Showing Grace to Your Worship Team When it Matters

Have you ever gotten a bit frustrated with members of your worship team? Maybe really frustrated? Of course you have.

Have you ever actually let this frustration show? Maybe been a bit of a jerk to them? No way. A worship leader wouldn’t do that.

Yeah right. Of course you have. We all have.

Maybe your worship team consists of one middle-aged man named Leroy who plays a mean acoustic guitar. Oh, and his guitar also happens to be named Leroy.

Or maybe your worship team is larger. Whatever the case, in the course of working with volunteers (most of whom have an artistic temperament) and working under the pressure of the congregation’s glare, you’re bound to get frustrated and tempted to show it.

Bad idea. Every time. Why? Because we’ve been shown more grace than we ever deserved.

If God’s grace really has been “lavished on us in Christ” (Ephesians 1:9) and is immeasurable in its riches (Ephesians 2:7), then we really have no excuse for not showing grace to our worship team. Really.

The people who serve on a worship team are real people. This means they’re sinful just like you. They run late, they don’t practice, they have annoying habits, they make mistakes, they get cranky, they have issues, and they aren’t perfect.

They also don’t get shown grace an awful lot during the week. The world is a grace-less place full of expectations, pressure, meanness, criticism, brokenness, speeding tickets, and lots of bills.

They need to know the good news of grace – of redemption and forgiveness – that has been shown to us all in the person of Jesus Christ.

But you can show them that grace too. And when it really matters – like when they mess up or show up late or are unkind to you – you showing them grace is not only good for their soul and yours, but it’s good for your worship team too.

This all sounds well and good in a blog post and we’d all agree in principle that it’s important to show grace. But when those moments of frustration come – a late rehearsal, a drummer who won’t stop playing when you’re trying to talk, a persistent squeal in the monitors that the sound engineer can’t fix, a vocalist who totally messes up the big Christmas Eve solo, or a pastor who asks you to cut that song you’ve rehearsed fourteen times just before the service starts – is when this will need to be put into practice.

This isn’t going to come from self-determination. It’s going to come from daily preaching the gospel to yourself. When we remember the punishment we deserved but the grace we received instead because of Jesus, then everything else comes into perspective.

Show grace to your worship team. It’s a good idea for worship leaders and it’s the good news of the gospel.