A few weeks ago, my colleague and friend Andrew Cote wrote an instrumental piece for string quartet to be used as the call to worship at our church’s Easter services. He entitled it “Triumph of the Resurrection”. I love it – and here’s the live recording from our Easter 11:30am service.
You can purchase the score – or just find out more about Andrew at his website here.
A few months ago at the Doxology and Theology conference in Louisville, I met Stephen Miller and enjoyed getting to know him a bit. Stephen is a worship leader, recording artist, and a song writer, not to mention a husband to Amanda, a father to five children, and a pastor. For many years Stephen led worship at The Journey in St. Louis. He’s now the worship pastor at Real Life Church in Austin.
This week Stephen released his latest album “Liberating King“. You can read a great review of the album on WorshipLinks here. I wanted you to get to know him a bit better, so I asked him to answer a few questions about worship leading and ministry.
JB: Tell us a bit of your story: how you came to put your trust in Jesus, and how you got into worship leading.
SM: I grew up in church. My mom had me there every time the doors were open. I went down to pray a prayer at a Vacation Bible School when I was 8, but I don’t know that I really connected intimately with my belief in Christ until I was a sophomore in high school. God just met me in my bedroom one day as I was listening to this song that talked about Jesus dying for me and I was just wrecked out. I fell on my face there in my bedroom and said, “God I’m yours. Whatever you want. Here I am.” Didn’t think that would be worship leading. I wasn’t into church music at that time. It was all what I call Hand Wavey Guy, leading a choir and orchestra and I just wasn’t into that as a high school kid. But later that year I went to a camp and saw band lead worship for the first time, and I remember thinking, “Maybe that’s what God’s calling me to do.” So my Junior year, my youth pastor asked if I would start leading our student ministry in worship each week, and God just sort of had his hand on it and it grew from there.
JB: What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve made as a worship leader?
SM: Man, I wish I could count them all. I think not knowing the people I was leading is huge. I would try to impose my world view on a room of people who just weren’t on the same page. Rather than meeting them where they are, I would just get angry and frustrated and think it was all their fault. But in the end it was a leadership problem for me. God was saying, “Be patient. Stay faithful. Trust me.”
JB: What are three main things worship leaders should always strive to do, regardless of their context?
SM: I think so much of the modern worship leader’s role is a song leader. So choosing songs that present the Gospel in a God-centered, clear and concise manner, then striving to sing those songs as excellently as you can so that as far as it’s up to you, there is no distraction from the glory of God. You want people to see him and respond to his majesty. So I think the third thing is to ensure that your own prayer life and worship life is active and vibrant, and that you are growing in your own knowledge of God each day, as well as walking in the obedience of faith that leads people to worship off the platform.
JB: You wrote a book a few years ago called “Worship Leaders: We Are Not Rock Stars”. How can worship leaders battle the temptations of fame and popularity
SM: Fame and applause are intoxicating, man. They’re like well-trained assassins waiting to take you out. We all love attaboys and attagirls. It’s just part of who we are. But I think that the way to combat that is firstly to realize that your greatest identity is not in your functional role as a worship leader, but as a redeemed and adopted child of God. That you’re a worshiper before you’re a worship leader. When you practice that private life of intimacy with God, it does change you. When you fill your mind and mouth and memory with the Gospel – even when no one is looking – it grounds you and centers you. And then I think having people around you who know you and can help keep you on track and encourage you when you’re distracted or down – that’s so key. That’s the beauty of the local church family too I think.
JB: If you had to summarize the calling of a worship leader in one sentence, what would you say?
SM: Be faithful to love the people God puts in front of you by giving them a huge picture of who God is and what he has done, so that they can respond in worship.
Thanks, Stephen, for your heart to see God’s people sing to him and delight in him!
GIVEAWAY INFO:
If you’d like to get a free copy of Stephen’s new album, leave a comment below. On Friday (5/22) at noon I’ll choose three random commenters and they’ll get a code to download the album for free.
GIVEAWAY UPDATE:
The three winners have all been emailed a free download link. Thanks everyone!
There are three common music models in western/protestant/liturgical churches these days:
1. The traditional model. The music is almost exclusively classical, and any contemporary elements are on the fringes.
2. The contemporary model. The music is almost exclusively modern, and any traditional elements are on the fringes.
3. The ping-pong model. There’s a traditional side and a contemporary side. Each side gets its turn, at its own service, or with its own songs, and there isn’t a whole lot of unity or cooperation.
Is it possible for a church with a history of a traditional music program (choir, organ, hymnals, handbells, etc.) to embrace modern forms of music (bands, vocalists, projected lyrics, “worship teams”, etc.) without the traditional music dying as a result?
Yes, it is possible. And that’s what my church, our congregation, our choir, our instrumentalists, and I are pursuing these days.
We’re pursuing a fourth model, which is called “convergence”. Maybe you call it “blended”. It allows for vibrant traditional music, and vibrant contemporary music, and it puts them together in one combined expression. Choir plus singers. Organ plus band. Traditional plus contemporary. 6th century plus 21st century. Liturgy plus spontaneity. We can play ping-pong when it’s called for, but we play together most of the time.
This “convergence” model accomplishes several things:
1. It’s faithful to our past
2. It builds a bridge to the future, and to those from outside our traditions
3. It’s a picture of the body (independence and interdepence)
4. It’s alive and messy and risky and new and exciting
5. It’s about addition, not about subtraction
Most importantly,
6. It demonstrates our unity in Christ
What does this model mean for a traditional church choir?
This model embraces the choir and calls them further up and further in. Is it different? Yes. Is it the traditional model? No. Is it calling more or less out of the choir than before? More!
In this model of musical “convergence”, being a member of the choir is not just about singing the anthem. It’s about singing and leading all of the songs in a service from beginning to end. From the call to worship to the final hymn. Every note of every song being an opportunity for the choir to fulfill a worship leading role, a congregational-singing-cultivating role, a visible role, an audible role, and a pastoral role. From challenging repertoire, to simple liturgical responses, to contemporary songs that will only (and should only) be in our repertoire for shorter seasons, the choir is being called to be an integral worship leading presence on all of it.
Here’s the kicker about “convergence”:
The addition of new things does not mean the subtraction of older things.
The experimentation with new forms does not mean the elimination of older forms. The birth of new songs does not mean the death of old songs. New singers and musicians on the platform don’t mean the replacement of other singers and musicians. We must force ourselves to think in terms of addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division.
The motto of “convergence” is “More! Older! Newer! All of it!” It’s leaning into what God’s doing, it’s being willing to be messy and make mistakes, and it’s trusting that the foundations are strong enough to handle adding some new structures. This isn’t demolition, it’s expansion. There aren’t any wrecking balls in sight, only more bricks.
And the Cornerstone isn’t going anywhere.
Classical musicians need not run in fear at the sight of an electric guitar. A drummer need not be banished to the youth room, hidden behind plexiglass, and surrounded by foam. Traditional choral repertoire need not be thrown into the trash can. There has to be a way for musical convergence to work. It can work when we love one another, when we keep the congregation singing along, when we exalt Christ above all things and above all preferences, and when we’re willing to take risks in an atmosphere permeated with God’s grace.
Here’s to keeping on trying to make musical convergence work!
A few years ago I came across a series of CDs called “Prayer Songs”. These are instrumental recordings of Jeff Nelson on piano, and are designed to be played during times of prayer.
From Whole Hearted Worship’s website:
These unique CD’s were recorded in an atmosphere of prayer. As intercessors prayed together in one studio, Jeff Nelson, a gifted keyboard artist, songwriter, and producer, sat at a Yamaha grand piano in an adjoining studio, listening through his headset and musically interpreting the spirit of the prayers. The result is over 4 hours of “fragrant sounds” that will stir your worship & intercession. (The recordings are music only – not the spoken prayers.)
These recordings have served us very well over the years. At a service or a meeting when there is going to be an extended time of prayer ministry, we’ll often play these CDs to provide a buffer of privacy for people, and help people feel more comfortable staying and waiting and praying – not starting conversation or just leaving.
I used to feel like I was stuck playing guitar or piano for a couple of hours while a time of prayer ministry went on. I was thrilled to find these CDs and highly recommend them to you. You can order them through the link to Whole Hearted Worship’s website above.
Yesterday I shared some quotes from Harold Best’s book “Music Through the Eyes of Faith”. (See part one).
Here are some more quotes from chapter 1 (“God’s Creation, Human Creativity, and Music Making”) that struck me as being powerful arguments for using all sorts of varieties of music for God’s glory, and learning how to love them all.
“The creation, at first glance, appears to be full of anomalies. Because there are lobsters and hummingbirds, deserts and rain forests, turtles and people, we might be tempted to believe that a mixture of creative opinions has been at work, as assortment of deities, if you will, who have either compromised with each other or concluded their business in outright disagreement. How could the same Someone think up a hippopotamus and then turn around and imagine an orchid? Is God inconsistent? Does God have any taste? Or is he a Creator whose sense of rightness and beauty are so complete that we will have a more comprehensive way of integrating all of the supposed anomalies and contradictions in human creativity? Is there a way for us to see if or how the music or Eric Clapton or Beethoven can fin a place among the musics of Japanese kabuki, the Balinese gamelan, the songs of Stephen Foster, an anonymous dreamer of songs in Africa, J.S. Bach, and Blind Lemon Jefferson? We need to find ways to validate artistic pluralism without becoming so sloppy as to allow anything.”
God’s Creation, Stylistic Pluralism, and Music Making, pg. 24
“…We may have no more aesthetic right to say that a sunset is more beautiful than an artichoke than we do to say that classical music is more beautiful than jazz or Gothic preferable to Bauhaus. Perhaps we need to compare Gothic with Gothic, jazz with jazz, folk with folk, and so on, before we get involved in trying to decide among them.”
God’s Creation, Stylistic Pluralism, and Music Making , pg. 25
“If the same God can think up a cucumber and a falcon, the same potter can make a vase and a free-form object, the same poet can make a simple couplet or an extended drama, and the same composer a Scripture song or a symphony.”
God’s Creation, Stylistic Pluralism, and Music Making, pg. 26
“A galaxy and a blade of grass may differ, but only in the expanse of quality. This should give us no excuse for overlooking the wonder in a blade of grass. The galaxy and the grass are put together in the same way: elemental particles are chained together, in the one case to make something small and, in the other, to make something exceedingly vast. It is the elemental parts, the “simple particles,” that, yet to be explained, remain the greater mystery. We can make the same mistake with simplicity and complexity that we do with worth and function when we see one as better than the other. What is simplicity in human creativity? Complexity? If complexity means more and simplicity less, then the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is complex and Braham’s “Lullaby” is simple. If complex means complicated and simplicity clear, then Karl Barth’s writing is complex and C.S. Lewis simple. And if the cathedral of Notre Dame is complex, the great pyramids of Egypt are simple. Which of these is better? More profound? … Which is more profound, the brevity of the Golden Rule, or the cumulative rhetoric of the book of Romans?”
God’s Creation, Simplicity, Complexity, and Music Making, pages 30 and 31
Worthily Magnify 