Jaime Brown on drummer drama:

This is a post I can write at the moment, since (praise the Lord) I have the joy of working with several gifted drummers on my church’s worship team who do a great job and are joys to work with.

But sometimes drummers can be incredibly difficult. Their instrument is the loudest (unless you use electronic drums). If they speed up, everyone speeds up. If they slow down, everyone slows down. If they decide to play a 3/4 song in 4/4, then you’re all playing it in 4/4. They’re opinionated. They know that they’re crucial to the “groove” and they like being crucial.

How do you deal with a difficult drummer?

If the difficulties stem from a lack of gifting, then you must insist on three things:

1. That they practice and play along to a metronome. At my church, we play along to a click track in our ears to keep us all together. It’s run off of an iPhone app called “Tempo Advance”, and either I or the drummer control it. If your team has in-ear monitors, it’s easy to get everyone to hear it. If your team doesn’t use in-ears, then your drummer can play with it in his ears. If we can do this with excellent drummers, then less experienced drummers should be willing to do it too.

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The famed preacher spoke on a contemporary topic over 100 year ago:

“How much public singing, even in the house of God, is of no account! How little of it is singing unto the Lord! Does not the conscience of full many among you bear witness that you sing a hymn because others are singing it? You go right straight through with it by a kind of mechanical action. You cannot pretend that you are singing unto the Lord. He is not in all your thoughts. Have you not been at places of worship where there is a trained choir evidently singing to the congregation? Tunes and tones are alike arranged for popular effect. There is an artistic appeal to human passions. Harmony is attended to; homage is neglected. That is not what God approves of.

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Joseph Mattera on the decline of doctrine:

The following are signs of a hypergrace church:

1. The preachers never speak against sin.

If you are in a church like this, you will notice that the word sin is usually only mentioned in the context of forgiveness of sins in Christ but hardly ever in the context of taking a stand against sin, except of course when they condemn the sin of “legalists” and “Pharisees” who are the ministers they denigrate for preaching against sin.

2. The lead pastor never takes a cultural stand for righteousness.

When issues like abortion come up, these pastors will shy away from mentioning it because they are afraid of offending new people. I can understand this to a point. But I counter that we as ministers of Christ are obligated to at least mention our positions publicly so that we use it as a teaching moment for the sheep following us. Not saying anything about an issue like abortion is another way of condoning it!

3. The Old Testament is almost totally ignored.

In these churches, the Old Testament is treated as only types and shadows for sermon illustrations but has no real value regarding our standard of living today. As I show in this article, my position is that the New Testament and Old Testament are organically connected, with the New building upon the Old, not eradicating it altogether!

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Ray Deck on using a dB meter:

At some point, every pastor will face criticism about music volume. A few preemptive steps will go a long way to prepare you for the inevitable noise complaint.

Noise complaints are usually subjective, made on feeling or impression. It’s important to measure the sound in the auditorium for both frequency and overall volume so you can respond with a scientific measurement.

The metric used to measure volume is called a decibel (dB). Some common benchmarks are:
0 dB: rustling leaves
60 dB: conversation
85 dB: city traffic
100 dB: stock earphones at maximum volume
120 dB: a clap of thunder

You can buy a meter to wire directly into your soundboard, but I prefer to use a free Android app called Noise Meter. (iOS users, what’s your favorite equivalent?)

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Tim Price on promoting from within:

Worship leaders, more than most other church staff roles, seem to come from within. With a higher rate than pastors, youth pastors, etc., many worship leaders seem to have attended their church before serving on staff.

There are probably many factors for this:

• culture of the worship style
• budget / salary is part-time
• students are often involved
• or a leader is raised up from within the church over time (there may have been an outside leader for awhile, but the role was filled with an existing team member after the leader left)

I began reflecting on the benefits of having someone already connected to the church lead in worship:

1. They know the congregation.

Knowing the congregation is a help because it opens doors to being held accountable, recruiting volunteers, and being in the loop on scheduling, events, vision, etc.

2. They have proven track record of faithfulness.

This may be in a variety of ways: worship attendance, volunteer role in the band, etc.

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Jon Acuff on church misspelling:

Recently I did a post about noticing typos in the worship music. The comments on that post were funnier than the post. Here are the best, completely real, typos people have noticed at church:

1. “Lord, You are more precious than silver… Lord, You are more costly than golf.”

2. Easter. The line was supposed to read “We were naked and poor” but instead it read “We were naked and poop.” Quite possibly the best typo of all time. I could not stop laughing for the rest of the song. It was epic.

3. ‘Defender of the week’ like Jesus is getting an award for being great at sports.

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