Leading a worship team – Page 6

The Pre-Service Distraction

On each of the last three Sundays, about 15 minutes before the service was supposed to start, I was faced with out-of-the-blue things that had the potential of completely throwing and/or my worship team off for the whole service.

One Sunday as I walked into our back room to put my guitar cases away, I overhead a member of the congregation calling the service at which I lead the music the “shake your booty service”.

The next Sunday we wasted 10 of the 15 minutes we had for a sound check by trying to find those adaptors that let you plug a little headphone connector into a larger jack. Oh, and the sound guy couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t getting the bass guitar at the board. He finally figured it out but this meant we pretty much had no time to get a mix or our monitors settled.

The following Sunday we were rehearsing before the service and when we finished rehearsing one chorus of a song, I heard my drummer say, “there’s a mouse in here!” Sure enough, there were two mice running around inside the drum booth (or as we affectionately refer to it, the “space pod”), and when my drummer felt something underneath his foot, he looked down to discover a mouse. Lovely. Oh, and my singer that morning happened to have a phobia of rodents and was doing her best not to have a panic attack right then and there.

One Sunday it’s a critical comment. The next it’s an AV issue. And the following it’s something completely random like mice in the drum cage. They get me frustrated, tempt me to say short-tempered things, and make me feel tense and anxious. What’s going on here?

Well, some of it is just the way things go. People aren’t perfect and those imperfect people sometimes say hurtful things at bad times. Sound systems do funny things and adaptors disappear. And, I suppose if I was a mouse living in a church, the drum space pod would be a nice quiet place six and a half days out of the week.

But there’s a spiritual dynamic to it also. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that on the day that God’s people are gathering to glorify him, Satan will be actively seeking to steal that glory away. He has a history of that.

Whenever you lead worship, watch out for pre-service distractions (or even mid and post-service too!) since they can easily throw you off your game. You’ll need to keep your cool (I wrote some thoughts on this a while ago) and keep your focus. Don’t be surprised when they come up. Just deal with them humbly, prayerfully and light-heartedly and try to stay focused on the glory of God and the congregation that has gathered. Unless you feel a mice under your foot, in which case a scream might be appropriate.

Worship Team Mechanics: Arranging the Moving Parts

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.

Worship Team Mechanics: Telling the Body That It’s a Body

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.

Worship Team Mechanics: Auditioning

I want to spend a few posts this week on issues that worship leaders face with growing, managing, and maintaining their worship teams. Whether you’re in a small church with only a handful of musicians or a large church with a bunch of them, it’s important that you have a clear and thought-through process for how to steward the gifts and people that God brings before you.

I am not the expert of any of this. I am still learning, still making mistakes, and still trying different approaches. But I hope that some of what I say will be helpful. Today we’ll look at how to audition people well.

Why audition?
God gives different people different gifts. No two people are the same. Every church is made up of different people with different gifts for different purposes. If you’re a worship leader in a church, one of your roles is to steward these gifts, and help people with musical gifts discern how and if they are called to serve the congregation.

Set dates
I used to say that if people were interested in exploring serving on the worship team, they should email me. I’d then set up a time to meet with them. The problem with this was that I might have 5 or 6 different people all wanting to meet on different days and at different times. It was unmanageable. Now I’ll pick one Saturday afternoon every 3 or 4 months and announce that auditions will be held on those dates. I’ll schedule auditions a half hour apart, assuming each one will take about 20 minutes. This way I’m only giving up 2 or 3 hours.

By the way, I would strongly encourage you to carefully word your audition invitations. I wrote a post on this a while ago and you can read it here.

Email questions
Once someone gets in touch with you and expresses an interest, the very first thing I would encourage you to do would be to (1) thank them, and (2) ask them a few important questions about themselves. This is not an exhaustive list, but generally I find these 4 questions helpful:
– (1) Tell me your story of how you came to trust in Jesus Christ.
– (2) Tell me your story as a musician.
– (3) In what ways have you served in worship leadership in the past (if at all)?
– (4) Why do you feel called to this particular ministry.

Asking these questions over email is a good idea. This way you have it in writing. People start to blend in after a while, and this way you can remember who said what. Further, it keeps your auditions brief, since you don’t need to spend a ton of time with each person asking them detailed questions about themselves. They also have time to think it through.

You’ll learn a lot from these questions, particularly if you see any red flags (I wrote a post on red flags to watch out for and you can read it here). Be on the look out for people who can’t really articulate a faith in Jesus Christ (they’ll need some discipling before joining the team), or people who just want to play music because it’s fun (they’ll need to catch a passion for worshipping God and leading others in engaging with him).

Schedule auditions
I’ve found it helpful to then schedule people about 30 minutes apart. This gives me time to (a) meet them, (b) chat with them to make them comfortable, (c) ask them a few questions to get to know them, (d) audition them, and (e) get a few minutes’ break before the next person.

Explain to the people over email that you’ll be singing or playing through a few familiar worship songs together. If they need the music in advance, get it to them. If not, pick really familiar songs.

Interview the person
You’ve already asked them a lot of questions over email. Their answers might have given you some things to ask them about. I’d encourage you to ask them what brought them to your church, and to make sure they’re a committed member of the congregation. If they’re not, you need to communicate why that’s important, if it’s not already a requirement.

If it’s a singer, ask them if they normally sing melody or harmony. Can they make up harmonies on the spot? Can they learn by ear? Do they always start singing on the first word of the song? Do they wait until the chorus? What’s going through their minds?

If it’s an instrumentalist, ask them what they’re thinking. Is the bass player listening for the kick drum? Is the drummer listening to the bass player? Is the pianist stuck playing in the middle?

Whether it’s a singer or instrumentalist, explain to them that while skill is important, what’s more important is their heart, and what’s most helpful to you and to the congregation is to have a worship team of people who are clearly engaged in worship. You’re not looking for backup singers and musicians. You’re looking for worship leaders.

Set up the audition
First, put them at ease. If it’s a singer, ask him/her if they want any water. If it’s an instrumentalist, let them set their stuff up and offer to help. Make a joke or two. Most importantly, let them know that this is just a chance for you to get a feel for their gifting, and that they can just be themselves and not worry.

Second, explain that you want to respect their time and help them by being honest with them about whether you think their gift would lend itself to being used on the worship team. Ask them if that’s OK. Hopefully they say yes.

Run the audition
I find it helpful to tell them something like “I’m going to start this song, and you just come in where you usually would if we were doing this in a service”. This way you can get a feel for whether or not they have really good instincts, or whether they just jump in without much thought. Play through a song or two, sometimes stopping and letting them play or sing on their own, and take enough time to hear them sing or play for several minutes.

What to say if they’re gifted
If they’re gifted, affirm them. Tell them you’d like to explore finding a place for them to serve.

What to say if they need work
If they need work, affirm them. Tell them what was good. Tell them what wasn’t so good. Then tell them what was good again. This is what we call an “affirmation sandwich”. Then tell them a number of things they need to work on, and that you’d like to keep in touch with them as they improve.

What to say if they’re not gifted
If they’re not gifted musically, affirm them. They have taken time of their day to come meet with you. They are seeking to be obedient to a prompting they feel to serve the church. Thank them for their heart to serve the church. But then kindly tell them that it’s your impression that this is not the right place for them to serve. Be specific, be kind, and keep smiling at them. Let them ask questions. Understand that this will probably be awkward and that’s just the way it goes. Affirm them again, offer to help them find other places to serve, and let them go.

For some more of my thoughts on how to say “no” to people, you can read a post I wrote here.

Why you shouldn’t allow everyone who auditions onto the team
For some churches, the idea of auditioning musicians, much less turning some musicians down, is unheard of. A certain level of chaos reigns, where anyone and everyone who expresses an interest is allowed to come to rehearsals, allowed to stand on the platform, and allowed to play on Sunday mornings.

I know that the heart behind this is to give people a place to serve and to avoid a culture of perfectionism, but it completely rejects the commands in scripture to play skillfully (Psalm 33:3). It ignores the fact that not everyone has the same gifting and that the body of Christ is arranged with different parts and different members (1 Corinthians 12). The standard will differ depending on the church, but there must be a standard.

Be slow to add someone to the team
It’s much harder to ask someone to step down from the team than it is to ask them to join the team. If you think someone is called to serve on the team, try to find a small venue for them for a while and see how they respond. If they’re reluctant to serve in children’s ministry because they really want to be up front on Sunday morning, I would avoid using them.

No lifetime passes
Finally, communicate to all new and existing worship team members that no one has a lifetime pass to the worship team. Everyone serves for seasons. You might find it helpful to follow a school-year type approach. Each September you kick off a new year. Each June you have an end-of-year celebration. In the summer you keep using people, but you give people a chance to reevaluate whether or not they want to commit for another year. This also gives you a chance to reevaluate whether certain members should continue or not.

You’re At Your Best When You’re At Your Neediest

Several Sunday mornings ago I sounded like a frog. My voice gradually went downhill during the service (and it was a communion service so there were a lot of songs) so that by the end of the service, our sound engineer had turned me down almost all the way in order to spare the congregation from having to hear it any longer.

I wish I had a good reason (like a cold or a cough). I wish I had a Godly reason (like I had been singing praise for so long that my voice was lost). I’d even settle for a natural reason (like I hadn’t warmed up properly or something). The truth is that I sounded like a frog because at 3:00am in the morning, after four hours of trying to get our 21-month-old to sleep after she woke up, I lost my temper. I yelled at her.

I felt horrible. I felt like the worst father in the world. I begged Megan to forgive me (and, by God’s grace, she did and didn’t even know what I was talking about when she woke up). I was confident that God had forgiven me. But, the damage had been done, and since I had yelled, I had hurt my voice so much that I lost it during the service. And I lost it good.

Why am I telling you how I sinned a few weeks ago in the middle of the night by getting angry with my precious little girl? First, because it’s good for my pride. And secondly, because I had a choice on Sunday morning what to tell my worship team.

I had a few options. First, I could lie. I had already sinned by getting angry with Megan, so why not continue the trend and make up something Godly sounding? I figured that wasn’t a good idea. Second, I could just not mention it. Sure, I sounded terrible and needed the other vocalist on the team to pick up the slack, but they didn’t need to know, right? Wrong. So my last option was the best option and I let them know that their esteemed worship leader had just, 5 hours earlier, been an idiot.

This was good on a number of levels: it was a chance to “be real” with my team, it gave them permission to “be real” back, it was an object lesson in how much we need God’s grace and how freely he gives it even to bad-tempered-Fathers, and gave me an acute sense that morning of how much I needed God’s Spirit to fill me and empower me. I certainly couldn’t fake it that morning.

We ended up having one of the sweeter times of worship during our communion set that I can recall ever having. We finished “Mighty to Save”, and then, froggy voice and all, I sang a spontaneous song before we went back into the chorus. I heard numerous comments from people who were really affected by that time.

If I could go back and do it all over again, I certainly wouldn’t yell at Megan. But in a way, I’m grateful for this lesson. It taught me a lot about Fatherhood, about worship leading, about being real with my team, and about how much better things go on a Sunday morning when I’m really needy.

And here’s how it sounded. Not pretty, but real.