Out of the Office

I’m typing this on my iPad somewhere southbound on Interstate 5 in California’s Central Valley.

Nobody Gets The Church They Want

Over at the 9Marks blog there’s an interesting post about giving up our preferences in church (read it HERE). While it was primarily written for pastors and church leaders, I felt the lessons for worship leaders was pretty obvious even before he used worship music as an example.

Sunday Strife

It’s Sunday Morning. We’ve gathered together to worship, pray and study as a church family. It should be all bliss and tranquility right? Well, you’d sure hope so, at least for the most part, but in the church family, like any family, you’ll have the occasional spat from time to time, and a little planning ahead can go along way.

The Accidental Worship Leader

LET ME TELL YOU A STORY

I had a friend, who we’ll call Phil. He was a theatre major who began to feel God calling him to full time ministry.  You would think that Phil would start or join a drama ministry or maybe with his degree he could work as a christian educator. Prehaps God was calling him to work in a “missional way” in secular entertainment, or since he was good on stage in front of an audience maybe he was supposed to be a pastor. But the ministry position that he was offered was facilities, God was calling this theatre major to be a church janitor.

The problem was that he didn’t know what he was doing. He could use a vacuum and he knew how to change a light bulb, but beyond that he wasn’t the handiest of men. Now he was in charge of the facilities and maintenance needs of an entire church. What was he supposed to do now?

Change

This morning I after I got up I was looking over email, news feeds, and social media. There was an older relative complaining that Facebook had ‘done it again’ and changed their “look” on the main page. I honestly hadn’t really noticed much of a change but therein lies the genius.

Change is inevitable. Change will happen. The only question is how prepared we are for that inevitable fact, and how we respond to it. Times will change and your church will change. People will come, people will move on, people will grow older. Most churches seem to do one of two things. Either they do nothing, never changing, never deviating, always the same as the year before, or they they don’t change for years and then one day realize that a change has to be made so it’s sudden and drastic. Why not try a third way, the ‘Facebook way’?

One Step To Playing Better This Sunday

What’s one thing we could all do better this Sunday?

Think Outside The Box

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.

Get An Expert/Be An Expert

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.

Birth

Well, I never made it to church yesterday.

 

My son Colton was born at 4:48 Pm PST

 

No Offense But I Don’t Relate

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.