“Structures tell stories.” These are the first words of _Christ Centered Worship_, Bryan Chappell’s celebrated textbook on Evangelical worship. This sentence demonstrates a foundational agenda at the heart of Evangelical theorizing about worship. In the past forty years, many theologians and leaders have encouraged Evangelical churches to recover “the fullness of the gospel, the story which worship does” (Robert Webber, _Ancient-Future Worship_). Primarily, this recovery has been sought through the rediscovery of liturgical structures that tell the biblical gospel story. A major concern of this literature has been to teach students and ministers to plan and shape worship that fulsomely and cohesively narrates the content of the Christian gospel. However, the focus on getting the structure of worship right has meant that the literature has had far less to say about what it means to _lead_ gospel-centered worship well.
This paper proposes a rubric through which to assess good liturgical leadership. Building on the existing literature, this paper suggests that if worship tells the story of the gospel, the worship practitioner (whether musician, pastor, or creative leader) ought to envision their role as that of a storyteller. In turn, reflection on good storytelling is helpful and necessary for reflection on good liturgical leadership. While the success of a story is partly attributable to its structure and content, there are other elements of storytelling that are also critical to the audience’s comprehension, immersion, and enjoyment of it. In the same way, a worship service may tell a well-structured and theologically robust story but can still disengage the congregation if the service is not led well.
In search of what it means to tell a story well, the latter half of the paper turns to J.R.R. Tolkien’s theory of fiction in his essay, _On Fairy-Stories_. In this essay, Tolkien envisions the storyteller as creating an immersive and consistent secondary world that, in its surface details—its ornamentation, dialogue, tone—maintains the inner fabric of the story’s reality. The paper ends by suggesting possible points of application between Tolkien’s theory of story as sub-creation and contemporary liturgical leadership.