Author: Jamie Brown

Last week I shared some thoughts on how to grow (by auditioning) and maintain (by treating the body like it’s made up of different members) healthy worship teams.

In smaller churches, a worship team might “grow” to be 3 or 4 people, and the worship leader’s job is mainly to keep the small body healthy. In larger churches, a worship team might grow to be quite large, with a lot of moving parts, and the worship leader’s job description grows from just keeping the body healthy, to also arranging the moving parts

By “moving parts” I mean that you don’t just have one bass player, you have four. You don’t just have two singers, you have twelve. In every role on the team, you have multiple people who can serve. And to further complicate things, each of these people is at a different gifting level. How do you rotate different musicians of differing skill levels while maintain some sort of consistency and standard?

Before I go any further, I have to say that the foundation of all of this is from what I wrote about telling your worship team it’s a body and treating it like one. If you have to tiptoe around certain members of your team or spend a lot of energy protecting egos and respecting territories, then none of this applies. But if you can be honest with people about their giftings, then hopefully some of this will help.

Scenario A: The good drummer scenario
In contemporary music, the drummer is the glue. He holds everything together. If he is weak, the whole sound is weak. The importance of a good, solid, in-time, dependable, and sensitive drummer cannot be overemphasized. Going back to the 1 Corinthians picture of the body, it’s not that the drummer is more important than anyone else on the team, but that his role in the body happens to be more prominent. Let’s say your drummer is the nose on your face and your acoustic guitarist is your ear. If you lose an ear, it’s a really big deal. But you can grow your hair out to cover it up. If you lose your nose, it’s also a big deal. But you’ll have a hard time covering it up. Is the nose more important than the ear? No. But it’s more prominent.

If you have a good drummer, you can rotate in less skilled bass players, pianists, guitarists, singers, etc., and it won’t be such a big deal. So seek after skilled drummers and do all that you can to not to lose them. With a good drummer in place, you have more freedom to rotate musicians in the other positions without having to carry as much of their weight.

In Northern Virginia, I am not able to get my musician’s availability longer than a month in advance at a time. And because of the nature of their work, their availability is not terribly predictable from month to month. So each month, I send an email to my team asking for their availability for the coming month. Based on their responses, I schedule them. This a bit more time consuming than having pre-set teams, or team A, B, and C, but it allows me to decide who plays when, and lets me rotate new members onto the team.

Scenario B: The pre-set teams scenario
If God hasn’t gifted you with a solid drummer who can hold things together like the glue, than either your guitar/piano playing will now be the glue, or whoever else you find most dependable. In this scenario, you’ll probably find your life to be a whole lot easier if you have pre-set teams, like a team A, B, and C, where the same musicians always play with each other, in order to have some sort of equilibrium that isn’t being thrown into chaos every month when the schedule changes.

This still allows you to rotate in new musicians. You can either see your team “D” as serving every fourth Sunday of the month and being made up of current musicians and new musicians. This way, once a month, you have an opportunity to use someone new, or to re-use someone who is already on the roster.

When someone who is on a set team is unavailable, you can either have them find their own replacement, or you can find one for them. I tend to choose the latter option, so that I can have oversight over who is being asked to serve.

Scenario C: The slim pickings scenario
You won’t find any command in scripture to have a giant worship team. If you’re serving a smaller church, or maybe you’re rebuilding your music ministry, you should feel totally confident in having a small worship team. If you play an instrument, you’ll probably remain constant from week to week. You can rotate a singer or two, and perhaps another instrumentalist or two to give variety and to provide some support for yourself. But if you don’t have a plethora of musicians from which to choose, you shouldn’t feel like you’re any less of a worship leader than someone at a mega church.

No matter what size your church or worship team, the principle is the same: your job is to help the members of the body see where God is arranging them.

The practicalities of how that plays out will change the larger the church and worship team. God has gifted my church with a skilled drummer, and I prefer to decide who plays when, so I rotate musicians on a monthly schedule based on their availability. Other churches use pre-set teams, utilize software like Planning Center to confirm availability, or just outright pay their musicians.

Every church is different, so no one solution is the answer. With a heart to steward the gifts and talents God has placed before you, and an honesty about how God is arranging the members, you’ll discern what’s best in your setting.

A couple of days ago I shared some thoughts on how to set yourself up for effectively auditioning prospective worship team members. Today I want to share the number one way to keep your worship team functioning healthily, and that is to tell the body that it’s a body, and to treat it like one.

Far too many worship leaders are tolerating a level of dysfunction on their worship teams that is completely unbiblical. There will always be different dynamics and personalities for worship leaders to learn how to navigate, and it won’t always be easy. But the body of Christ, and by extension its worship teams, isn’t supposed to have diva singers, superstar drummers, unqualified and unskilled electric guitarists, and carryovers from the previous worship leader whom no one can question. 

In 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 Paul sets the stage for how the body of Christ is to function: like a human body does. One body with different members, each member with a different function, no one member more or less needed, and each member arranged by God himself.

When certain parts of the body think they’re not needed, or think they’re more important than others, the body starts to get dysfunctional. The same principal applies to worship teams, part of the body of Christ. With scripture as a basis, there is ample justification for maintaining a healthy worship team by keeping its members mindful of the fact that they belong to a body.

Unity must be maintained 

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ…” (1 Corinthians 12:12)

Your body, your human body that is, is most effective when it’s in one piece. When members of your human body start falling off, you’re in trouble. The same is true with your worship team. The unity of the body must be maintained. When we are in Christ, we belong to each other. We are different members of the same body.

So if you have members of your worship team who don’t talk to each other, or don’t get along, or are not all Christians, or think less of others and think more of themselves, as a worship leader you have a responsibility to call this out and address it and work to fix it. Sometimes you have to do surgery in order to make sure your body/worship team is unified.

Many members

“For the body does not consist of one member but of many.” (1 Corinthians 12:14)

This is why your worship team should always be looking to add more members, rejoicing in new members, and not be threatened by new members. When we belong to Christ, we can exist in unity with many members. This is a good thing.

If your bass player is threatened by a new bass player who joins the church, if you have a singer who is resisting stepping aside from time to time to allow other singers to sing, or if you are threatened by other gifted worship leaders in your church, you have dysfunction and you have some work to do.

Interdependency 

“If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’… or “if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body.” (1 Corinthians 12:15-16)

I didn’t think about how much I used my left hand until I fractured my left wrist several years ago and couldn’t use it for six weeks. When that cast was removed I was so much more grateful for having it back!

It’s cliché to say that we all need each other, but it’s actually a biblical truth. In this passage Paul paints the ridiculous picture of if “the whole body were an eye” or “if the whole body were an ear” to make it plain to us that every member of the body needs the other members. Your drummer, even though he might play every Sunday, needs your middle schooler electric guitarist, even through he only plays once every six weeks. Your singer needs your bass player. We must foster an atmosphere in our worship teams that keeps us mindful that none of us are more or less needed than any one else.

God is the One who does the arranging

“…God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.”  (1 Corinthians 12:18)

This should be incredibly freeing and empowering for worship leaders. You don’t have to give the same position on a worship team to a drummer who is skilled and a drummer who can’t keep a beat. You don’t have to add singers to the team who are tone deaf. You can look someone in the eye and tell them that, in your view, God has a different place for them in the body.

This is what I mean by “telling your worship team that it’s a body”. It is inevitable that at some point, you will have an eye come up to you and tell you it’s an ear. Or you will have a foot come up to you and ask if it can be a hand. You’re going to be tempted to agree because it won’t hurt their feelings. So in the short term you’ve made your life easier but in the long term you’ve set your team and its members up for dysfunction.

If scripture is true (and it is!) that God arranges the members of the body, then you can be honest with those members about what their role is. This, by the way, is why worship leaders need to be prayerful, careful, and Spirit-led people, as we need to be able to discern where God is placing people.

Being honest, but being honorable

“…the parts that seem weaker are indispensable, and on those parts… that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor…” (1 Corinthians 12:22-23a)

“God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.” (1 Corinthians 12:24b-25).

So here are the facts:

– Your worship team, part of the Body of Christ, must be unified

– Unity doesn’t mean uniformity. Members of the same body have different roles.

– If you don’t like your role, take it up with God. He does the arranging.

– There will be some members who are weaker and some members who are stronger.

– We must show honor to the weaker members.

The only way my 23-month-old daughter learned to walk was by slowly building up her leg muscles. She fell a lot at first, and still does from time to time, but she’s pretty much gotten the hang of it.

My 5-month-old daughter can’t walk yet. She can hardly sit up on her own without some help. But she has an awful lot more strength now than she did when she was a baby.

The only the weaker members of the body are going to grow is if we show them honor, if we give them opportunities to grow, and the safety to do it. It won’t honor a young drummer to make him play a whole service before he’s ready. But he might be able to do one song. It won’t honor an untrained bass player to make him play a difficult song and embarrass him. But with some practice and a few month’s notice, he might be able to do it.

Worship leaders can’t just sit back, set an incredibly high bar, and only allow really strong members to join the team. Yes, you need strong members, but you also need weaker members. Show them honor, help them grow, and your body will be stronger as a whole because of it.