Song selection – Worthily Magnify

The Freedom of Long-Term Worship Planning

For much longer than I’d like to admit, I lived in the weekly tyranny of song selection. Monday morning would come, the upcoming Sunday would again be approaching (they have a way of doing that), and I’d be back where I was a week earlier. I’d put together a list, look at the Scripture readings and sermon topic for the coming week, consider anything special coming up (baptisms, communion, etc.) and try to find the right balance.

Oftentimes, I’d look at the upcoming readings or sermon, and realize that the *perfect* song was a song I had just used a week earlier, so I couldn’t use it again. Bummer.

Similarly, I’d realize that a particular song would work great as a sermon response, or as a service closer, but the congregation didn’t know it. If only I had taught it for a couple of weeks before. Bummer again.

And on many occasions I’d realize that I was going back to my favorites too often. Or we weren’t cycling through enough of the wonderful hymns that my congregation knew. Or we weren’t going back to new songs quickly enough to reinforce them. This weekly cycle I was stuck in wasn’t good. But it was all I knew. And it was how I thought I could stay “fresh”. And it was awful.

A couple of years ago I tried something that was new for me, which was to plan out the song lists for the upcoming four months of services. In August, I would plan out of the songs for September through Christmas. In the weeks after Christmas, I would plan out the songs through Easter. And in the weeks after Easter I’d plan out the songs through the summer.

This would require a lot of time, and several days of locking myself away in my office and not doing much else besides thinking about the upcoming services. It was tedious and a bit grueling, but I noticed several things began to happen.

I introduced new songs more strategically. I wasn’t repeating the same songs too often. When I needed the *perfect* song, I could schedule it and make sure people weren’t sick of it. We were cycling through a broader repertoire of hymns. And I wasn’t living in the weekly tyranny anymore.

Now when Monday morning came, I could look at what I had prayerfully planned months before, and see if it still felt right. I might make some small changes, rarely some major changes, but most often, I was happy with what was planned, and I was freed up to do other things. And when I would hear a new song and think “we’ve got to introduce that!”, then I could look ahead and see where it would make the most sense to include it, even if it meant bumping something else off of the list.

My process looked something like this (keep in mind I serve in an Anglican/liturgical context, and we sing about 291 songs per-service):

1. Choose the opening hymns
2. Choose the closing hymns
3. Choose the song that goes in between the readings
4. Choose the opening song(s) of praise
5. Choose the last song of communion (we usually like this one to be an upbeat song of celebration)
6. Choose the first two communion songs, trying to weave them together and build towards the closer.
7. Choose the call to worship (sometimes these are congregational, sometimes they’re choir pieces, and sometimes they’re instrumental, varying from contemporary to classical).

As for the offertory, which is usually a choir/band piece, my colleague Andrew and I usually map all of those out for the entire ministry year by the time we get to August. We’re just about done with that process as I speak.

This kind of long-term planning did not come naturally to me, and seemed unrealistic to me for a very long time. But now that it’s become the norm, I find that I enjoy no longer living in the weekly tyranny, and that I’m freed up to be spontaneous when I need to be.

Most of all, I’ve been freshly amazed at the wisdom of God and his kindness in helping me plan songs months in advance that will end up ministering to specific people or responding to certain current events in ways that there was no way I could have foreseen. He has a way of doing that.

Eight Of The Most Common Worship Leading Mistakes

No worship leader ever stops making mistakes. From the most seasoned and experienced worship leaders, to the newest and greenest, mistakes are inevitable, humbling, and part of the process of maturing. We’re imperfect people, working alongside other imperfect people, playing musical instruments and singing songs imperfectly, with a congregation of imperfect men and women trying to sing along.

So our goal is not to become flawless worship leaders who never make mistakes. Our goal is simply to keep being humbled by our awareness of our imperfection, and to keep growing, so we can more effectively point our congregations to Jesus in the power of the Spirit, not the power of our own professionalism.

To that end, here are eight of the most common worship leading mistakes that I’ve observed in my own ministry, and through friendships and experiences with lots of other worship leaders too:

Wrapping our identity up in our performance
We feel good about ourselves after a good service, and bad about ourselves after a bad service. We need to resist this temptation – every Sunday – and always ground our identity and our worth in the gospel reality of being hidden in Christ.

Inserting too much of our personality into our performance
Using “performance” here in a very broad sense of “standing in front of people”, worship leaders can sometimes make the mistake of allowing so much of their personality, sound, look, and “stage presence” onto the platform, that people in the congregation get a subtle hint that they should tune out and watch. Worship leaders, while remaining themselves and being who they are, have to also know how to dial back their persona, especially depending on the context, so that the congregation can focus on the main task at hand: signing along with each other and magnifying the greatness of God.

Doing too many new songs
This is another big, and all-too-common mistake. Too many new songs in a service, or in a row, can have an incredibly detrimental impact on your congregation’s ability to engage in worship. Worship leaders should be building a solid repertoire of songs, anchored by the best songs of the centuries, and enjoying the best songs of the modern day. Adding one or two new songs a month to that repertoire, is realistically the most we should aim for.

Doing songs with ranges that are too high
Most people don’t want to – and can’t – sing songs that hang out near Es and Fs and Gs. They just simply can’t do it. Being aware of this, and being willing to take the extra time to transpose songs down to sit in more singable ranges, will serve your congregation and result in stronger singing.

Playing it too safe for too long
What risks are you taking? Where are you pushing your musicians? Where does your congregation need to grow? In what ruts are you – and your congregation – stuck? If your worship team and/or choir and/or congregation is still singing the same songs, in pretty much the same way, with pretty much the same instrumentation, then you may be making the mistake of playing it too safe for too long. Prayerfully discern where you might need to expand your expression of worship to a God whose “greatness is unsearchable” (Psalm 145).

Trying to be too creative too much
On the flip side – a common worship leading mistake comes in the form of always trying to be more creative, more inventive, more cutting-edge, and more different than last week, or last Easter, or last Christmas. Some worship leaders get stuck in a vortex of pursuing relevance/creativity and eventually lose their bearings. If this is you, take a step back, go back to the basics, and rest in the good news that, at the core of worship leading, is a call to be consistently, faithfully, reliability, and pastorally persistent in helping your congregation sing to, and see, and savor Jesus Christ, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday.

Allowing our wounds to harden us
Over time, even in the healthiest of churches with the most gracious volunteers and congregation, worship leaders get beat up. Maybe a full-fledged critical campaign is launched against you, or maybe it’s just one person who views their life-calling as being a thorn in your side. Whatever the case may be, every worship leader will get wounded. We can’t help that part. But we make a mistake when we allow those wounds to harden us, so we become angry, or burned-out, or resentful, or we pull back and just phone it in so we don’t get wounded again, or we quit ministry and give up. The good news of belonging to Jesus Christ, and knowing that he calls us, equips us, protects us, and goes before us, allows us to operate in ministry whether in good times or rocky times, with a rootedness and security that keeps us both soft-hearted and thick-skinned.

Basing our assessment of worship on what we see with our eyes
Lots of hands raised = worship happened. No hands raised = no worship happened. Sadly, that’s an all-too-common way that many worship leaders can tend to assess a service. We look out at a congregation, and we make a snap assessment, that may or may not have any basis in reality, especially in an invisible and spiritual reality which we cannot see with our eyes, and we stick with that. I’m not saying we shouldn’t look at our congregation, or that we can’t tell a lot by what we see. We certainly should, and we certainly can.

But never forget this, worship leader: you have no idea what’s happening in people’s hearts, you can’t possibly know all that God is up to, and you most likely won’t ever know the short-term and/or long-term impact of your faithful leadership in people’s lives over the course of years’ worth of Sundays that help them remember and proclaim the good news of the gospel. Don’t make the mistake of making a quick assessment. God is like a gardener, not a Photo Shop artist. So plant seeds, water soil, pull weeds, enjoy fruit, prune when needed, and repeat as needed. That’s the reality of ministry, and every worship leader in the world, from the most experienced to the most amateur, can never hear that truth enough times.

Thinking in Thirds

There are few responsibilities that a worship leader should take more seriously than choosing songs for his or her congregation to sing. In the words of the theologian Gordon Fee, “show me a church’s songs and I’ll show you their theology”. With centuries of older songs, and an ever-increasing library of new songs from which we can choose, how is a worship leader supposed to prioritize what to put on their congregations’ lips?

I have found it helpful to think in thirds. Visualize each of these thirds as a slice of one whole pie. The size of each slice will change depending on your own context, culture, and even particular service and/or venue. But a healthy repertoire, with the goal of shaping your congregation’s sung theology in a balanced way, will typically draw from these three thirds.

The ancient
Every church should have a list of at least (!) 20-30 ancient hymns that their church can sing. Why? Because we don’t want to fall into what C.S. Lewis describes as “chronological snobbery”, a trap which ensnares far too many worship leaders, causing us to think that newer is better, and older is worse. We have centuries of well-written and robustly-scriptural hymns that we would be fools to ignore. Do them as written, do them with a rock band, do them with new choruses, or do them with organ and timpani. But do them.

The proven
It’s been about 50 years since the worship renewal movement hit, thus spawning hundreds of thousands of new songs. It’s been long enough now for us to know which ones are worth keeping and which ones are not. It wouldn’t be a good idea to be “stuck” in the 80s or 90s, but it would be an equally bad idea to pretend they didn’t happen either. Sure, most of them have lost their new-car smell by now, and might make the chronologically-snobbish among us tempted to turn up our noses, but some of them deserve an occasional place in our repertoires, if for no other reason than to simply honor those people in our congregations for whom those songs are actually quite helpful.

The modern
So we have the ancient hymns, the proven and tested songs of previous decades, and the new songs being written by the Church today. By focusing first on the biblical faithfulness of the lyrics, second on the congregational accessibility of the music, and third on the particular and pastoral usefulness in your own context, you can filter out a substantial amount of new music. Then, you add to your church’s repertoire new and fresh songs that help your congregation (in the words of John Piper) “see and savor Jesus Christ”. Some of these songs will last for decades, and join the slice of the pie I call “the proven”. Who knows, maybe in 100 years they’ll be classified as “the ancient” by your grandkids. Or maybe they’ll fall away in a few years’ time. And that’s OK.

The goal for all worship leaders should be to maintain a repertoire of songs that serves the congregation whom God has called them to serve. In my setting at Truro Anglican Church in Fairfax, Virginia, that means I keep these three slices pretty even with one another (with the second slice, “the recent”, being the smallest, and the two other slices “the ancient” and “the modern” being bigger).

None of our respective “pies” will look exactly the same.

But, as worship leaders, if we’re thinking discerningly, and choosing songs wisely, then hopefully the songs that we’re choosing will help our congregations have a sung theology that has sufficient enough roots that it’s also able to branch out.

Beholding the Beauty of Jesus: In His Suffering

“ECCE HOMO (Christ Before the People)” by Edward Knippers.

A few nights ago I was about to head out to choir rehearsal for a few minutes before doing a couple of errands around town – when I decided to ask my oldest daughter (Megan) if she wanted to stay up late and come with me. Of course she responded enthusiastically. Staying up late – and going out when it’s night – is one the best things in the world for a six-year-old.

When we were about to leave she came around the corner wearing a new jacket that Catherine had bought her the week before. I hadn’t seen her wearing it until that moment. And when I looked at her, in that cute brown jacket, I thought (and I said) “Oh my goodness. You are beautiful.”

It stopped me in my tracks.

I was reminded of how beautiful she is. It’s not that she hadn’t been beautiful in the first place, but it’s that I had just grown accustomed to it. I had gotten used to it. I was taking it for granted. I see it every day!

This happens on a regular basis with me. One of my three daughters, or my wife Catherine, will come around the corner sometimes and I’ll just look at them, reminded of something I had forgotten: They’re beautiful.

Do you ever have this experience?

We get used to beautiful things and we don’t remember they’re beautiful anymore. They don’t take our breath away.

We need to be reminded.

And that’s why worship leaders have a responsibility to point people to Jesus every Sunday. To center their songs and their leadership around the clear proclamation of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

Worship leaders need to beckon their congregations to hear the Gospel again. To consider the cross again. And to behold the beauty of Jesus again.

This week I’d like to highlight some attributes of Jesus that should be prominent when we point people to him during corporate worship.

First, his suffering.

John Piper writes in Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ:

The agonies of God’s Son were incomparable. No one ever suffered like this man. No one ever deserved suffering less, yet received so much. The stamp of God on this perfect life is found in two words: ‘without sin’ (Hebrews 4:15). The only person in history who did not deserve to suffer, suffered most. ‘He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth’ (1 Peter 2:22). None of Jesus’ pain was a penalty for His sin. He had no sin.

He was betrayed, arrested, mocked, tortured, beaten, whipped, scourged, spat upon, and subjected to the very cruelest form of execution ever known to man. His physical suffering is impossible for us to fathom.

But beyond his physical suffering – is his spiritual suffering. And his spiritual suffering far outweighs his physical suffering, if that’s even possible.

Because on the cross:

All of the sin, suffering, betrayal, woundedness, evil, darkness, sickness, terminal illnesses, fear, twisted perversions, and heartache was laid squarely on Jesus.

The airplanes flying into the twin towers. Bodybags coming out of yet another school. Bombs claiming 100 lives at a rally for peace in Turkey. All of it was laid squarely on Jesus.

Jesus cries out on the cross: “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)

No one has ever suffered like Jesus.

And Jesus didn’t deserve any of it. Only he had lived a perfect, blameless, holy, morally upright life. And yet he suffered more than anyone has ever – and will ever – suffer.

Isn’t Jesus amazing?

The suffering of Jesus teaches us that: Jesus knows what it’s like to suffer. And we can run to him.

And even though we might not know the answer to why he allows it – we know that:

It can’t be that he doesn’t love us. It can’t be that he is indifferent or detached from our condition. God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself. … So, if we embrace the Christian teaching that Jesus is God and that he went to the Cross, then we have deep consolation and strength to face the brutal realities of life on earth.” (Tim Keller, Reasons for God)

And that’s the beauty of Jesus in his suffering. We see the vileness of evil in all of its wretchedness. And we see the fullness of love in Jesus. What a wonderful Savior.

Worship leaders: don’t shy away from singing songs that deal with the suffering of Jesus.

It helps stop people in their tracks and see again the beauty of Jesus that we all far too easily forget.

On Not Beginning with the Ending

This past August, during two weeks’ vacation, I had the wonderful experience of actually sitting with my family during church, not leading any songs, not being up front, and being the one to do the nursery and Sunday school drop-off/pick-up. It was great.

And whenever I get to experience church as a someone in the pews (or comfortable padded chairs), I’m reminded of how helpful it is when the worship leader begins with the beginning and ends with the ending.

Here’s what I mean.

On those Sundays, when I had finally gotten my kids signed up for Sunday school, dropped my 21-month-old at nursery (and left her crying), convinced my 4-year-old that the donuts she just saw were not for her, and figured out that my 6-year-old had a very specific seating chart in mind (in between me and Catherine), the opening song was already halfway done, and I needed to get my bearings.

Kindly, the worship leader had chosen opening songs that focused me upward. He helped me get my bearings on just who this God is that I’m singing to, and some of the countless reasons why he’s worthy of my worship.

This is good worship leading: it’s thinking through how to pastorally guide people, as distract-able and weary as we’re all prone to be, to behold again (and again, and again) the God who has revealed himself to us, principally in the person of Jesus Christ.

But all too often, worship leaders don’t begin at the beginning. Instead, they begin at the ending. And to make things clunkier, they end with the beginning.

When the opening songs have to do with sending, going out into the world, or songs of mission, your congregation might be saying “but I just dropped my crying kid off at nursery, and I’m not even sure I remembered to lock our front door when we left the house…” It’s good to sing these kinds of songs, but it’s a better idea to sing them after you’ve laid a little bit of groundwork first.

Wait until people have gotten their bearings, heard the Good News, and had God’s Word opened to them before singing songs about the implications of it all.

Songs that articulate a response, and a willingness to go out in mission to the world are good and necessary (and rare), but usually work a whole lot better at the ending. And this way, you can begin with the beginning: consistently calling people to look upwards, before calling them to look outwards.