week because the Holy Spirit begins to move at least you have a plan to begin with and everyone can be on the same page. This should apply whether your group has ten people or one hundred. When there is no order in a meeting it’s obvious, it shows that not much time and thought was put into it, and it’s uncomfortable.
Below I’ve included an example of one of the schedules from the BASIC group at Buffalo for you to download and change for your group. The file is in Microsoft Excel format.