Joshua Weiss offers ideas to help you decide.

If you have spent any amount of time working on a church worship team, you have inevitably encountered the discussion of paying musicians to play. This is a conversation I have had more and more lately. I should preface this blog by explaining I have been leading worship at my local church for over 10 years. We run around 250 people each week. Our team has consisted of gigging musicians, born-and-raised at this church musicians, and relatively young musicians actively growing in their skills. So when is it appropriate to pay musicians in church?

There is not a criteria checklist to go down in order to determine this answer. So let’s begin by asking you some questions.

• Is your church in a financial position that it is able to pay the musicians?
• Are the musicians truly professional in their roles? (i.e. Are they on time, have they adequately practiced the songs on their own time and learned the tunes, is their skill worthy of compensation?)
• Are their alternative options within the church body capable of filling the need?
• Do you value them?

Because I am pulled a few different directions on this topic, let me first speak in favor of paying the team members followed up with the arguments opposed.

I think it safe to say we can agree that Sunday morning services are the most important service for local churches in America. As such, the efforts and skill of the Sunday morning team should be quality. No doubt there are many “musicians” who think they are great. All they have ever heard their whole life is mom or dad tell them how great they are. Let’s face it, most musicians are not as great as they think they are. Plus, unnecessarily arrogant musicians are kind of annoying – especially when they have a bad attitude as well.

As a worship leader who is also responsible for many other areas at the church, I have a plethora of things on my mind every week. I shouldn’t have to worry about whether the electric guitar player is going to show up or if the drummer has gone over the songs. We should be able to get together for a practice and already have a good baseline to go from. When it comes time for a sound check, there shouldn’t not be a need to constantly ask other musicians to stop playing while we are getting levels or dealing with other issues. I shouldn’t have to identify a poorly tuned instrument early in practice because that musician didn’t see the need to tune before we started. And the question, “will musician X be able to play with the click?” should not ever run through my mind. Nevertheless, these are the types of things that one encounters with unpaid musicians.

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Andrew Holt gives his feedback on the importance of growing student worship ministries.

I have lead worship for student ministry in different capacities for almost six years, and it has become one of my favorite ministries to be a part of. One of the trickiest parts of building a strong student worship team is navigating through all the challenging parts of being a teenager in hopes to build something powerful and game changing for your entire church. Here are 5 key practices that I believe can lead to exactly that.

1…Re-define student worship as a part of the overall worship ministry

A challenge that keeps many student worship teams from seeing huge success is their separation from the overall worship ministry of the church. The leadership often comes from within the student ministries’ leadership and not the worship ministries’. If you are a worship pastor, I would encourage you to get involved with your student worship leaders and begin to pour into them and push them to grow. Encourage your main worship team members to find students who play the same instrument or even sing the same parts and begin to build relationships. This will achieve two things. First, it will make your student worship teams feel accepted and appreciated by the worship ministry as a whole. Secondly, it will bring growth for both your students and adults because they will begin to learn from each other.

2…Begin raising up leaders at an early age

One of the most impactful times in my life was when I was in middle school and an older worship leader in my church began to give me opportunities to be involved. Chances are that a student at this age is going to be awkward and inexperienced (I know I definitely was), but finding students at this age will give them 7 to 8 years to gain experience before they graduate high school. That’s more than enough time for a student to grow in extraordinary ways. The hope is that you will begin to grow a culture of discipleship within your worship ministry, and that students will begin to mentor each other as you mentor them.

3…Encourage and Embrace Growth

The truth is that most students interested in worship ministry will not be well-seasoned musicians, and that is a good thing. Never dismiss someone who does not match the quality that you think they should have. Instead, look for potential to grow, a heart that is passionate about worship, and someone who is willing to learn. There has to come a time where someone is willing to take a chance so that they can grow and become all that God wants them to be.

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Rich Birch wonders if the “Modern Worship Crowd” is holding onto its approach in the same way the “Hymns & Organ Crowd” did?

The first church I served at was in the middle of a worship war when I started there. It was like a cold war with a lot of passive-aggressive leadership on both sides of the debate. The “Hymns & Organ Crowd”declared that their music was rich with theological significance, whereas the“Praise Chorus Crowd” was fervently committed to introducing new songs with more current sounds that connected with people personally.

It all seems so long ago. In fact, it seems like ancient history. I’ve invested the majority of my ministry career in churches with attractional music environments that are targeted at connecting with the next generation. I’m honored to serve with some of the best musicians out there. They are passionate about creative musical experiences that engage with people and move them closer to God. The “new norms” of this approach to musical worship are:

• Electric-guitar driven // The leaders are typically behind a guitar and the sound is based around that instrument.
• Bands // We have a group of 5 to 8 people on stage: lead vocal, background vocal, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, keyboard and drummer.
• Video-augmented experiences // There are screens in all of our environments that display not just the lyrics but also other visuals that support the message of the song.
• It’s loud // We aim for 95 dBa … loud enough to make the room feel full. (Also loud enough to get regular complaints about the volume and the need for our guest services team to have ear plugs on hand.)

We should always remain “open-handed” in our methods while being “closed-handed” on the message. I wonder if it’s time to reinvent a “new norm” of musical worship. Have we wedded our method too closely to our message? Do we need to dream a new dream in musical worship?

Or maybe … is it time to wage a new worship war? For the sake of the next generation, do we need to ask fundamental questions about our approach to ensure that we’re connecting with them? Is today’s “Modern Worship Crowd” holding onto its approach in the same way the “Hymns & Organ Crowd” did so many years ago … looking down their noses at what was coming next? Here are some signs that convince me we need to be looking ahead to what’s next:

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Forbes’ Bobby Owsinski writes about the latest news in the new music business.

There are times when a trend happens so fast that it’s just like being hit in the face with an ice cold towel, and then there are times when it’s so slow moving that you can feel something happening, but it takes a while before you realize that you’re totally immersed in something new. A little of both happened to me over the last week as it finally sunk in that mainstream pop music is now totally represented by the latest music trend. And guess what? The electric guitar, staple of modern music for more than 50 years, has little part in it.

In case you’re wondering, it’s electronic dance music (or EDM as we’ve grown to call it) that has totally blended with pop music to become the current background music of our lives. It’s now in every nook and cranny where the latest music is required to be seen as hip.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m in the music business up to my ears every day and I’m totally aware that EDM has become both a phenomenon and a giant money maker over the last three or four years in terms of live events. I’m also more than aware that over the last two years elements of EDM have permeated the Top 40 charts on the vast majority of hits. You have to be completely musically unconscious to not to have seen and heard that.

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