A Worship Leader Blog

I was listening the other day to one of my favorite podcasts, Geeks and God, and heard about a new site that worship leaders need to know about: Muddy River Media. This is a ministry that provides quality video, motion backgrounds, loops, countdowns, still images and more, absolutely free to churches. Yes, you read it right--FREE. Donations are accepted, of course, but Muddy River Media views itself as a missions organization, with the purpose of providing quality media resources for worship and ministry, particularly for smaller churches that don't have the budget to go buy media, or don't have the resources and talent in-house to produce their own.

If you're a worship leader or a pastor of worship arts, particularly at a smaller church with limited resources, do yourself a big favor today and check this site out.

You can find an article about the site at the Geeks and God website--the Geeks and God guys actually helped develop the site using Drupal (the same CMS we use for our church Web site and for this blog site), and they've done a great job with it.

I'm in the process of preparing to put all of the college Bible study audio up on iTunes, so I've prepared a separate page that contains all of the audio links for each of the three studies we've recorded so far, Ephesians, Mark, and Stand Firm.

You'll notice that in the menu bar below the header for this page, there is now a "Bible Teaching" menu item--click on that and it will take you to a summary page for all three studies, and clicking on the link for any one of them will take you to the list of audio files for all of the sessions in that series.

I'll let you know when I get all this stuff up on iTunes.

The audio recording of last night's College and 20-somethings Bible Study, "Stand Firm," is now available at this link.

Enjoy!

Something I mentioned in the college Bible study I teach the other night has sort of stuck with me and been rolling around in my head for the last couple of days--it has to do with worship as a response to fear. The trigger for this thinking was a story from 2 Chronicles 20 about Jehoshaphat, who was king of Judah about 850 years before Christ. Jehoshaphat received word one day that a huge, multi-national army was assembling to the east of Judah, intent on invading Judah and taking over the nation. Not exactly good news for the king, particularly in light of the fact that his army was nowhere near capable of defending his country against that kind of onslaught. His first reaction was predictable: fear and alarm.

His second reaction was that he "resolved to inquire of the Lord, and he proclaimed a fast for all Judah" (v. 3). There were a lot of things he could have done in that situation--he could have sent word to any allies of Judah that they needed military help, or he could have instituted a draft to build up his own army. He could have decided it was time to flee to safety somewhere else. But instead, he chose first to seek God's help, and to get his people on board with him, through fasting (and prayer).

God sent a message to the king through Jahaziel, the son of a priest, who told him that God was going to deliver the nation, and at that point it would have been easy for the king to write the message off and continue in panic mode, but he didn't--instead, "Jehoshaphat bowed with his face to the ground, and all the people of Judah and Jerusalem fell down in worship before the LORD."

Worship might not be at the top of the list of all the things people do in the face of great fear, but for King Jehoshaphat, it must have seemed logical, so he led his whole country in worship. It must have done wonders for his faith, because the next day he got up and began encouraging his people to have faith i God. He continued to make worship his priority, even as he prepared his army to go out and meet the invading force--he appointed singers to go in front of the army as they marched, praising and worshiping God, singing, "Give thanks to the Lord, for his love endures forever." (I confess to having somewhat mixed feelings about this, as a singer and a worship leader.)

Of course, as the story concludes, God delivered the advancing army into Jehoshaphat's hands in a miraculous way, and that's very cool, but that's not what struck me most about this story. What has stuck with me is the thought that many of the people who enter our sanctuaries on Sunday mornings enter with great fear in their hearts--they face troubling news from a doctor, or disheartening situations with a rebellious son or daughter, or the loss of a job, or perhaps the loss of a spouse, and they are afraid, not sure what to do or where to turn, and yet they have come into our auditoriums to seek God, because somehow, worshiping the God whose love endures forever has the power to calm our fears.

In worship we replace one kind of fear with another--we may come into God's presence afraid of our circumstances, afraid of the future, afraid of things over which we have no control, but when we worship God, we fear him, not in the sense of being afraid of him, but in the sense of revering him above everything else, including the situations and circumstances that have struck fear in our hearts.

Worshiping God restores our perspective on what is really important; it reminds us that God is bigger than our fears, that his love endures in spite of the things that are happening to us--worship can release us from our fears.

Jehoshaphat put worshipers at the front of the army, to encourage his army, and to help them remember that they served a God who was afraid of nothing, who loved them eternally, and who promised to deliver them. When we walk onto the stage on Sunday morning to lead our congregations in worship, we may very well be like those singers in front of the army--we may be there partly to encourage people who are afraid, to help them to have faith in God anyway.

I'm no soldier, but I'm all in for that mission.

The audio for Stand Firm, session 2 and Stand Firm, session 3 are up. Enjoy!

Our worship team recently spent some time talking about how we evaluate our ministry. It's one thing to walk off the stage after a worship set and feel that we played and sang well, but does that necessarily mean that we hit our target?

I recently listened to a talk by Atlanta pastor, Andy Stanley, in which he made the point that it is important for people in every ministry in the church to understand what the "win" is for that ministry, that is, to understand what it looks like when we hit the mark, when we've "nailed it." And it is important for the leadership of that ministry to "clarify the win."

One of the challenges for the worship ministry is that the "win" may be a subjective thing. I asked the members of our team how they know when we've done our job well--we all pretty much understand that we've done a good job if we play and sing without too many mistakes that might otherwise distract the congregation from worshiping God. Skillful execution is one criterion by which we should evaluate our work, to be sure. We need to constantly strive to sing and play as skillfully as we can, but we've all probably led worship at times when the band sounded great, the vocals all were right on the money, and yet we didn't sense that the congregation was really "entering in," so to speak. On the other hand, we've all probably played services where we thought we had totally blown it, musically, and yet someone came up to us and told us that the music moved them and helped them to experience God's nearness that day. What do you do with that?

We talked a little bit about some of the subjective cues that you can get as a worship leader, observing the congregation during worship--there are certain obvious indicators that people are tracking with you in worship, such as raised hands, tears, expressions on faces that leave no mistake about the fact that people were worshiping God. But the absence of the obvious cues doesn't necessarily mean that people weren't worshiping God.

We agreed that sometimes you just know that the Spirit of God is moving in a given context, but as we thought back to the times of worship that were most meaningful to us, not in our roles as the lead worshipers, but as members of a congregation of worshipers, we realized that we found ourselves worshiping most authentically when there was a worship leader who was leading us authentically in worship and into the presence of God.

This puts things into a little different light--now the primary evaluation question after the worship set might be, "Did WE worship authentically today?" Granted, it's still a little subjective, but it's a lot easier for us to evaluate a service based on whether WE, as worship leaders, were engaged in worship in an authentic and meaningful way.

We're still thinking this through, but this kind of self-evaluation seems to make more sense right now.

What do you think?