Category: Leading

Small Annoyances Can Equal Big Resistance

1Many worship leaders unconsciously do little things when they lead worship that annoy the congregation. On their own, these little things might not be such big deals. But added up, and experienced Sunday after Sunday, small annoyances can equal big resistance, as the worship leader can begin to grate on the congregation and cause them to take a more defensive posture so as to not be further annoyed.

Before I list some of the top annoyances I’ve observed, let me say one very important thing: be yourself when you lead worship. There’s nothing more crippling as a worship leader than the fear of what people think about what you’re wearing, how you sound, whether you prayed articulately enough, whether you tied your shoes tightly enough, if you played a G instead of a G2, if they think you look stupid, if you don’t have a good enough voice, etc. Be yourself.

But having said that very important thing, let me continue to make my point. If you do things – consistently – that are annoying to your congregation, they will begin to resist you. Here are few examples:

Unpredictably changing the rhythm and syncopation of the melody
Sing it like the recording. Sing it like people will have heard it if they’ve heard it elsewhere. Don’t add in your own syncopation (or removal of syncopation in some cases) because you want to give the song personality. It throws people off. It makes them want to stop singing.

Adding “and” pre-buttals
“And here I am to worship / and here I am to bow down…” “And how great is our God / and sing with me…” “And our God is greater / and our God is stronger…” Seriously, stop with the “ands”.

Singing with a weird affect
I posted a video on this last year to demonstrate what I mean. Don’t put on a grungy voice when you sing if you don’t naturally use a grungy voice when you talk. Sing like a normal human being and people will feel more at ease trying to sing along.

Using cheerleader phrases
Except for rare (and I mean rare) circumstances, phrases like “come on!”, “let me hear you!”, “you’re sounding good!”, “that’s some good singing!”, and “get on up!” should be banished from your lips.

Breathiness
When you pray, don’t use the kind of voice you’d hear on an R-rated perfume commercial. It makes me blush.

Always repeating
I shared some thoughts on this in previous posts here and here. If you repeat songs too much, two bad things happen: first, people find themselves wanting you to shut up. Secondly, you become the boy who cried wolf, and when you really do (and should) want to repeat something, it doesn’t have the effect it should because the congregation is so tired of repeating everything.

Keeping the intensity level up all the time
Whether it’s your singing or playing, you can’t keep it all intense all the time. Calm down from time to time.

The best ways to discover your little annoyances are: (1) ask your spouse, (2) if you don’t have a spouse, or even if you do, ask a close friend, (3) listen back to yourself without skipping or muting, and (4) watch videos of yourself. Keep in mind my first point about being yourself, but do watch out for little things you might be doing that could equal big resistance.

For more on this, I posted several years ago here on different “ticks” worship leaders should remove. I’m preaching to myself too!

Six Avoidable Mistakes When Disciplining (or Correcting) a Worship Team Member

1One of the responsibilities of worship leaders is to build and cultivate a community of fellow musicians to help serve the congregation in leading worship. You can call that community a worship team, worship band, praise team, praise band, band, or whatever term you come up with. Whatever you call it, it can be a great joy to lead this kind of community of fellow-musicians. It can also be really difficult.

Musicians have the infamous artistic temperament that makes them not only opinionated, and not only comfortable sharing those opinions, but turns those opinions into “rights”. Musicians then want to protect their rights and their territories against anyone who would seek to invade. Plus, they’re sinners like everyone else.

From time to time, if you’re a worship leader attempting to lead a healthy worship team, you will be faced with difficult situations when you’ll need to bring correction to one of your fellow musicians, or in more difficult situations, bring discipline. You will lose sleep over these situations, and you will want to avoid them. But sometimes it will be clear to you that you need to address an issue with a member of your team.

Here are six mistakes I’ve made, that you shouldn’t make, when disciplining or correcting a worship team member.

1. Interact Primarily Over Email
If at all possible, avoid the use of email from beginning to end. The more difficult the type of interaction, the more healthy it is. A face to face conversation is crucial. If that’s impossible, then a phone call. Under no circumstances should you interact over email. Emails can be so much more easily misinterpreted, misread, forwarded, blind-copied, and saved forever. Pretend you’re handling this before the invention of the computer.

2. Insist On Meeting On Your Turf
Do not insist that the meeting take place on church property, or in your office. That’s your turf, not theirs, and it will immediately cause their defenses to go up. Not good. Find a neutral place, and a public place, for both of you. A coffee shop or a restaurant. This will level the playing field and increase the odds of a relaxed atmosphere.

3. Handle It All By Yourself
You have people over you. Take advantage of their covering. The single most stupid thing I’ve done when I’ve had to deal with a difficult issue is to keep it from my pastor until it had blown up. Consult him, ask him what you should do, have your pastor in the meeting with you, and keep him totally in the loop. Don’t put yourself in a position to take all the bullets or do/say something unwise. Use the covering God has put over you.

4. Let It Simmer
So a band member has a profanity-laced temper tantrum at rehearsal. The rest of the team is shocked. You’re shocked. They’re all wondering if you’re going to address it. Tension is building. Don’t let it simmer. You might not think stopping rehearsal is wise, but address it before the guy goes home. It might be easier in the short-term to let things slide, but in the long-term it will build tension and pressure in your team that will be unhealthy.

5. Don’t Know What Outcome You Want
On a scale of 1 – 5, 1 being minor correction (i.e. I can tell you didn’t practice one single bit and that’s why you ruined half of the songs) and 5 being major correction (i.e. I need to ask you to step down from the team for a while), you need to know what you want for the person. If you go into a meeting/conversation with the person without an acceptable outcome in mind, then you could very likely get trampled on.

6. Be Unwilling to Apologize
You’re not perfect. You don’t communicate with your team as well as you could. You lead a rehearsal on an empty stomach and say something mean-spirited to your drummer. You ask a singer to sing a song you know he or she can’t pull off. It could be anything. Be the first to apologize, the first to show contrition and humility, and genuinely ask forgiveness for things you’ve done wrong. Even if your apology isn’t reciprocated, you’ve done the right thing and will get a better night’s sleep even if the meeting doesn’t end the way you hoped.

It’s a great joy to lead a worship team. It’s also hard work. If you’re faithful and consistent in the hard things, then the joy, morale, and unity on your team will increase. If you avoid the hard things, then no one will be happy. 

Figuring Out Who You Are

1When I was first starting to really get into worship leading during middle school, I was spending a lot of time listening to a Pentecostal worship leader out of Florida. You wouldn’t know who he is, since the only reason I could listen to him was because my Mom had subscribed to that church’s sermon ministry and when they sent the tapes they included the whole service.

So I’d listen to those tapes and sit there transfixed. The worship leader (and team) was really good. This stuff wasn’t edited or produced or anything. This was live, straight-from-the-sound-board, as-it-happened worship. In classic Pentecostal style, they could take a 3 or 4 minute song and make it go (and go) for 15 minutes. And the more they repeated a song the more people seemed to get into it.

You can criticize that style all you want, but for me at that point in my life, attending and leading worship in an old, dead Episcopal church, listening to those tapes was like water to my thirsty soul.

Naturally, when you listen to a particular worship leader and/or style of music for a while, you start to copy it. And so I, a middle school boy leading worship at a little Episcopal church, began to replicate the Pentecostal worship leader I was hearing on the tapes.

The guy on the tapes could hit a high G and make it sound like he wasn’t even trying. When I tried to hit a D it sounded like I was mimicking a farm animal. The guy on the tapes would add all these phrases and runs and cool embellishments and it made the congregation respond with more vigor. When I tried to do something cool it just sounded like I was… well… trying to do something cool.

I was over-doing it. Big time. Instead of being who I was, a fourteen year old guy who had an average voice, was pretty good on the guitar, and loved to worship, I was trying to be the guy I was listening to on my Walkman after school every day.

I began to become aware of this problem when I started recording our times of worship and listening back to them. As much I wanted to convince myself that I sounded awesome, I couldn’t. I was embarrassed. I felt bad for the people who had to endure my attempts to hit high notes, do cool embellishments, and be somebody I wasn’t. Thank God that the youth group I was leading worship for was gracious and encouraging and never critical.

So for several years, into high school and college, I began an adventure of attempting to lead worship as myself. I would swing from trying to be Bob Kauflin to trying to be Stuart Townend to trying to be Tim Hughes to trying to be like Matt Redman.

But eventually the time came when I had led worship for long enough, gleaned different positive things from different worship leaders I had seen or heard, made enough mistakes, and had enough freedom to stretch my own wings, that I began to get comfortable in my own skin. I was figuring out who I was as a worship leader, and who I wasn’t.

This process is ongoing. I still catch myself trying to be someone I’m not. But, by God’s grace, I feel less and less pressure to be someone I’m not.

How about you? When you lead worship are you trying to be someone else? Have you picked up things from other worship leaders that just aren’t who you are? Are you over-doing? Maybe you just need to relax and not try as hard to be who you think you need to be when you’re leading worship.

Incorporate all the good things from other worship leaders that you see or listen to. Learn as much and as often as you can. Always be eager to make adjustments to how you lead. But at the end of the day, be yourself.

A New Year To Do Old Things

1So it’s 2013. A new year, a fresh start, and a new number you have to get used to writing on your checks. That’s the hardest part for me.

We hear a lot in these first few weeks of a new year about doing new things, or making new resolutions. There’s a pressure on us, in our personal lives and in our professional lives, to do things a little bit differently.

Worship leaders aren’t immune to this pressure. We can begin feel the need to be more innovative, creative, and different than we were last year. Just this morning as I was watching the archived first session of the Passion 2013 conference I noticed feeling the pressure: teach these new songs, incorporate these new sounds, and do it this coming Sunday.

Growing and changing are not only good things, but they’re necessary things. Living things grow and change. Psalm 1 describes the man who delights in God as being like “a tree planted by streams of water…” Since when have you seen a living tree not change from year to year?

But the focus on the new can come at the expense of the focus on the old. Yes, it’s good to let God grow us up and change us as worship leaders as we draw from him. But don’t forget the old things that you’re called to. Year after year after year.

Love Jesus. Study his word and worship Him when no one’s looking.

Love your family. Don’t fall victim to the worldly pressure to overwork and miss out on your commitments in the home.

Love the Church. With all of its issues and problems and politics, it’s the body of Christ and you’re a part.

Love your worship team. Don’t treat your worship team like they’re just a bunch of names on a monthly schedule. Build community and foster friendship among your team.

Love your congregation. Don’t become a celebrity who only appears on a stage every Sunday. You might be a great singer, but if you don’t have love, you’re just a resounding gong (1 Corinthians 13:1).

Love to see your worship team leading your congregation in singing to Jesus. All of the above combine in a worship leader’s heart that finds no greater joy on Sunday morning than being caught up in praise to Jesus with a worship team and a congregation all singing the same song.

So, this new year with new pressures to do things in a new way, may we not forsake the old, foundational things that really matter: loving Jesus, loving our families, loving our churches, and loving to sing the unchanging song of heaven for all eternity: worthy is the Lamb.

How Wrong (with audio)

1The bad thing about this blog is that it makes me feel compelled to share all of my worship leading bloopers with the whole world wide web. So, without further ado, here’s my most recent mess-up from this past Sunday.

For our offertory, we were going to sing Stuart Townend’s “How Long? (We Have Sung Our Songs of Victory)“. I would sing the verses, joined by the vocalists on the chorus, and then at the very end we’d have the congregation stand and sing a chorus. This is a great song for Advent (which is why I picked it), and was even more poignant following the horrific events in Newtown, Connecticut last week.

So I started the song off on piano, and then began the first verse with no problem.

We have sung our songs of victory, we have prayed to you for rain / We have cried for your compassion to renew the land again…”

But then, instead of continuing with verse 1, my brain decided it would be a good idea to sing the second half of verse 2:

But the land is still in darkness and we’ve fled from what is right / We have failed the silent children who will never see the light.” 

The obvious problem is that it’s the wrong half of the verse. The second problem is that I’m the only person singing, so there’s no covering this mistake up. Yikes.

I was so confused and lost that I had no option other than to just stop and start over again. Here’s how it all went down. Enjoy.

My congregation responded to my little blooper with laughter, encouragement, and applause. How encouraging! This was another reminder to me that people in the room are quite happy to see that the people on the stage are just normal people. There’s no need to pretend that you’re amazing. Just be you.

I received an email that evening from a man I really respect who’s a member of our church and he thanked me for this little blooper and said it helps affirm that we’re not trying to draw attention to ourselves on stage.

So, I hope my bloopers are an encouragement to you that perfection and flawless performance are not our goals. Yes, excellence is, and this was a reminder to me that I need to do a better job of memorizing the words. But when you mess up (and you will), just get over yourself and move on.