Patterns of Worship

Since I wrote the last post here, life seems to have particularly hectic (nothing new there then!). Apart from work, I was involved in leading worship yesterday; also during the last few days a fair bit of spare time has been taken up with organising our church's Spring Harvest booking.
Anyway, back now, albeit briefly! Thanks to those who have read this far. I've had a fairly brief browse around the blogosphere of various British Methodists - good to see all sorts of opinions, thoughts and debates going on - much more entertaining and thought provoking than the (IMHO) rather turgid 'Methodist Recorder'.

Our church has for the last 18 months or so had two morning services on each Sunday except the first Sunday of the month. This started as an experiment to create more space in the church - apparently research has shown that once a church gets more than about 75% full for services, it tends to stop growing numerically. As we were in this happy position and having had much prayer we set out on an experimental period with the idea of having two broadly similar services.
Because of Junior Church staffing constraints, this takes place during the second service only. For this or maybe other reasons too, we seem to have fallen into a pattern where the first service is now more traditional style (with choir and keyboard or organ) and the second service more contemporary (with some sort of ensemble of musicians). This isn't set in 'tablets of stone' but is more the way things tend to be on the whole.
The vagaries of the way the Circuit Plan works (for non-Meths - the allocation of ministers and lay preachers within a group of local churches) still means that we can have a more 'trad' preacher planned for the second service. This doesn't always make things easy - especially if a guitar-led music group/band is rota'd for then!
With all this in mind, I came across an interesting article http://www.lpma.co.uk/ichthus/newpatterns.htm by Revd Dr Mike Bossingham who also runs www.FamilyFriendlyChurches.org.uk. One part of the piece in particular I thought very relevant - he says "There really is no gentle way of saying this, but all this means that the hymn sandwich has come to the end of its shelf life."
It seems to me that if we are to have more contemporary style services in Methodist churches, somehow the way the Circuit Plan is made has to take notice of this. It is no good trying to shoehorn contemporary worship songs into a traditional 'hymn sandwich' service - they don't work well in this way. Further, many Methodist ministers and local preachers (not all!) have the traditional service format very firmly ingrained into them, making it difficult for them to see that any other format can be valid and helpful in leading people to God's throne of grace.