Tag: Leading

Don’t Pull a LOST

1The ABC drama “LOST” had it all: great acting, lots of suspense, beautiful beaches, and high ratings. Its fans were devoted, many to the point of obsession, and for a few years it was impossible to get away from the cultural phenomenon of this show, even in church. Many churches all over America had sermon series that were titled (you’ll never guess it) “LOST”. It was a really big deal.

Until the writers started throwing in random bits of nonsense.

Smoke monsters. Polar bears. The hatch. The countdown. The backwards whispering. The flash forwards and the flashes backwards. The crazy time traveling lady. The “others”. Sometimes it was good. But a lot of the time it was all incredibly random. And it didn’t connect.

What happened? How did this top-rated show lose its way? It might have something to do with the fact that the show’s writers and creators never knew how they were going to end it. They were just making stuff up. Throwing in these random bits of nonsense with no idea of how the bits came together.

And soon, the fans began to notice. Questions went unanswered. Mysteries unresolved. Storylines abandoned. The writers had to make up an ending that didn’t really make an awful lot of sense and didn’t really make anyone that happy.

It’s not a good idea for writers to just make stuff up without a master plan. You might get some good ratings to begin with and attract some buzz, but the proof is in the pudding, and people will eventually want to know that there’s something “there” there.

Sometimes I see worship leaders who remind me of the writers of LOST. There’s some good stuff, which should be commended, but then on occasion there are random bits of nonsense.

Strong theology one song, then terrible theology the next.

Sing with us, now sit there and watch us, now stand and sing again, but now stand there during this killer guitar solo.

This song has a plain background, the next song has a candle background, and the next song has us flying through the clouds (on a 10 second predictable loop). Why am I flying through the clouds? Am I hiding from the smoke-monster?

This Sunday I’m chilled out and low-key and pretty accessible, but next Sunday I’m going to bring the fire down from heaven and make this place rock!

The sermon was about the humility of Jesus but the song we sang right after it was about heavenly storehouses laden with snow.

You get the point. What you see are things that don’t make an awful lot of sense. There’s not a thread running through everything, connecting different elements, creating consistency from week to week, providing security for your congregation, and crafting a narrative that’s clear, communicable, and gripping.

And that’s what separates good books from bad books, good stories from bad stories, and good TV shows from TV shows that lose their way.

If you don’t have a core conviction/plot/theme/narrative to which every scene, chapter, character, and surprise points back to, then you’re in trouble.

Because it’s not so much that random is bad. It’s that nonsense is bad. You can have things (anthems, songs, instrumentation, etc.) that appear random at first, but actually end up making sense because you know that they connect, and the congregation eventually says “aha! That connects!”

But you can’t make nonsense work. Nonsense results in confusion.

So, with whatever authority you have over a worship ministry, a service, a team, a choir, a small group, or whatever it is, do what you can to keep the core from being compromised by random bits of nonsense. It might mean saying no to a persistent soloist, a weak song, a good idea at a bad time, or that persistent pull to compromise. It might mean devoting more time, prayer, and preparation to making sure you’re engaging people effectively.

The integrity of your ministry largely rests on your ability to maintain a faithful consistency to the Good News, week after week after week. Tell the old, old story in as many ways as you can, connecting your songs and services together to point back to the Gospel.

What Making Worship Albums Has Taught Me

1Last year I had the privilege of producing a worship album for my church called “A Thousand Amens“. This year I’m producing two more. It’s been a ton of fun, a lot of work, and a learning experience. Here are a few things making worship albums has taught me:

Make every measure count
Do you really need that 4-measure interlude between the chorus and verse? Could you cut it out altogether? Could it be more effective if it was just 2 measures? Extra measures can drag a song down. Cutting out 2 measures here and 2 measures there can make a huge improvement.

Play less. Really. Play a lot less
You hear this a lot and you know it’s true, but do you and your team members practice it? Probably not. I need to do a better job insisting that all of our team members, and this includes me, play less and play better stuff when we do play.

There’s no such thing as a live worship album anymore
We’re able to fix so much stuff in post-production that it’s almost ridiculous. The result is a great-sounding worship album, but the danger is that worship leaders and congregations expect Sunday mornings to sound like a worship album. Except for rare circumstances and rare teams, your Sunday morning services will not (and should not) sound like a recording. Relax.

I should only introduce new songs if they’re worth introducing
It wasn’t long after our first album released last July that I knew we’d be doing another one in 2013. So every time I thought about introducing a new song I had to think “is this a good enough song that I’d want it to be immortalized on an album, put in the cars and homes of my congregations, and held up to other worship leaders who buy this album as a song they should do as well?” Most songs didn’t meet that criteria so I didn’t introduce them. It was a high bar. But I don’t regret it. Set a high bar for what songs you introduce.

It doesn’t take much to freshen up a song
As our latest live recording in July was getting close, I had lunch with a good friend of mine who’s a gifted worship leader/arranger/composer. He cautioned me against doing songs the exact same way they were recorded. Change a chord here or there. Do a different melodic thing on the intro/interludes. Whatever. It doesn’t have to be much. Just use your brain and your creativity and freshen up a song. Good advice.

Congregations are hungry for extended worship
The two times we’ve recorded live worship albums, I’ve been amazed at my congregation’s response to the lengthy times of worship that we’ve offered on a Friday/Saturday night or even on a Sunday morning. They sat down when they wanted to. They stood when they wanted to. They wanted more at the end of 90 minutes. They seemed rejuvenated. So did I. I shouldn’t wait for album recordings as an excuse to offer extended worship. I should look for other times as well.

God gives congregations a song to sing
I’m not talking about a “song” as in an individual song, but I’m talking about “song” in a bigger-idea, over-arching-narrative sense. Our first album was recorded when we were losing our building. Our “song” was that Jesus was “all to us” (which happened to be an actual song, too). This time we recorded an album after a year and half of being a portable church without a home. Our “song” was the faithfulness of God and the unchanging power of the Gospel. What “song” is your congregation singing? What song should they be singing? Keep your ear to the ground and you’ll hear it.

Ten Things Worship Leaders Should Never Do

1Leading worship provides so many opportunities to make mistakes and be humbled and grow in maturity. I’ve made so many mistakes I’ve lost count. The benefit of those mistakes is that I now have an idea of some things I should never do. Will I do these things again? Yes. But should I? No. Here are ten things worship leaders should never do, courtesy of mistakes I’ve made (and will keep making) in all of these areas.

Don’t Willfully Disobey Your Pastor
Willfully disobeying your pastor is one sure way to grieve the Holy Spirit and put yourself on thin ice.

Don’t Publically Correct a Worship Team Member
Praise publically. Correct privately.

Don’t Allow Yourself to Be Made Famous
Take practical steps, in small ways that add up to big ways, to resist meaningless fame in your congregation.

Don’t Make Minor Things into Major Things
Think long and hard about whether or not you want to make a big deal out of what you’re making a big deal about. Is it really a big deal? Probably not.

Don’t Make the Major Thing a Minor Thing
The major thing is that people are able to see and savor Jesus Christ. You can do that in a lot of ways. But if you can’t do that, then that’s a major thing.

Don’t Neglect Praying with Your Team
Before you rehearse. Before you lead a service. Huddle up and pray together. If you regularly neglect to do this, you send the message that you don’t need any help.

Don’t Fish for Compliments After the Service
Pity the poor soul who sits across from you at lunch after church while you not-so-subtly fish for a compliment. Just be quiet and eat your lunch!

Don’t Leave the Room During the Sermon
Think about what you’re saying if you slide off stage and eat a donut and surf Facebook during the preaching of the word. Stay in the room and listen to the sermon.

Don’t Be a Diva
Set up your own guitar stand. Coil your own cables. Get yourself a water bottle. Be a pleasant/humble personality for your other volunteers/staff to interact with.

Don’t Forget Your Family
There is such intense pressure to prove your worth by how many hours you work and how busy you are. Nonsense. Give yourself first and foremost to your family, and fit your ministry responsibilities in when you can – not at your family’s expense. 

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.

Don’t Be Afraid to Laugh At Yourself

Every once in a while, while leading worship, you can’t hide from the congregation the fact that, at that moment, you don’t know what you’re doing. In these moments, you can either try to keep digging (in which case you usually make things worse) or just laugh at yourself.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

Back in May (of 2012), my church had its very last Sunday morning service on its beloved property of over 275 years. I’ve talked about this before (specifically here). Sunday May 13th was the day, and at the end of the opening time of worship at our 11:00am service, after we sang “Behold Our God”, I had planned for our congregation say Psalm 95:1-7.

The problem was that I hadn’t checked to make sure it was ready to go on the screen. So after “Behold Our God” ended, and I said “let’s read together from Psalm 95”, nothing came up. Awkward moment number one.

The other problem was that I was depending on the words being on the screen so I didn’t have a bible or a printout close by. So I had to rely on my memory. Which at that particular moment, in front of 1,000 people, decided to fail me. Awkward moment number two.

By God’s grace, I had the presence of mind to laugh at myself.

After realizing that Psalm 95 was, in fact, NOT going to come up on the screen, I said “…maybe I’ll read Psalm 95“. People laughed. Phew. Awkward tension lowered a little bit.

Then, after fumbling my way through trying to remember how Psalm 95:1-7 went (and not doing a very good job), I said “(pause) that’s a paraphrase“. People laughed. Phew. Awkward tension lowered again. Then I quickly prayed before I made any more mistakes!

My point is that in those worship leading moments when it’s clear to you and to the congregation that you’ve made a mistake — it’s usually a good idea to just laugh at yourself. It gives them permission to laugh too. It lowers the tension, breaks the ice, and then everyone can move on.

Here’s the clip of the moment for you to enjoy. Feel free to laugh.