A Blog For Worship Leaders Who Lead Normal People In Normal Churches ||| RealWorldWorship.Org
Are you trying to keep up with the Jones? The Jones that go to the “cool church” on the other side of the city. The Jones who go to the “artsy church” in the nearest urban center or college town? The Jones who go to the big, well known church in your tribe or denomination?
Well… Stop it. Stop it right now. Stop it right now, and here’s why…
Let’s be honest about two things:
1. Church bands tend to “overplay” and step over each other on a regular basis
2. Church bands are often a hodge podge of who’s available instead of who is needed.
What I’m going to suggest will hopefully unmuddy the waters sonically speaking and give structure to arranging and picking your church’s band for a worship service.
When I put a band together for a Sunday or Wednesday I first look at who is available. It’s all well and good to want a thick analog synth sound on a song but if all your keyboard players are on vacation, you’ll need to rethink your plans. Once I know who is available, I start to fill roles based on my “5 point band”. I admit that I don’t always do it consciously, because I’m so used to doing it. But it’s always there in the background of my mind. So here are the 5 points that I look for to put a band together. I’m going to write them in order of importance.
For someone out there, this is going to be a mind blowing, revolutionary thought. So by all means, feel free to sit down for a moment and catch your breath.
For the rest of you, who hopefully get the playful spirit in which I wrote the above sentence, this is a valid conversation for us to have.
In some church traditions, this is a pointless conversation with an obvious answer: of course not. But for many evangelical churches, the question I posed would mean a complete paradigm shift. The worship leader is ALWAYS the person singing. Whether they sing on their own, or if they are also the piano player, guitarist, or even bass player, the worship leader always sings. I’m going to propose that maybe this thinking is why your church’s music ministry is struggling.
Someone is going to read the title of this post and think to themselves: “Of course not! Who would think that is a good idea”. While someone else will think: “Why not? I know someone who did this or that and it worked out just fine”. The answer to this question really does not depend on what you think, or what I think. As with all things, our answer to this or any question should be ‘What does God think?’ This is why having the Bible, God’s word to humanity, as our final authority is so important. So let’s talk about this. In a day and age when churches hire musicians from outside the church, some who aren’t even christians, does God have anything to say on the subject of Non-Christians and Worship Leading?
Continue reading “Can A Non-Believer Be On The Worship Team?”
Last week I was at a Pastor’s Conference where many different worship bands and leaders served leading us in worship before the sessions. Almost all of them fell victim to the trap of overusing vocal cues in their leading. What is a vocal cue? Why would someone use them? How can someone overuse them? Well, let’s talk about it.
Continue reading ““Let’s Sing That Again”: Vocals Cues In The Worship Service”
Proverbs 29:18 tells us that “where there is no vision, the people perish.” In Mark 6:34 Jesus has compassion on the people because “they are like sheep without a shepherd.” Ephesians 4:11 tells us that it was God “who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers,” and I feel safe in saying that worship leaders fall somewhere in their too. I could give more examples but the point is that the Bible teaches that godly leadership is a great thing but a lack of leadership is a very bad thing.
One of the main reasons I started this blog is that other blogs about worship leading didn’t seem to cover the issues that I had dealt with over the years in ‘average’ churches. It makes sense. Most of the guys who put up these blogs have the time to do so because they are on staff at churches that are large enough to have a full time Worship Pastor, which generally means they are large enough to have more than one full band, and quite often have several fully staffed bands.
My background is both in large and small churches. I grew up at a church in Seattle that was around 2,500 people back in the 80’s and 90’s that (not surprisingly for Seattle) had an abundance of talented musicians (some of whom are in nationally known bands today). That church never had trouble putting a band together. Then when I was 18 in 2000 I was asked to leave Seattle and move to the UK to lead worship at a small church of 40 people. I was the only musical person in the church. Since then I’ve lead at churches of all sizes. Even at my last church which was around 800 people with a lot of musicians we often had trouble putting together a full band because of availability with work and we were sharing a lot of musicians with the youth ministry.
We can either see the challenge of staffing a full band as a problem but as an opportunity to think outside the box.
You’re a worship leader. You play guitar, piano, maybe bass, or you are strictly vocals only. You speak the ‘language’ of those instruments. But the band you lead is made up of a host of other sounds, timbres, pitches, and ranges speaking different musical ‘languages’ than you do. How do you lead them? How do you work with them and convie what you want done? Get an Expert. Be an Expert.
The Reason I started this blog is that I was looking for blogs and podcasts about leading worship so that I could get better in areas I’m weak in. For me this would be admin, mostly, but I’d like to get better at team development, running practices, etc.
I found that the blogs and podcasts were not dealing with these issues or they were done by guys at a big church. There is NOTHING wrong with big churches, I grew up in a church that was around 2,000 people strong. But the reality is that leading at church of 700 or so and then planting a church that averages below 100 people, the dynamics are a lot different.
Also, a lot of the musical style and expression they were discussing was foreign to me. The expressions I found either leaned towards performance or towards a form of simplicity that was often a cover for laziness and lack of vision. In short I just didn’t relate.
I’m not trying to rag on every worship blog out there… one of the blogs that seemed to me to be from a very performance driven church taught me a lot about admin. One of the podcasts that leaned towards that rigid simplicity reminded me that I wasn’t a rock star. Both sides were used by God to bless, challenge and teach me.
I just felt that I had a perspective I could share here, and that there might be other worship leaders like me out there who want to grow in their gifts and callings but don’t connect with the currently out there or are looking for a different perspective. I hope as I write more posts that it will be helpful to someone in some way.
Some thoughts I’d had recently on why I pick the songs I pick when I lead worship.
NEW SONGS:
The bible speaks in many places about Singing a New Song to the Lord.
I admit that I don’t like doing new songs. It just easier to go with the songs everyone knows or the songs other band leaders have introduced. But last year I was convicted of my laziness and our need to be constantly reloading our song lists and expressions of worship. So new songs have to happen.
OLD SONGS:
Music has a way of calling people to the Lord or back to the Lord as the case may be. If someone is sneaking into the back row for the 1st time in years than these will be the songs they know. These will be the songs they connected with their relationship to God. So i’m very intentional about having some other tunes in a set list.
REALLY OLD SONGS:
Hymns. Some people love them. Some people hate them. I don’t make a distinction between hymns and choruses other than one has more words than the other. Some Hymns are really good and I pick those and some aren’t and I leave those alone.
Hymns do come in really handy for a few reasons. Older saints tend to connect well with them. They also tend to be a little more open to new styles and expressions of music in worship when it’s done with songs they grew up with because at least the words or tune is familiar. Younger Christians are gravitating to the hymns because they often express the reality of our lives in Christ better than the songs on Christian radio do and the seem to lend themselves well to modern expressions of music.
So I go with what works.
“CONTEMPORARY” SONGS:
Like many in my generation I find little connection with “Christian music”. The music seems to have little connection with my faith, Christian life or preference in music. That’s fine, it’s not geared towards me anyway. But there are people in the church who love that music, they connect to it in a way that I don’t. I want to serve them so sometimes I do songs I don’t care for because it’ll serve the larger community and that is a good thing.
INTENTIONAL VARIETY
In a church with as large as demographic cross section as the one I serve at variety is the key.
I try to be intentional about the songs I pick. I try to be intentional about our “sound” (folk, pop, rock, country, etc) so that a broad range of tastes are covered.
No one type of sound, style or song should have a monopoly.
Jesus should have the only monopoly when it comes to music in the church.
Real World Worship 