Let Me Burn Out for Thee has to be one of the worst hymn titles ever. How about writing one called Let Me Live a Long, Productive, Balanced and Healthy Life for Thee? One of the best tips I can give a part-time (or full-time) worship leader is: don’t burn yourself out.

The closest I’ve ever been to a nervous breakdown was during December several years ago at my part-time church job. As I wrote recently, a part-time worship leader at a smaller church ends up doing everything since there’s usually no support staff. I wanted to have a special Christmas Sunday so for my 20 hours a week I wrote and arranged an entire music program, typeset all the music, made copies, rehearsal tracks and notebooks, organized a praise choir, scheduled all the choir members, led several choir and band rehearsals and compiled videos and PowerPoint.

Then I decided to rinse and repeat and do it all over again for an elaborate Christmas Eve service. By January I was so burned out I could hardly get out of bed (all while trying to figure how I was going to pay my bills that month with my part-time salary!)

When you’re in ministry you’re typically (I hope!) not in it for the money since there typically isn’t any (unless you’re a Rock Star Worship Leader LOL!) So if you’re working part time you’ll tend to get consumed with the job (since you love it) and end up working full time hours for part time pay. Nobody’s gonna stop you, either.

Of course, get done what needs to be done even if it means working a little extra but please, pace yourself. Allow yourself to take that day off and turn your phone off. Go on a good vacation and forget all about your work life for a few days (you’ll be refreshed and ready to tackle the job again when you return.) Sneak away and get some ice cream tonight with your wife or husband. Visit another church one Sunday and enjoy a service you didn’t have to plan.

Especially during hectic holiday seasons if you feel that burned-out feeling coming on, recognize it and deal with it head-on so you can have a productive, balanced and healthy ministry.

Contemporary worship is not business as usual! Gone are the days of three hymns and a sermon. Today’s worship leader must know a little bit about everything: pop music, praise bands, worship flow…

…and design.

If you’re a part-time or volunteer worship leader you probably have to program your own worship slides. There’s a bunch of bad PowerPoint out there. But you don’t do art, you say? If you have enough creative energy in you to be involved with worship, you have enough creativity to maintain decent graphics. You can see changes if you put in the effort and gather more info about graphics and designs.  You might not be able to produce the graphics yourself (although I believe anyone can learn to create good, basic graphics) but you should at least be able to recognize graphics that aren’t good.

With the wonders of technology we can today create videos and graphics that could have only been created by a professional on a super computer twenty years ago. However, I’m afraid the technology is getting ahead of us. We have the latest bells and whistles yet I’ve seen the most horrific cheesiness projected on some church screens!

Let’s start with a few basics. Of all places, I ran into a nice, quick and concise art lesson at the US Post Office in the form of a pamphlet. They’ve put a copy online, take a look:

https://www.zairmail.com/articles/simpleformula7.asp

There are a few things here we can apply to church graphics.

1. One thing dominates the page (or screen.) Don’t try to cram the entire song/sermon on one slide.

2. Minimize typeface variety. Don’t mix and match 5 fonts just because you can. Stay away from weird type styles – you don’t want your worship to resemble a used car commercial.

Choose one or two nice, readable fonts and stick with them throughout your service. Serif fonts are more staid (like Times Roman) while sans serif fonts are more contemporary (like Myriad Pro or Segoe UI.) Whenever you use a new font, try it out on the screen before worship. What looks good on your computer monitor might not look so hot enlarged.

3. Easy to read text. Tiny text is hard to read on screen. The vast majority of churches center their lyrics, but in my Art 101 college class I learned this tires the eye. You might try creating lyrics that are “flush left,” like a newspaper column and see how it looks. Centered lyrics forces your eye to search for the beginning of each line.

4. Use relevant illustrations or photos. Avoid cartoonish, goofy clip art. For worship song text, try matching an image to a song lyric. As many worship songs include topics like sky, sea, mountains, rain, etc. this shouldn’t be too hard.

Take a look at your presentation software for this coming week. What can you tweak that would make the presentation cleaner and more professional?

Bottom Line: Avoid graphic cheese in church!

by Don Chapman

As I listened to David Santisteven’s interview with (ex) Willow Creek’s Nancy Beech I reminisced about my own Willow Creek experience and developed hives as I heard her wax nostalgic about the old days as she mourned the loss of alternate expressions of worship – like drama. I have the utmost respect for Nancy Beech – she’s a legend and genuinely seems to be a very cool person – but I have quite a different recollection of those times.

Back in the day when the Willow Creek philosophy ruled the contemporary church, worship leaders would probably have to squeeze a “skit” into their service order each week. It seemed like everybody was trying to do drama. There were entire conferences and companies producing worship drama materials. I was thinking recently how interesting it is that no church I know of today has a drama ministry! What happened? I’ll explore that a bit later, but for now – some background.

In the early 00’s when we were all trying to figure out this contemporary worship thing we had a plethora of worship conferences we could attend (one worship guru who taught at such conferences told me he’d teach at one every single week of the year!) and Willow Creek was the granddaddy of them all.

The small church where I started my music director career had what I’ve termed “Willowcreekitis.” All they could talk about was Willow Creek and they tried to model their services after them as best they could. As soon as I was hired I was promptly shipped up to the Willow Creek conference with the praise team to learn the tricks of the trade.

The Willowcreekitis cult-leader at my church was the former lay worship leader who literally was obsessed with the place and expected me to be as well. After months of constant frustration with me for not being “Willow Creek enough” he tried his best to get me fired and then left in a huff taking half his small group with him.

Soon after this nightmare I attended another worship conference where I struck up a conversation with the guy sitting next me and we got on the topic of Willow Creek. I told him the story I just told you and he gasped “Did that guy move to Columbia (a town about an hour from me) – the exact same thing happened at my ministry and he split the church in half over his Willow Creek obsession!”

No, this fanatic didn’t move to Columbia, but evidently Willowcreekitis was extremely contagious and was caught by churches all across the country. Here’s how it happened: worship teams made the Willow conference pilgrimage, got excited, came back and tried to turn their ministry into Willow Creek. Of course this not only didn’t work but it caused church splits. Over the years I’ve heard many such stories – they didn’t call it the drama ministry for nothing!

Churches built from the ground-up in the Willow philosophy quickly boomed and worked for a while, but as reality set in they tried to make the switch to worship. Bill Hybels famously, back in 2007, admitted they “made a mistake.”

A pastor of one of these Willow-cloned megachurches told me around the same time he realized his church simply did not worship or even knew how. The music director of this church eventually quit over being urged to… start leading worship. He once told me the church “did not worship” – their music consisted of current top 40 hits performed by a paid band and the area’s best singers. I guess you would call this the “reverse worship war” – secularized, performance-based megachurches lost members because they began switching to a worship format!

These Willow-clones loved to kick off their services with – I can’t remember their exact term – a “focus” song or something like that. This was a pop or country song that thematically matched that week’s “sermon.” No actual praise sets, of course, since they needed time for the weekly skit. So maybe they’d do two or three pop songs a week – an opener, offertory and closing song. I can’t believe how crazy this sounds as I’m recalling and writing it LOL!

Hybels’ admission of making a mistake plus the current collapse of Willow now, ten years later, gives one pause – this odd, brief tangent out of hundreds of years of church worship seems to have had quite a derailing effect on today’s church and our collective spiritual temperature. Is it because of Willow Creek that the watering-down of evangelical Christianity is now in full swing? Let’s pray we can correct course (and many churches have) by having deep Biblical truths presented in a contemporary setting.

Bottom Line: Nancy is correct – contemporary worship is getting in a rut and needs something more than just music (find her thoughts on this around 20:28 in the podcast.) But please, no more skits 🙂 Thanks to David and Nancy for the great discussion – it stirred up a lot of memories for me as you can see.

P.S. Why Skits Fizzled Out

The Willow philosophy, of course, encompassed much more than just skits in your service order – but that’s one of the things that seemed to negatively impact me the most (I’m also not a fan of doing secular songs in worship.)

Let’s face it – church music is in the Bible, skits aren’t. Drama simply was too hard for the average (100ish member) church to pull off and without a clear Biblical mandate it quickly fell by the wayside. I have a degree in church music, not drama. I’m not an actor, have no interest in acting and don’t know anything about it. Rare would be the person who had skills in both areas, yet this is the type of person a Willow-clone was looking for.

Only the megachurches with talent and budgets had the energy and resources to maintain the weekly skit and a drama director. The smaller church worship leader, mostly volunteer and occasionally part-time-paid, absolutely could not maintain both a praise team and a drama team. My own church realized this as I myself was part-time, so the leadership fished for drama volunteers. The enormous time spent finding/writing scripts, training and rehearsing actors made this impossible for a non-paid position.