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So let’s talk about rehearsing your worship team for a few minutes:

Rehearsing is like wasabi: Just the right amount of it does the trick. Too much of it makes you want to scream. Not enough of it and everything tastes too raw.

I’ve written a few posts on this topic before (here, here, here, here, here, and here) but today I wanted to approach it from a different angle: How you can lead an effective rehearsal in a really short amount of time. I’m talking anywhere from five minutes to 30 minutes. Anything longer than that is not really “short”, but that’s another topic for another day.

You can lead effective rehearsals in a really short amount of time. How?

First step, have the sound system, monitors, music stands, music, mics, cables, etc., ready before rehearsal starts. Sound engineer at the desk at start-time.

Second step, ask the sound engineer: what do you need from us? Let him tell you what he needs to hear in order to set gain levels, monitor levels, etc., until he’s happy and gives you a thumbs-up.

Third step, break the songs down into categories: 1. We know that. 2. We don’t know that. 3. We still need to work on that. 4. Transitions.

Fourth step: Start from the beginning.

Go through the songs in order. When you come to a song that everyone knows, skip it. If everyone except one person knows it, consider running through that song with that one person after rehearsal is over.

When you come to a song that’s new, talk the team through it. With whatever time you have, run through the main sections of it. If there are multiple verses and/or choruses that are arranged similarly, you don’t need to run those. Hit the parts that are different from the other parts.

If you come to a song that’s familiar, but has a tricky part, or something out of the ordinary, point that part out. Rehearse it if you have time. Or just say “does that make sense?” until everyone nods their heads at you. Move on.

Finally, make sure you talk through transitions. How you will get from one song to the next smoothly.

Keep things moving. Keep control. Don’t get bogged down in side-conversations. Make a joke every few minutes. Don’t let one person who didn’t rehearse drag everyone else down. And don’t forget to pray.

When it’s all over, gather your team together and pray. Pray that God will lead you, help you, fill you, lift your eyes to see Him, and give you a heart of love for the congregation. Then you’re ready to go!

Usually, just a little bit of rehearsing can go a long way. Just like wasabi. You don’t need to overdo it!

A few months ago, at my father’s funeral, my good friend Jordan Ware sang my arrangement of the old hymn “He Giveth More Grace”.

Here’s the recording.

You can download a free chord chart here, a free lead sheet here. Thanks to my friend Zach Sprowls for creating this lead sheet. (He also played guitar on this recording.)

You can download the 4-part harmony here, and/or string quartet arrangement here. Thanks to my friend Joshua Spacht for creating these arrangements. (He also played piano on this recording.)

Some more of my friends (wow, I’m blessed with a lot of good friends, and they blessed my family greatly at my dad’s service), Andréa Picard Boekcer and Marlisa Del Cid Woods, played violin 1 and 2.

These words have been ministering to me a lot throughout the last few months, and hopefully they’ll bless you too.

Lyrics:

He giveth more grace as our burdens grow greater

He sendeth more strength as our labors increase
To added afflictions He addeth His mercy
To multiplied trials He multiplies His peace

When we have exhausted our store of endurance
When our strength has failed ere the day is half done
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources
Our Father’s full giving is only begun

Fear not that thy need shall exceed His provision
Our God ever yearns His resources to share
Lean hard on the arm everlasting, availing
The Father both thee and thy load will upbear

His love has no limits, His grace has no measure
His power no boundary known unto men
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus

He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again

Words: Annie Johnson Flint. Music: Jamie Brown.
© 2013 Worthily Magnify Music. All rights reserved. CCLI Song # 7055874.

When I arrived at Truro Anglican Church two years ago, my hope was to “hit the ground jogging”. Silly me. By the end of my very first day at work, I was simply overwhelmed by all of the moving pieces, different volunteer groups, needs, demands on my time, and weekly/monthly/yearly deadlines and expectations.

My question then, and my question now, even two-years in to the job, is: how can I move beyond just simply maintaining a ministry, but actually leading it and helping it grow, in multiple areas, with different needs, all at the same time?

The answer is a combination of many things: lots of prayer, listening, delegating, meetings, planning, administration, meetings, constant volunteer recruitment, thank-you notes, apologies, meetings, building a good team, laughter, clear communication, meetings, and a realistic recognition that you just can’t do everything and you just can’t please everyone.

I thought it would be helpful to share a bit of the scope of the Worship and Arts ministry that I help lead: 

1. Weekly services

• 7:30am
• 8:30am (or 9:00am in the summer)
• 11:15am
• 5:00pm

2. Church-year services

• Carols by Glowstick
• Lessons and Carols
• Christmas Eve (two family services and two big evening services)
• Christmas Day
• Epiphany (featuring a family-oriented (no pun intended) three wise men pageant)
• Ash Wednesday (family service and evening service)
• Palm Sunday
• Maundy Thursday
• Good Friday (noon, family, evening, extended worship)
• Easter Saturday (occasionally)
• Easter Sunday

3. Other congregational events with a large Worship and Arts component

• Retreats (men’s, Alpha, parish, choir)
• Annual congregational meeting
• St. Paul’s Theological Center (runs two-three times per year, six Saturdays in a row, each requiring worship leaders and AV support)
• Weddings
• Funerals
• Alpha
• Monthly staff communion
• Weekly staff meetings
• Genesis Arts Camp
• Miscellaneous

4. Groups under the oversight of the Worship and Arts AOM that serve these services and/or congregational gatherings

• Worship leaders
• Adult choir
• Children and youth choirs
• Children and youth hand bells
• Dance ministry
• Instrumentalists and vocalists
• Sound engineers
• Projectionists
• Altar guild (the people who set up for communion at our four weekly services, and special services throughout the year)
• Flower guild
• Lay Eucharistic Ministers, or LEMs (these are the people who help serve communion at all of our services)
• Acolytes
• Lectors (readers)
• Ushers
• Wedding coordinators
• Sermon audio editing/transcription

As you can see, there’s quite a lot going on. Truro’s services are at once Anglican, contemporary, traditional, liturgical, spontaneous, and everything in between. It’s fun, but also requires a large infrastructure to support. And thankfully, in addition to a great staff team, there is an army of volunteers who serve faithfully each weekend to keep the ship afloat.

So how do I evaluate all of these moving pieces without losing my mind? Here are some “metrics”, for lack of a better word.

Evaluating weekly and/or occasional services

• Level of engagement during the congregational singing. Are the people singing?
• Attendance numbers and/or trends
• Punctuality (starting on time, not running over, managing time well)
• Presence, or lack, of technical, audio, musical, and liturgical mistakes
• Managing costs of printed materials. (We just completed a significant overhaul of our Sunday worship guides, and greatly the reduced the cost/waste of paper every weekend.)
• Protecting parishioners’ hearing (We are days away from installing a drum isolation booth, so we can get the drum level under control, and help us to have band/choir/organ/congregation coexist)
• Ability to stay rooted in scripture and tradition, and do “traditional” well
• Ability to change and adapt, and do “contemporary” well
• A pursuit of a well-balanced, scriptural, Christ-centered, generations-spanning repertoire
• Meaningful up-front participation of children and youth

Evaluating our various volunteer groups

• Numbers of volunteers
• Age spread of volunteers
• Attrition rate
• Effectiveness of our training
• Recruiting enough new LEMs, ushers, readers, musicians, etc. each year to GROW the ministries (pursue ministry growth, not simply stabilization)
• Successfully maintaining and pastoring our choir core, while growing fairly quickly. This a huge priority
• Maintaining excellence in the acolyte ministry, and ensuring the smoothness of its leadership transitions from year to year
• Quickness and pastoral nature of our outreach to grieving families to plan funerals
• Organization (and streamlining) of our wedding planning process
• Ability to integrate those with young children at home

I never get to all of these things every week. Sometimes I go weeks, or months, without giving much attention to some of these questions, or groups. I can do that because I trust the volunteer leaders, coordinators, and the rest of the Worship and Arts staff to do their jobs and let me know when there’s a problem. I don’t need to micromanage anyone, and even if I wanted to, I don’t have the time. I have to learn to let a lot of things go, and trust God, using the gifts of other people who have stepped forward to devote their time and energy to different aspects of the worship and arts life at Truro.

My main focus from week to week is planning worship services that are Gospel-centered, congregationally accessible, well-led and executed, and faithful to Scripture and our Anglican tradition. Beyond that, I do a lot of planning, administration, thinking down the road a few weeks and months at a time, and making sure the different pieces are moving in the right direction. Things fall through the cracks, emergencies come up, and I realize I’ve let a ball drop from time to time. But I extend grace to myself, and to my team, and that grace is reciprocated, and we keep plugging along.

And in the midst of all of the busyness and programming and planning and administration, I remember that I am simply a temporary steward of this ministry. Some day, I will hand it off to someone else. And they will lead the ministry their own way, before they hand it off to someone else. That’s all we are. We’re stewards. May God help us steward our ministries well, not simply as “maintainers” but as “leaders” and as faithful shepherds and servants of His flock.

Early on in my experience as a worship leader, I heard someone paraphrase Jack Hayford who said something along the lines of: “My greatest fear as a pastor/worship leader is that our church services could become such a well-oiled machine that the Holy Spirit could leave altogether and we wouldn’t notice for six months“.

It’s a bit dramatic and intentionally hyperbolic, but he gets his point across. And the possibility of that scenario playing itself out is something that rattles me to this day.

Could I let something like that happen? Could I (and my worship team, or choir), and could my church, become so good at “doing church” or making good music, or sticking to our liturgy, to the point that we’re no longer asking for, expecting, and depending on the empowering work of the Holy Spirit in our midst? Yes, I could.

When my worship leading becomes dominant over my Spirit-leaning, I get into dangerous territory. And you do too.

Here’s what happens when our worship leading becomes dominant in our eyes: We allow the excellence (or lack) of our musical/liturgical/technological execution to determine for us whether or not the Holy Spirit was at work. As a result (in our judgement), a tight band, a beautiful Cranmerian prayer, and flawless sound engineering all equal a powerful presence of the Holy Spirit, and we head off to Sunday lunch very pleased.

Conversely, a lousy band, a pitchy choir, a dead liturgy, and constant squealing feedback all equal (again, in our judgement) the complete absence of the Holy Spirit, and we head off to Sunday lunch feeling worthless.

But what if it’s more complicated than this?

What if our criteria for determining whether or not the Holy Spirit was actively present in our services is not so black and white? What if we’ve allowed our worship leading gifts to become dominant over our calling to be Spirit-leaning?

Is it possible that we could experience a flawless service on every level: from the parking lot attendants, to the greeters, to the nursery and children’s church workers, to the technical team, musicians, preacher, and fantastic church coffee (is that possible?), but we’ve not actually asked for, or left room for, or relied upon the Holy Spirit to undergird and work through all of it, for the sake of the exaltation of Jesus Christ and the efficacious preaching and hearing of the Word of God?

And is it possible that we could experience a messy/unpolished service on every level, to the point that we feel like there is NO POSSIBLE WAY the Holy Spirit was even in a five-mile radius of our church, but he was actually very much at work in powerful ways?

I know I’ve experienced this kind of upside-down reality in my experience as a worship leader. You probably have too.

There have been times I’ve planned and executed a service with so much planning, rehearsing, technical excellence, musical flare, and seamless transitions, that the Lord would have been crazy not to let the train of his robe fill our temple. But the service ends and I don’t get a single comment, not one email, not one “great job” in the parking lot, and no one had any visions of angels dancing up and down the aisles.

On the other hand, there have been countless times where I’ve felt unprepared and disjointed, I’ve noticed a bunch of mistakes in the slides, we have multiple musical issues, the reader messes up and reads the wrong Scripture passage, the drummer forgets how to play drums, and the congregation looks like a room full of mannequins. But the service ends and I hear from person after person who were deeply ministered to, who were clearly and unmistakably pointed to Jesus, and who had a profound sense of the nearness of the Holy Spirit.

I think back to Jack Hayford’s concern: that our services could be so well-oiled that the Holy Spirit could leave altogether and we wouldn’t notice for six months.

But there’s another side to that concern: that our services could be so ordinary, and so unpolished, that we would become blind to the very real and sweet presence of the Humble King himself, by his Holy Spirit, walking up and down the aisles, with his face beaming, while the worship leader is too distracted by his broken string to notice.

Am I saying that the Holy Spirit isn’t always present with us? No. Of course he is.

Am I saying that the Holy Spirit isn’t present in well-oiled services? No. Of course he is.

Am I saying that the Holy Spirit is only present in the services that we think are lousy, so we shouldn’t strive for excellence, or to remove distractions? No. Of course we should use our gifts and skills as well as we can.

Here’s what I am saying to worship leaders: to stay needy. Stay dependent. Stay expectant. And stay faith-filled. Our Spirit-leaning must be dominant over our worship leading. Never the other way around.

Stay needy for a God who will empower you with his Holy Spirit for the work of ministry. Stay dependent on that Spirit to keep you fixated on Christ. Stay expectant that the Spirit will do what he alone can do, and don’t try to do his work for him by over-programming or over-thinking or over-filling every possible detail that you can.

And finally, be full of faith in a God who can work through you, or around you, or in spite of you. This way, you can head off to Sunday lunch with full assurance that regardless of whether the service was amazing or average, you were faithful, and the Holy Spirit was at work. Our trust and identity is in his unchanging grace, not in our weekly (or daily) performance. This is good news.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in my Wednesday night seminary class when I got a phone call that would change everything. It was my brother calling to say that my dad had been found unresponsive on his apartment floor, and I needed to get over there right away. I’ve never driven so fast in my life.

I arrived, and was able to see my dad still barely alive, before the paramedics arrived and attempted to stabilize him. They tried their hardest on the ambulance, and the doctors did their best at the hospital, but to no avail. My dad died of heart failure as a result of undiagnosed cardiomyopathy the evening of April 13th, 2016.

Marshall Harrison Brown was born in North Miami, Florida, in 1953, the only son of Jerry and Emma Brown. He met and married my mom at The Church of the Resurrection in Miami, and they moved to Alexandria, Virginia in the late 1970’s to attend Virginia Theological Seminary. Graduating with his masters of divinity, my dad went into full-time pastoral ministry serving different churches in Florida throughout the 80’s and 90’s, before coming to Virginia in 2000. My brothers (Tim and Matt) and I tagged along for the ride, and oh what a ride it was.

Last Wednesday, April 20th, hundreds of people gathered at Truro Anglican Church (where I now serve as Director of Worship and Arts, and where my father had once served as an associate pastor in the early 2000’s) for my dad’s funeral. We celebrated and proclaimed the good news of the gospel together, and while we mourned the loss of a good man, we rejoiced in the hope of Jesus, the resurrection and the life.

I offered a few words of remembrance at the service. You can listen to/read what I said below.

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Good morning.

On behalf of my entire family, thank you all for coming this morning. But much more importantly, thank you for your love for us, and your love for my dad. He was a good man. He was a great sinner. And he has a great Savior.

My dad was a man of deep giftedness.

He had such amazing pastoral skills. In these last few days it’s been overwhelming to hear and read so many stories of the lives, marriages, and difficult situations where God used my dad in meaningful ways. Whether it was his preaching, his pastoral care, his hospital visits, his counseling, or the smile that you’ve written about in your notes to us, God used my dad to point countless lives to Jesus, and that is a legacy I will give my life to carry on.

My dad was also a man of good humor.

He knew how to tell a good joke, how to break the ice, and how to make people laugh. One of my favorite stories is from his third year of seminary, around the time the Episcopal church was revising its prayer book. Dad, being assigned to field work at a church in Mt. Vernon, was approached by an older lady from the congregation after the service who said: “If Jesus could see what they’ve done to his prayer book, he’d roll over in his grave”.

And if you thought my dad was funny in public, I got to hear his jokes at home. I don’t think he’d mind me sharing his code name for the “Craft Guild” at one of our previous churches in the Florida Panhandle: “Stitch and Bitch”.

He was a good dad to my brothers and me.

He was present in our lives, encouraging, strong, tender, and always telling us how proud he was of us, and how much he loved us. He gave us freedom to grow up and make mistakes, and he would rescue us when we had gotten in over our heads. Most importantly, he planted the seeds and watered the soil so that my brothers and I would hear and respond to the good news of the gospel. He knew and he shared the freedom of Christ.

But my dad was also a man who knew great bondage in his life.

He fought, and he struggled, and sometimes he won, and sometimes he lost, in the battle against sin, and in the struggle between the flesh and the Spirit. He was a normal, sinful man. But he was also a pastor called to a certain standard. And for how he fell short of that standard, on my dad’s behalf, I’d like to ask you to forgive him.

Over the last several years, it had been hard for me to forgive him. I didn’t see him or talk to him much, while I waited to see what kind of man he would be and what kind of decisions he would make. Several months ago we began to rebuild our relationship, and talk again, and get coffee, and exchange text messages, and I saw a humbled man. A contrite man. A more feeble man. A good man.

And you can learn a lot about a man when you go through the place where he lived, and through his belongings, as I have begun to do over the last few days. I see a man who had a devotional, or a bible, or a journal, or a prayer book, or a book on the hard sayings of Jesus, or a workbook on finding freedom in Christ, on every table or nightstand or dresser or chair. Until the last day of his life, my dad was pursuing Jesus. I am proud of him.

You know the depth of my dad’s giftedness. And my dad knew the depth of his sin. And the good news of the gospel is that Jesus took the punishment for my dad’s sin, and my sin, and your sin, on the cross. There is a grace that is greater than all our sin. It’s amazing grace. And it not only saves wretches like us. But it leads us home.

That grace has led my dad home.

Until the end, my dad “fought the good fight, he finished the race, and he kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7). And that faith is in a Redeemer whose nail-scared hands reached down to my dad on his apartment floor, and said “come with me, Marshall, you’re free”. God’s grace reaches downward, and it reaches deeper than our sin, and it leads us home.

And that is my dad’s last sermon to us today.

That our hope is not in our giftedness, or our charm, or our reputations.

And our salvation is not won or lost depending on our performance.

Our hope, and our salvation, is in Christ alone. It was won by Christ alone.

Marshall Brown’s life – all of it – from beginning to end, the good and the bad, the successes and failures, are hidden in Christ. He was a good man. He was a great sinner. He has a great Savior.

The hard news of this week is that my dad is no longer here.

The good news of the gospel is that my dad is risen.

Amen.