When I was a young lad, an early teenager who was sensing a call to pursue worship leading as a career, I was blessed to have a healthy supply of normal mentors in my life. These were guys who were the worship leaders or youth pastors at my church, and who were fantastic at what they did, but (and this is not a bad thing) were just plain-out normal.
They wore normal clothes. They drove normal cars. They did normal things. They didn’t present themselves as being any better than anyone else, they were accessible, and they were people I could see myself emulating someday.
Even the “celebrity” worship leaders (who were putting out albums, speaking at conferences, and doing worship leading seminars around the country) were pretty normal too. They wore dorky sweaters on their album covers, they had a job at their local church with fake plants covering up the floor monitors, and when you met one of these guys at a conference or seminar, they surprised with you their… normal-ness.
A lot of the guys and gals in my generation of worship leaders were deeply impacted by a collection of normal trailblazers, that we either knew personally, or came to know through their broader influence, and to this day (whether we’re conscious of it or not) are still emulating what we saw.
I’m grateful to still know a lot of those guys who helped shape me from an early stage. And they’re still pretty normal. And I still need (and will always need) their continued mentoring.
But I’m not as young a lad anymore, and now I’m the same age that MY mentors were when I first met them. There are middle schoolers, high schoolers, and even college students who are discerning a call to worship leading, or worship team involvement, and I’m not so much a peer to them – I’m actually more of a mentor.
And I want to be just as “normal” as my mentors growing up were. The worship leading world is bigger than it was 15-25 years ago, and it has become a wee bit more difficult for up-and-coming worship leaders to find older/more-seasoned worship leaders in their own church or in the music/conference/seminar world who are normal. The celebrity factor is a bit more of an issue than it was in the 90s, or even the early 2000s.
Those of us who benefitted from normal mentors need to make sure we become that kind of normal mentor ourselves. We owe it to a crop of young musicians, who will one day be shaping the worship of the church, to provide a model of accessible, genuine, down-to-earth, humble local-church servanthood. If all that’s being offered is a glossy picture of cool church celebrity-ism, or performancism, then we’re setting up the future generation (and their churches) for a drift away from the ancient paths.
The more we pursue (and seek to be) normal, faithful, accessible, and Christ-centered mentors, the more the aura of celebrity will fall away from the role of worship leading: and that can’t happen soon enough.
Meeting with potential singers and/or instrumentalists for auditions is always something I look forward to, but it’s also something that carries potential risks for awkwardness if the person I’m meeting with is under the impression that they have a musical gift (when in reality they don’t), or if they think they’ll definitely be given an up-front role (when in reality they might not).
Last month I had the privilege of preaching at my church’s Sunday night service, where I wrapped up a summer sermon series called “Seeing Christ in the Old Testament”.
Several years ago I had just finished leading worship for a big event that had taken a huge amount of my emotional and physical emotional energy, the better part of six months to plan and execute, and a significant amount of ministry capital, when a letter arrived in my mailbox (an actual letter, in my actual mailbox) addressed to (you guessed it…) me.
Worthily Magnify 