Jon Nicol explains his preparation policy.

Simply put, a preparation policy is what your practice and rehearsal values look like lived out. The policy spells out my ministry’s expectations for practice and rehearsal. Now, since musicians get twitchy around words like policy, I call our document “Expectations for Preparation.”

So that’s what it is. Why have one?

WHY HAVE A PREPARATION POLICY?

If you don’t have clear expectations, you cannot hold your team members accountable to them.

At one point in those early days of leading what I considered to be a slacker team, I finally saw through the smokescreen of my own whining and started asking the rigth questions. Instead of, “Why are these people slackers? I started asking, “Do they truly know what to practice? Or how to practice? And have I ever clearly told them what I’m expecting in the way of preparation?”

No. So I had to tell myself to quit whining and find a solution. And part of that solution was clearly defined expectations.

Once I clarified my expectations, I now had something to hold my team accountable to. I had finally defined what the value of preparation looked like lived out within our ministry.

So, what’s the process for developing a preparation policy?

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Jonathan Aigner thinks they are important symbols for worshiping congregations.

1. Hymnals actually teach music. We’re making less music than ever before. Oh, to be sure, there’s lots of music going on around us, but very few people are actually making it. We’re just consuming it, or at the very most, singing along with music someone else made first. But even an untrained musician can look at the words and music in the hymnal and learn to follow melodic direction and rhythmic value.
2. Hymnals set a performance standard. Contemporary worship music is based on recording instead of notation. This is endlessly confusing, and it opens each song up to individual interpretation. Without notation, it is exceedingly hard to sing well as a congregation. Hymnals fix that. Everybody has the same notation, so we all know how the song is supposed to go.
3. Hymnals integrate the music and text. Words on a screen give no musical information. Hymnals fix that. Singers aren’t dependent upon learning the song by rote.
4. Hymnals allow you to sing anywhere. When you depend on projection to display hymn texts, you’re bound to do your music making in a space outfitted with sufficient media.

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Amanda Furbeck offers tips to bring out the nuance of a song.

If you feel like the worship music has become a little bit stale, it might be time to bring things up a notch musically. Start with a vision for growth. That means taking an honest look at your teams strengths and weaknesses and envisioning what you want that to look like in a year, a month, and next rehearsal. you could even sit down with your team and ask them to think about how their piece of the puzzle fits into this. What are the musical problems that crop up when you think about where your team is musically and where you would like them to be?

I’ll give you a great example. Once upon a time, in a far away church, on a legendary worship team, there played a drummer. I’ll call him Cedric.* Cedric loved hard rock. He had a natural ability to listen to a hard rock praise and worship song and recreate it almost exactly. Cedric was old school – he was strong, he was loud, and he only ever wanted to play on an acoustic set.

Faraway church loved Cedric’s playing, but the church needed to sing more than just hard rock songs. Faraway church needed to sing some simple, quiet, love songs to Jesus. Cedric refused to play slow quiet songs because he felt like a bull in a china shop. How could the music pastor save Faraway church from it’s lack of love songs without making Cedric feel like a terrible musician?

Should the music pastor avoid quiet love songs to Jesus?
Should she fire Volunteer Cedric and search for a more well-rounded, even if less talented drummer?

With some brainstorming and a little creative problem solving, the team was able to widen their musical style to include softer, quieter songs without getting rid of valiant Cedric. Sometimes, they sang songs without any drums. Sometimes, they used simple auxiliary percussion to add feel without using the set. And Cedric agreed to try using brushes instead of sticks to play some of the softer songs. Eventually the church replaced the acoustic set with a much more manageable electronic set so that the sound tech could control the level of drums. Cedric wasn’t thrilled with the electronic set, but agreed to try and work on it for the sake of good music.

No one wanted to single Cedric out because he was very talented and very willing to share his time with the team. And we are all Cedrics in some way or another – we all tend to rely on our strengths and avoid our weaknesses. So what are some other ways we can solve this and similar problems that hamper musical growth? Maybe there aren’t specific ‘problems’ that you can think of, but your team lacks musical interest. Sometimes we just need to think about things a little differently to really bring out the nuance of a song so that its message can reach all the way into the softest parts of the people’s hearts. Have you tried any of these ideas?

1. Dynamics. The ebb and tide of flowing dynamics can make or break a piece of music. An average worship song may have a soft verse and and a medium loud chorus, with a crescendoing bridge into a loud chorus and back to a soft chorus. It’s pretty predictable, but does give good flow to the song. Make sure you are exploring the full range of dynamics of a piece – and if you don’t like the dynamics that are there, you might need to create some of your own.

Encourage your musicians to play softly and really listen to each other as you learn new songs. This is a great exercise to increase the musicianship of your team. As you rehearse a song, watch the lyrics and melodies for places where dynamic changes will really pop. It is amazing how much more in sync a team can play when they rehearse softly as opposed to rehearsing at the full volume of the song.

What if you took a hard, loud, fast song and softened it up? What would happened if you took a soft song and sang it loudly? Sometimes, a hushed chorus creates just the right mood for folks to hear Jesus.

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Glenn Packiam says painting with a broad brush doesn’t give us the best picture.

It seems to be in vogue to predict the impending demise of modern worship, with some even suggesting we ‘kill megachurch worship’. The subject in question has been variously named ‘modern worship’, ‘contemporary worship’, and even the more direct and provocative aforementioned, ‘megachurch worship’. While there have been a plethora of futurists and liturgists rushing to judgment, I am not certain if any of them worship regularly in a church that employs a modern worship style. And I am quite sure none of them are involved in leading either modern worship or megachurches.

So forgive my skepticism.

Before I go further, it’s worth my saying that if you know my writing over the past few years, you know I’ve been strong in challenging the contemporary worship movement (on formation; on reclaiming the mystery of a faith through historic practices). You know that I believe in mining the old traditions of Christian worship, asking what they were doing and why and what we’ve changed and why. I believe with all my heart that ‘the way we worship becomes the way we believe‘.

But I don’t believe careless critiques will help us.

The renowned social psychologist Paul Eckman wrote that research from a social scientist is less credible when their fieldwork cleanly validates their hypothesis. This is because the kind of experiments and research social scientists engage in are not easily repeated, and thus their biases are less easily held in check. If this is true of the biases even of researchers, what shall we say of the biases of bloggers (even— or especially— if they are liturgy professors)?

If one wants to prove the shallowness of modern worship, examples abound; but if you want to really understand and assess the subject, you need a more careful eye. And you must account for an insider perspective. What matters is not simply what the outside observer/blogger/professor thinks is going on; what matters is also what the pastor or worship leader says is going on, and what the worshipper is experiencing. (The latter is known as phenomenological perspective— the way people describe their experience of a thing.) If all we get are theoretical assessments from afar, we will evaluate modern worship without knowing if we are actually evaluating modern worship or our impression of it— which is almost always a caricature.

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