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It isn't often that we get a major worship leader conference in our area, but we've got one coming this fall, at the Church of the Resurrection in the greater Kansas City area. The Contemporary Worship Institute is a three-day conference for worship leaders, featuring a concert and talks by worship leader Paul Baloche, along with other speakers and breakout sessions. The conference is scheduled for September 30-October 2, 2008.

The cost is a very reasonable $99 per person, provided you register and pay before September 5.

The Contemporary Worship Institute precedes the Leadership Institute, which will be held October 2-3. Attendees of the CWI also get a $40 discount off the $139 cost of the Leadership Institute, meaning you can attend both events for $198. For information and online registration, head on over to the Leadership Institute site.

(This is pretty much a no-brainer, but it took a long time for us to figure out that this might be a good way to do this, so I offer it for your consideration.)

We have three Sunday morning services at our church--the early service (8:30am) is our "traditional" service, where the music is mostly hymns and older worship choruses, accompanied by organ and piano. Our 9:45am and 11:15am services are "contemporary," where we have a full worship band (except for the last few months, when we've been without a drummer, but that's another story). As soon as most of the first-service crowd has cleared out, our sound techs begin playing walk-in music over the PA that is more geared toward our contemporary worship crowd. In the past, we have provided the sound techs with CDs that contain a variety of different kinds of songs, but for a long time we weren't too good about doing that consistently, so the same CDs kept getting used week after week.

Then one morning we were backstage before one of the contemporary services, listening to the walk-in music and observing that it was the same stuff that was used for the last several weeks, and someone suggested that we should get an iPod and create a new playlist each week and let the sound techs use that instead of CDs. (Like I said earlier, it seems like a no-brainer.)

So we got an iPod Nano, the 4Gb model, and now I take it home each week and assemble a playlist for the following week. This gives me the opportunity to tailor the playlist to the sermon content, if I wish, and I can also create several weeks' worth of playlists at once and just have the sound techs play the current week's list.

You need a cable for this--one with a 1/8-inch stereo plug on one end and a pair of RCA plugs on the other end is perfect, because the sound guys can plug it into the "tape" input on the board.

Tomorrow (July 30) my lovely wife and I celebrate 25 years of marriage, so I hope you'll permit me a moment of personal reflection in her honor. You see, although I had been a Christian musician for many years, it was Carolyn who introduced me to modern worship music and opened my eyes to what worship could be.

Back then our church was doing "blended" worship, but to us, it felt like we were stuck in a style of worship that was great in the 1950's, but neither of us felt good about bringing our non-believing friends to church to hear hymn singing with organ accompaniment.

Carolyn was the youth pastor at our church for several years, and at youth leader conferences she was exposed to an emerging, contemporary style of worship that was exciting, engaging, and culturally relevant. It was the late 1990's, and she began bringing home CDs such as the Revival Generation albums, with artists like Delirious?, Matt Redman, and others, and she played them during her Quiet Times in the early mornings. Listening from my study in the next room, I heard songs that gradually awakened me to what worship could be, and with the help of a wise, older senior pastor who understood that our church needed to adjust to the times if we had any hope of communicating effectively with new generations, the vision of contemporary worship at our church became a reality in the late summer of 2000.

I began working with the worship team, and soon was leading the team. And many of those songs, which seem a bit dated now, almost ten years later, ended up in our early repertoire. I have been leading contemporary worship services ever since, and in a very real sense, I owe it to my beloved wife for helping me catch that vision.

Thanks for twenty-five great years, babe, and for your influence in my life and ministry. You're the best.

(Carolyn is our children's pastor now--you can check out her blog at http://carolynheacock@blogspot.com.)

I suspect every worship leader has faced one--even Crowder and Tomlin have surely walked onto a stage in a room full of people who were too quiet and not planning on getting engaged in worship (although probably not recently). You're the worship leader. Your mission statement says something about "engaging, dynamic, authentic worship, yada, yada, yada," and it ain't happenin' today, my friend.

I heard a recording of Tim Hughes at a Passion conference breakout several years ago, suggesting that the usual way of dealing with those times when the people just don't seem to be engaged is to "play 'Shout to the Lord'," and if they still don't respond, play it LOUDER. (And, yes, he was joking.)

I can think of times in my own worship ministry when we've just played our hearts out--we can't possibly squeeze another ounce of passion out of the players and singers--and...blah. It feels like nobody cares that we're worshiping a risen Savior.

It just happens that way, sometimes. I suspect it happens less in larger churches, where it's much easier to reach the critical mass with a large crowd, where the energy seems to create itself. In smaller churches, it can be tough to convince enough people that they have good reason to clap their hands and join in exuberant worship.

Lest the reader think I have this all figured out, know that I am asking these questions of myself, hoping that maybe I'll be able to come up with some reasonably reliable way to help people become engaged in worship. In the meantime, I offer some suggestions, some of which I believe have actually made a bit of a difference from time to time.

1. Don't get on the crowd's case about being unenthusiastic. It just might be that YOU haven't done much to engage them. Look at what you're doing. Ask trusted team members for critique and feedback. As someone you trust in the congregation to level with you.
2. ASK them to engage. Tell them it's okay to clap, to applaud (some people come from church backgrounds where applause is frowned upon), to worship in whatever manner is meaningful to them.
3. Mix it up. If you say exactly the same sorts of things from the stage every single week, people may go into autopilot mode the moment you step to the mic. Call them to worship with Scripture, or with a song, or with media in some way. Keep 'em guessing from week to week.
4. Make sure your team looks alive. Worship is contagious. So is boredom. Do we lead worship as if we really care about it, or are we nervous, or tired, or bored? Whatever our attitude or mood, it's probably coming through.
5. Pray for your congregation and your team. Getting prepared for leading worship is a lot of work. But even if every other little job is done, if you haven't prayed for your people, you're not ready.
6. Evaluate. Whether things go well or fall flat, it might help to sit down with the team from time to time (and/or the senior pastor) and assess how we're doing.

As I noted earlier, I'm not saying we do all of this stuff right. Maybe you've got some other ideas? I'd love to hear them.

This made me laugh out loud:

more graph humor and song chart memes

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.