Jamie Brown on letting your songs speak for themselves:
Good news for worship leaders all over the world: there’s no reason for you to do much talking. Seriously. You really don’t need to talk that much.
Ask yourself: how many times per month/per Sunday/per service do I interrupt the flow of songs to talk for more than 5 seconds? Like the game of golf, the lower your score, the better. If you get a high number when you ask that question, may I kindly suggest that you reconsider your approach?
Here’s an excerpt from an article by John Flowers and Karen Vannoy that addresses an issue many worship leaders struggle with – why you shouldn’t let just anybody join the praise team.
I was taught to cook at twelve years old, and was allowed to “practice” on my family. Everyone accepted that I was young, and not very accomplished yet at cooking. On the nights I really flubbed, we could just make tuna sandwiches. I needed the practice, and that was how I learned. However, I was never asked to cook for company, just family.
I’m suggesting that we have this much regard for the music and liturgy of the church. Instead, too many churches have worship leadership that is ineffective and even hard to sit through for the uninitiated. For example, Joy is given a solo because she’s having a hard time right now and needs some attention or affirmation. She isn’t very good, but the whole church family knows what she’s been through and doesn’t mind. Or a child is asked to read who is so hesitant or soft spoken that he can’t be heard beyond the first row.
The reading of Scripture and the leading of worship are too important to give to any volunteer untrained or ungifted at public reading. A church doesn’t need master singers or musicians to lead in the worship of God. But being an outward-focused church means we don’t use worship to honor each other. We honor God with our worship, and want to reach others with the good news, so we offer up the best quality in whatever we do.
Kevin DeYoung on contemporary service orders:
Every church has a liturgy. Traditional congregations have a general order to worship. So do contemporary congregations. So do funky, artistic ones. Church leaders do not have time to reinvent their services every week. Congregations are not capable of learning new forms, new songs, and following a new order every week. Even the most spontaneous and creative church will flounder without some predictability and commonality from week to week. Even the most conscientious pastor or worship leader will eventually settle into a basic template for worship. Every church has a liturgy.
But not every liturgy is as good, or strong, or deep, or biblical, or gospel-centered as every other.
If I’m not mistaken, there is a New Evangelical Liturgy which is increasingly common in our churches. You find it in Baptist churches, Presbyterian churches, Reformed churches, free churches, and non-denominational churches. It’s familiar in rural churches and city churches. It can be found in tiny churches and megachurches. No one has written it down in a service book. No council or denomination is demanding that it be done. No pastor is taught this liturgy in seminary (um, probably not). But it has become the default liturgy nonetheless. It looks like this:
Casual welcome and announcements
Stand up for 4-5 songs
During the set, or at the very end, add a short prayer
Sermon
Closing song
Dismissal
I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say this is the basic liturgy from which most evangelical churches operate. To be sure, there are slight variations. The announcement may go after the praise set. There may be an offering in there somewhere, possibly with a special music number. The service may be tweaked a bit when there is communion or a baptism. But overall, if I were to visit 50 different evangelical churches over the next year, this is what I expect to find most of the time.
The simple question I want to ask is this: Is this New Evangelical Liturgy really an improvement?
Nic Cook on yesteryear’s worship wars:
So you’ve taken that new job and you’re trying to figure out how to make some much needed transitions without causing yourself or your church unnecessary “bloodshed”.
I’ve been talking to some worship minister friends of mine who are either in this phase of ministry or about to experience it. During these conversations I’ve found myself telling the story of my very first worship mentor and decided to share it with the hopes that it can be helpful even to those of us in established ministries.
I was at a church in Oklahoma City during high school through college and during that time I had sung in the high school worship band and the adult choir and gotten to know the worship minister for “big service”. His name was Josh and he was in the Air Force and was working for the church part time. Once I was in college I began leading the high school worship team and had done so for a couple of years when the worship minister asked if I would be willing to do an internship that paid a little bit weekly. As part of my internship I continued to lead worship for the high school band as well as play keyboards and sing in the adult services.
Now at this time the worship wars of the 90′s were in full swing and raging across many churches. This unfortunate problem came from a tension to either embrace fully more traditional worship that included mainly hymnody and used piano and organ as instrumentation or choose contemporary worship that consisted of choruses and recently written songs and performed with a full rock band instrumentation. Mainly there was an either/or approach where both sides tended to demonize each other and build arguments as to why their style and preferences were biblical and the only right way.
It was into this mix that I watched my mentor successfully transition the church into what many people called “blended worship” without any casualties or causing a church split.
Caryn Rivadeneira, Sharon Hodde Miller and Megan Hill share their perspectives on young people and the church:
As a true sign that I am getting old, Rachel Held Evans’s uber-popular CNN post Why Millennials Are Leaving the Church brought about a wistful, nostalgic response in me: Ah, to be young and turning my back on church again.
My mind traveled back to 1990, when I swore off church for good. I told God I still loved him, but his people I wasn’t so sure about. Like a good Gen-X-er, I was angry. Angry about what I saw as wrongheaded views on women in the church and a hostile stance toward the gay community. Angry because I thought the church was filled with hypocrites who cared more about sexual sins than greedy ones.
Sound familiar?
Though I did still love Jesus and read my Bible and pray and go to a Christian college and then work for a Christian publisher, I kept pretty true to my no-church word. I can probably count on my fingers the number of times I darkened a church door during my 20s. And one of those times—at Westminster Abbey, no less—I was drunk.
So while I don’t think we should ignore pieces that suggest differences in generational “needs” from church, millennial malaise about church is nothing new. Gen-Xers felt it, as did Boomers before us. And lest we forget: the U.S. was founded by disgruntled church folk!
According to Scot McKnight, statistics show that “young adults have always been less affiliated; when they get married and have children they return to their faith. Part of the life cycle is reflected in this.” That’s what happened with me. Maybe it was hormones, maybe it was the Holy Spirit, probably it was a bit of both, but five days after giving birth to my son, I was back in the pews of the church I had once sworn off. In the 11 years since, I can count on my fingers the number of Sundays we’ve missed. And never once have I shown up drunk.
Today, I love church more than I ever could’ve imagined. I love it for the things that used to drive me nuts: for the hypocrites and other messy folks who gather together every Sunday to be unified in one thing, for one hour: to worship the God who loves us regardless of our cheesiness or our rigidity, of our hostility or our mushiness, of our inclusion or exclusion.
I feel this way not because the church changed, but because God changed me, grew me up while he held tight to me as I wandered away. The welcome I received when I came back to my church family changed everything.
Fans of a beloved Christian hymn won’t get any satisfaction in a new church hymnal.
The committee putting together a new Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) hymnal dropped the popular modern hymn “In Christ Alone” because the song’s authors refused to change a phrase about the wrath of God.
The original lyrics say that “on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.” The Presbyterian Committee on Congregational Song wanted to substitute the words, “the love of God was magnified.”
The song’s authors, Stuart Townend and Nashville resident Keith Getty, objected. So the committee voted to drop the song.
Critics say the proposed change was sparked by liberals wanting to take God’s wrath out of the hymnal. The committee says there’s plenty of wrath in the new hymnal. Instead, the problem is the word “satisfied,” which the committee says refers to a specific view of theology that it rejects.
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Last week a CNN article swept through the Internet and stirred up some debate:
Armed with the latest surveys, along with personal testimonies from friends and readers, I explain how young adults perceive evangelical Christianity to be too political, too exclusive, old-fashioned, unconcerned with social justice and hostile to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Here’s the original article, and here’s a response.
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Wikipedia explains an Internet meme is an idea, style or action which spreads, often as mimicry, from person to person via the Internet, as with imitating the concept. Here are a few worship leader-themed memes to hit the ‘net:
