Worship Leader Blog

Just wanted to let you know about some free music you might want to have--Phil Wickham has released an album titled "Singalong" that you can get by simply agreeing to receive his newsletter via e-mail. Go to his site to sign up and download the album, and you'll be sent an e-mail confirming your agreement to receive his newsletter.

We get about an hour with our congregations on Sundays, and it's crucial that we make that hour count, which means every member of the worship team must be ready. Here are three ways you can make sure that you are ready to contribute when you get your cue.

1. Be "prayed up." Yeah, we all pray together before we go on stage, but I wonder what it would be like if each one of us spent time in prayer before we showed up to play, asking God to move in our hearts and the hearts of our congregation?

2. Be warmed up. For some of us, 9:45 (our first service time) is pretty early in the morning to be in top vocal (or even instrumental) form. We joke sometimes about our earlier service being the "warm-up" service, and even if we don't really mean that, if we're not warmed up when we get there, that's exactly what it is. Even a little singing in the car on the way to church can help. As a guitarist, I know it makes a difference when I've taken a few minutes before the service to play and get my hands and fingers loosened up.

3. Be prepared. Rehearsals for our team are on Wednesday nights, and it's a long time between Wednesday and Sunday, particularly when it comes to remembering any little details we work out at rehearsal. Prepared team members make notes on their charts and review their notes prior to the service. I don't know how many times I've failed to remember a break, or even how to start or end a song, just because I forgot and didn't review my notes before heading for the stage.

Following these three bits of advice will make a difference in your singing or playing, and it will help you be better prepared to lead people into the presence of God. Any other tips or suggestions out there? I'd love to hear them.

I've touched on this topic before, but when I saw this photograph by Reggie Joiner, of ReThink, I decided to revisit it. The crowd in the picture sure seems to be engaged--just look at the raised hands, the mouths that are obviously singing along, the closed eyes--looks like a worshiping crowd to me.

I suspect that many, many worship leaders across the country have never seen anything like this in the congregations they serve. If you rounded up the one or two percent or so of our congregation that gets into worship like this on any given Sunday morning, you'd have a crowd of...well, three to five people, and that's on a "good" Sunday. (I'm only half-kidding about that.)

The fact that you can't snap a photo like this in your sanctuary or auditorium on a Sunday morning doesn't necessarily imply that your people aren't worshiping--our congregation never looks like this, and it could simply mean that they are characteristically reserved Midwestern folks who don't express themselves with quite as much abandon in worship as these folks obviously do. But what else could it mean?

Maybe they've never experienced worship like this before. It's possible that most of the people in your congregation have never been in a worship service where they felt the freedom to simply forget everything else and worship God with complete freedom.

Maybe it's peer pressure. There might be people who would like to be more free in their physical expression of worship, but they look around, see that most people aren't worshiping that way, and they follow suit.

Maybe the environment you've established for worship isn't conducive to the free expression you hope for. It could be that the setting just isn't right--the house lights are too bright, or the sanctuary just doesn't "feel" like the kind of place to just let it all go and put your hands in the air.

Maybe there are too many distractions. As members of the worship team, we rehearse and try to lead in a way that is as free from distracting mistakes as possible, but it might not take too many wrong notes or off-key vocals to "kill the mood."

Maybe your worship leading doesn't appear to be authentic. Ouch. If this is true, this one hurts. We strive for authenticity, but if it isn't real, it just isn't real. Some soul-searching could be in order.

Maybe you haven't reached the "cricital mass" for an exuberant worship experience. If there are only three of you in a particular row of pews, and the rows behind you and in front of you are the same way, you can feel awfully conspicuous. Most of the worship experiences I've had that resembled this picture were among thousands of people. Our sanctuary has been filling up pretty well for at least one of our worship services each Sunday, but in times when attendance has been sparse, I've tried getting people to all move to the center section--with very little success.

Maybe the music isn't loud enough. No, really. This may sound like a silly thing that shouldn't matter that much, but the truth is that when you can feel the music in your chest, the whole experience becomes more intense, and your voice doesn't stand out like a sore thumb. Might be time to turn it up a notch or two.

Maybe the house lights are too bright. Seriously, people feel less self-conscious when they are worshiping in a darker room. Light the stage or platform well, to focus attention forward, but keep the house lights low enough that those who might otherwise feel inhibited might let go a bit.

Maybe your worship leaders aren't strong enough. If this is true, that's going to hurt a bit, too, but honestly, it makes a difference. Have you put your best people up front? It might be better to go with fewer, more qualified personnel than to let inferior leaders/musicians bring the quality down. Relationally, that's not an easy thing to deal with, necessarily.

Maybe it's a matter of your church culture. The personality of a congregation is something that can take a very long time to change. In our city there are some churches where you probably could take a photo like this on any given Sunday, but many more where you couldn't come close. But pushing a cultural change to hard or too quickly can cause a lot of problems.

To be fair, I should mention that I've been in worship services where someone I saw in the congregation, someone I would have bet was bored out their skull, actually came up to me after the service to tell me how much the worship time meant to them. You can't really tell what's going on in people's hearts. A person who outwardly appears to be totally engaged in worship might actually be just going through the motions.

I suppose the bottom line for the worship leader and team is this: Be real, be prepared, do your best, and pray that God will be able to use what you do to help the people in the congregation connect with him in an authentic and life-changing way.

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.)