Tag: Leading

The Value of Out-of-the-Bubble Advice

News flash: if you lead worship in any capacity, whether it’s full-time, part-time, or volunteer, one thing is inevitable. You will face a difficult situation at some point. And you won’t know what to do. And how you handle the difficult situation will have consequences.

A member of your congregation is so angry at you that he/she threatens to leave the church. How do you respond?

It seems like someone else on the ministry team/staff at your church is out to get you. Who do you go to?

A member of your worship team is openly living their life in a way that’s contradictory to being in up-front worship leadership. How do you tackle this?

Your pastor is critical of you to other members of the congregation. What in the world are you supposed to do?

You inherited a “worship design committee” that is seeking to exert control over you and your song choices that’s not helpful. Do you have any hope of survival?

These are just a few made-up scenarios that either in my own ministry, or in my experience knowing other worship leaders, touch on some of the difficult situations that leave us wishing we were in another line of work.

And while the difficult situation that you’ll face might be different from one I described above, your questions will be the same. How do I handle this? What is my next move?

You handle tough situations by getting good advice. And, preferably, out-of-the-bubble advice. Someone who can look at your situation from a 30,000 foot view. Someone who’s not emotionally involved. Someone who has Godly wisdom. And, most importantly, someone you can trust to be honest with you.

Here’s the thing, though. And I want to be careful how I say this.

Sometimes the worst advice you’ll receive will come from other people who are in ministry. This is because, generally, people in ministry don’t have as much business/management/leadership experience as the people who are, you guessed it, working in the fields of business, or management, or leadership.

I’m not saying that people in ministry, namely your senior pastor (who you need to include on as much as you can) or other pastors at your church, won’t have good advice. Go to these people too. They’ll have great insights and observations and could potentially help you avoid some landmines. You might have a pastor who’s incredibly wise and experienced. (And even if he’s not, you should still keep him in the loop and love him as well as you can!)

But, again I’m making a generalization here, most pastors or people in ministry, are not nearly as experienced or seasoned in the political and managerial realities of real-world leadership issues as some of the Godly men and women in your congregation are.

So If I could give one piece of leadership advice to a new worship leader, it would be this: when you face difficult situations in ministry and you don’t know what to do, stop and take a deep breath. Pray a lot. Talk to your pastor and get his advice and observations. But then get outside the bubble as quickly as you can. Find someone who can be your mentor. Someone who has run a large-ish organization. Someone who’s been in politics. Or someone who is a gifted leader. Spill the beans to them. Then listen to their advice. Give them permission to be honest with you. Because maybe you’re the problem! In any case, listen well and you’ll benefit from them.

Out-of-the-bubble advice will prove to be incredibly valuable to you as a worship leader, and will help you navigate the inevitable difficult situations with wisdom and clarity.

Having a Good Rehearsal… In Your Head

Did you know that you don’t need a room, a stage, equipment, a microphone, an instrument, or any other musicians to have a good rehearsal? Sometimes, all you need is your head.

Not that having an actual rehearsal in a physical space with real live human beings and some sort of instrumentation and equipment set up can’t be helpful. It’s a good idea to have that kind of rehearsal when you can.

But if you’re going to be leading worship for something, you should be running through the songs, and the transitions. You’ll be going over what you’ll play, what you’ll say, and what you’ll pray. You’ll hang out on the parts where you’re not quite sure what to do. You’ll run through different scenarios. You’ll fiddle with different arrangements. All within the confines of your brain.

This way, when you do have an actual rehearsal, and when it comes time for the actual service, your head will (literally and figuratively) be in the game. You’ll be able to lead your fellow musicians and fellow congregants with more ease. You’ll be freer to worship because you won’t be wondering what you’re going to do.

Find some quiet time to mentally prepare and rehearse for leading worship. You might find it helpful to do this while you exercise (for me, it makes running go by more quickly), sit in traffic, drive to church, stare out of a window, sit at a piano or with your guitar, or just lying in bed. Try to focus and run through things from the beginning. Make mental notes or actual notes if you think of anything that you need to remember. Otherwise, just walk through the songs and transitions and get comfortable with where you’re headed.

You’ll be glad you did when real rehearsal or real service starts. All the time you take in advance of leading worship or rehearsals will pay off. Even the time you spend in your head!

Where is Your Confidence?

Do you feel panicky when you’re not as rehearsed as you’d like to be? Do you feel anxious when you see a really full room looking back at you (or empty chairs)? Does your heart start racing before the service is about to start? If you make a mistake (say something dumb, forgot to take your capo off, mess up a song) do your agonize over it for days and replay it in your head?

If you’ve never experienced these sensations while serving as a worship leader, you’re not normal. But if scenarios above describe a regular experience for you as a worship leader, you’re missing the point. God very kindly allows us to feel all of these things – panicky, anxious, nervous, obsessive and embarrassed – so that we cease to seek our confidence in ourselves.

God is all about revealing the idols of our hearts and mercifully taking them away from us. For worship leaders, a common idol is self-sufficiency and self-centeredness. Feelings of anxiety are good for us because they serve a purpose: they remind us of our utter need for God.

The temptation is to think that if you’re panicky, you should have rehearsed more. Or if you’re anxious, then you’re not a good enough worship leader. Or if your heart is racing, you’re not ready for the big leagues. Or if you made a mistake (by the way, every worship leader in the world makes mistakes every single Sunday) that you ruined the service. None of these are true.

Maybe you should have rehearsed less, not more. Maybe you’re a great worship leader and you just need to relax. Maybe God has prepared you for this exact moment and you need to trust in him. Maybe your mistakes are helpful reminders to you (and your team and your congregation) that you’re a real person.

In all cases, and for all worship leaders, God is consistently reminding us that our confidence can’t be in rehearsals, polish, skill, or experience. All of those things are good things and you should pursue them. But none of them should be where we find our confidence. Our confidence is in God.

This might sound trite to you. It’s not. It’s the first building block of worship leading and if this one gets shaky, then everything else does too.

Allow God to humble you. Allow God to remind you that you need Him. Relax on Sunday morning and don’t stress over all the details and transitions and notes and chords and people and pressures. Fix your eyes on Jesus and you won’t sink. Look away from him and you will. He is our confidence!

Things to Pray for Before a Service

If you’re anything like me, and if your worship team is anything like mine, sometimes when you gather to pray (and I hope you do) before a service, you can either blank on what to pray or you can tend to pray the same sort of thing. What kinds of things are we supposed to pray for before a service? Here are some ideas:

That your worship team would be unified in the Spirit
All of us have different gifts, but we all belong to the same body (1 Corinthians 12:12-13). Your worship team needs the Spirit’s help to act as one body, not a bunch of individual members.

That Jesus would be made central
John the Baptist said in John 3:30 that “(Jesus) must increase, but I must decrease”. The Psalmist wrote in Psalm 115:1, “Not to us… but to your name give glory…”. These are our prayers, and we need the Holy Spirit to help us decrease and to help Jesus to increase (John 16:14).

That God’s word would be preached faithfully
The “sword of the Spirit” mentioned in Ephesians 6:17 isn’t a synthesizer pad or a cool transition. The sword of the Spirit is the word of God. We should be praying that God’s word is preached boldly and faithfully, and that what we do supports it.

That people would sing from their hearts
In Matthew 15:8 Jesus lamented the people who honored him with their lips but whose hearts were far from him. One of our jobs is to help prevent lip-service to Jesus. We need the Holy Spirit for this, since he is the only one who can search our hearts (Romans 8:27).

That you would lead with Spirit-inspired excellence
If I wanted to, I could play an excellent guitar solo. But it wouldn’t do any good. Excellence on its own is useless. Excellence for the purpose of God’s glory and the congregation’s edification is commanded (Psalm 33:3). We need God’s help to discern the difference between being impressive for the sake of impressing, or excellent for the sake of serving.

That unbelievers would be convicted by the Holy Spirit
Here’s an understatement: there are certain things God can do that you can’t do. You might be a great worship leader but you can’t convict unbelievers of sin. In 1 Corinthians 14:24-25, Paul says that one advantage of prophecy is that an unbeliever can be “convicted… and declare that God is really among you”. This is why you should pray that God helps you lead prophetically, in the power of the Holy Spirit, so that even unbelievers will see God’s glory.

That you would be led by the Holy Spirit
Don’t just plow through your song list and rush through it without taking time to let God lead you to repeat, underline, emphasize, or even skip certain things. If the Holy Spirit lives in you, then (this is amazing) you can know the very thoughts of God (1 Corinthians 2:11). What you’re thinking is important. But what God is thinking is more important. Pray that the Holy Spirit speaks clearly to you what’s on God’s heart as you lead.

That the time of singing would bear fruit
It’s not enough to give people a pleasant singing experience on Sunday mornings. We should be changed every time we encounter God individually or corporately. One of the main ways our time of singing can bear fruit is for the words we sing to sink deep down in our hearts and stay there during the week, reminding us of the truths we’ve sung (Colossians 3:16).

That your sound engineer will have wisdom and energy
Seriously, pray for your sound engineer(s) anyone else on the AV team at your church. Too often worship teams treat their audiovisual colleagues like second-class citizens. Pray for them, honor them, thank them, and be understanding when something goes wrong. They need God’s help to stay attentive, to be able to engage in worship, and to maintain servants hearts while in the background.

That you would lead, sing, and play beyond your natural abilities
There are many instances in scripture when the Holy Spirit enables someone to operate beyond their normal ability (Moses in Exodus 31:3, David in 2 Samuel 12:32, Ezekiel (all throughout the book), Micah in chapter 3:8, Zechariah in Luke 1:67, Stephen in Acts 6:10, and Peter in Acts 11:12). These are normal people to whom God gives supernatural strength for the demonstration of his power and the proclamation of his good news. Worship leaders would be wise to ask for that same supernatural strength, every single Sunday.

Give Yourself a Break

For many years, too many years in fact, I led worship way too often.

Starting in the Fall of 2006 when my church started a Saturday service, I was the primary worship leader for the Saturday 5:00pm service and the Sunday 11:00am service. Two services a weekend. I would get a free Sunday the weekend after Easter when our student worship team would lead, and I would take two weekends off somewhere in the summer. Three weekends off per year.

So, I was picking songs, leading rehearsal, up front, and leading worship 49 weekends a year. And since we were doing two services each weekend, that means I was leading worship 108 times a year. This doesn’t count monthly healing services, Wednesday staff meetings, and other services and events. But you get the idea. It was way too much.

It was unhealthy for me. It burns you out after leading that many times in a row. You don’t feel fresh anymore. You don’t lead fresh anymore. Everything starts to blur. You get tired of choosing songs. You get tired of leading rehearsal. You lose energy. You fall into ruts. You get predictable. You get safe. Worst of all, you start thinking that your church would fall apart if you were to leave.

It was unhealthy for my worship team. It didn’t give other worship leaders in the church a chance to lead. There might have been an occasional spot for them for a men’s or women’s ministry event, but I wasn’t giving people an opportunity to get experience leading worship in the context of a service. I was hogging 108 opportunities all for myself.

It was unhealthy for my church. Whether they realized it or not, I was fostering an unhealthy dependence on me leading worship, so that when I did rarely get a service off, it was more disruptive than it should have been. If I really did mean what I prayed – that I would decrease and God would increase – then why wouldn’t I take a very practical step toward decreasing and get myself off of the platform more often?

I have resolved to push other worship leaders in my church into at least half of the 108 yearly opportunities. I lead worship very seldom on Saturday nights now. Other worship leaders take turns, sometimes by themselves, and sometimes with a band. I lead healing services very seldom now. Other worship leaders get experience by leading those. I still lead most of the time on Sunday mornings, but this year I’m planning on taking at least 6 off.

You can’t do this if you’re insecure. If you think your church really needs you, or if you’re concerned that if someone else leads worship then your congregation might forget about you, then you’ve fallen into unhealthy thinking. You have to be secure enough to step back and push others into the spotlight, so to speak. It’s more healthy for you, for your team, and for your congregation.

And you can’t do this if you’re needy. Without realizing it, you can begin to need to be needed, and if you’re not leading worship you feel like you have no purpose. This isn’t a good thing.

I remember meeting a worship leader at a church I visited while on vacation a few years ago (during one of my two weekends off). After a brief conversation with him, I said “I hope you get a couple of weekends off this summer”. Sadness fell over his face. He said “I wish”. It turns out that he was allowed – maybe – one weekend off per year.

For your sake and your church’s sake, make sure you’re getting regular breaks from worship leading. Even if you’re not going on vacation, schedule yourself to get a break. Your substitute might not be as polished, or they might even be better!, but just do it. It will keep you from getting burned out and it will keep your congregation from getting too dependent on you too.