Clarifying the "win"--evaluating our worship ministry

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?