Beyond Sunday Worship

Worship Podcast & Blog

How to plan for a great rehearsal

Sometimes we love it. Sometimes we hate it. Rehearsal can equal a recipe for disaster – bringing together different people of different ages with different skill levels with different musical experience with different opinions and different styles. Ready for a good time? I hope to equip you in this post with practical advice on how to improve your worship team rehearsals so you can start seeing some instant improvement. It’s possible for you to look forward to rehearsal. It’s possible for you to have consistently good rehearsals. It’s even possible for your team to have fun. It just takes hard work and some time to build momentum.

I think most worship leaders leave their rehearsals up to chance. Here are some things you should begin to implement:

1. Put front end work into rehearsals

  • Prepare for your rehearsals like you would prepare for a service.
  • Give intense thought/prayer to songs, transitions between each song (musically & vocally), musical arrangements.
  • Call/Email/Facebook/Twitter/Text/Go door-to-door to make sure everyone arrives on time. Enforce this in love 🙂
  • Depending on your musical knowledge, have ideas for what each instrument should do. You need to ‘produce’ the sound so it’s not mass musical chaos, which is very distracting to the goal of worship. If you don’t have this type of musical knowledge or training, you should find someone you trust who does and work very closely with them.
  • Make sure the stage is set for your musicians! You want to minimize distractions and focus on your rehearsal. Too often loads of time is lost finding direct boxes, cords, and making sure the stage and sound is ready. Do this beforehand. TRUST ME!
  • Don’t plan a rehearsal covering 400 songs. I typically rehearse for 2 hours and plan to get through 3-4 songs. I spend the most time on one song that I know will be a challenge. I also try and leave time for spontaneous practice too. More on that later.
  • Ask the question, “What is the goal of this rehearsal?” Write it down. Plan around it. See it happen.

2. Create a fun, disciplined culture

  • RELAX! Don’t be tense, mean, impatient, and rude to your team. You may be leading worship by yourself if you are. Give them a reason to respect you.
  • Have fun! Make jokes. Laugh at yourself a lot. Something weird seems to come over us musicians when we’re on a stage with lights and a guitar in hand. You’re not really that good 🙂 It’s healthy to realize that.
  • Don’t allow everyone to say whatever they want whenever they want to. The front-end work you put in will enable you to have an organized practice with a specific goal and outcome. Definitely allow your worship team to offer ideas and give input (which may even be better than yours), but realize YOU ARE THE LEADER! Lead them!
  • Challenge your team to musical excellence. Less is more. If someone is consistently messing up, talk to them personally. Challenge them to practice on their own and come to rehearsal prepared. If they come unprepared, again, talk to them personally. If you set this standard, over time you will see dramatic improvement.
  • Don’t be afraid to confront.

3. Prepare for the spontaneous

  • I’ve noticed the best worship experiences are not my breakthrough musical ideas, drum loops, and air-tight arrangements. It’s what happens in between.
  • Reserve 10-15 minutes of your rehearsal for ‘flow time’. Take a simple chord progression and flow with it. Teach them how be spontaneous musically, follow the Holy Spirit, and be sensitive to the moment.
  • Don’t be solely ‘music-centered’. Pray. Worship during your rehearsal. Lead the way.
  • BEFORE rehearsal, take time to pray over your songs, your musicians, and ask for the Holy Spirit’s leading in your practice.

Worship Leading… In Practice

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on my recent post on worship leadership. I’d like to take some time in the next week or so to dive into some of these qualities on a deeper level. There is a way to be a worship leader that is not burned out, stressed, and just trying to survive. It’s staggering to see that the average tenure of a worship leader in the local church is 2 years. Where are the steady, passionate, vision-filled leaders who are building up a worship team of ‘on-fire’ worshipers? Hopefully this stuff will help. Some topics covered will be:

  • How to plan for a great rehearsal
  • How to plan a great worship set
  • The tension between spontaneity & preparation
  • How do I get inspired each week?
  • Getting behind the vision of your local church
  • How to approach personal practice
  • Creating a fun, disciplined culture
  • What to do when your worship team doesn’t ‘get’ your vision

Anything else I should add?

The Skinny on Worship [Video]

Hilarious.

What stereotypes of worship have you had to overcome as a leader? There are people who come into our services every weekend who have been weirded out by strange worshipers. Matter of fact, there are actually 3 levels to Sunday morning worshipers (Check out that post here).

It can be tough to balance engaging the fans while also engaging the newcomers. If you haven’t seen this incredible video, you could say it’s a prequel to this one.

So how do we “ease people in” to our services?

[Btw, I love the Skit Guys. Check out more their videos here]

7 Disciplines of a Good Worship Leader

A life well lived is less about instant gratification and more about steady discipline. I know, the dreaded “D” word.

But it’s true. Achieving greatness is about making great choices every day over the long haul.

John Maxwell says it best: “See what a person is doing every day, day after day, and you’ll know who that person is and what he or she is becoming.”

Good worship leaders are no different. They’ve learned to develop certain disciplines that make them effective at what they do. Here are what I would call “7 Disciplines of a Good Worship Leader”:

1. Lead out of your story

  • Are you leading out of a ‘NOW’ faith or yesterday’s encounter?
  • What has God brought you through?
  • What is God currently doing in you?

2. Worship extravagantly behind closed doors

  • Who are you when there are no lights, stage, band, etc?
  • People see right through a fake worshiper
  • Before God blesses your worship ministry, he may teach you how to worship behind the scenes for a while. Maintain that discipline.

3. Constantly improve your craft

  • Personally – practice your instrument; practice your weak areas (speaking, transitioning, flowing)
  • With your team – create a fun, disciplined culture; challenge your musicians; allow input but know what you want. Musicians like to feel their opinion matters, but they also like to be led well; put front end work into rehearsals

4. Pastor your worship team

  • Worship with your worship team
  • Prepare yourself and your team for the spontaneous

5. Passionately embrace the vision of your senior pastor

  • If you don’t agree with your senior pastor’s vision, it might be a sign that you’re in the wrong place.
  • Local church worship leading isn’t a platform for your global worship enterprise or a place to push your own agenda. Get under your pastor’s vision and pour yourself into it.

6. View the worship service through the lens of your congregation

  • People don’t care about your slick production, powers stances, and air-tight arrangements. They want to connect with a heart that loves and pursues Jesus.
  • Minimize distractions so when it’s time to lead worship you can focus on your congregation and Jesus.
  • Practice hard, but don’t just perform great arrangements of worship hits. Connect with the people. Connect with God.
  • The best worship times are usually what happens in between your well-rehearsed songs.

7. Pursue an ever-expanding view of God

  • A.W. Tozer – “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
  • Nothing inspires worship more than amazement. Seek each day to become more and more amazed by the glory of God.
  • What books are you currently reading to expand your view of God?
  • Do you view your Bible reading as a worship experience?

Question: What are some other disciplines you would add to this list? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

Keep Your Passion Alive

One of the topics of discussion that has been circulating among our team on this young adult missions trip is, “Why is our faith so alive on a missions trip but dies so quickly in the everyday? How do we keep our passion alive?”

I’m convinced, 100%, that passion must be kept alive through action. If all we do is read books, attend church, listen to podcasts, go to conferences, attend prayer meetings, purchase Christian music, and have discussions with our Christian friends, we will lack in our faith and vibrant passion.

I know this firsthand because oftentimes I would rather speculate than serve.

Romans 12:11 says, “Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord.”

“Serving the Lord” means action. Paul wrote this as, quite possibly, the most action-oriented Christian in history. The Gospel of Christ was so precious to him he had to give his life to declare it.

The glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ was not meant to be contained in your own heart, privately. It was meant to be spoken. It was meant to be preached. It was meant to be sung. It was meant to be shared with a broken world that needs salvation in Jesus Christ.

Is your passion weak? Here’s the deal: Go and bless someone. Go and do something. Don’t wait for God to reveal his ‘will’ for your life or your ‘calling’. Just go and do the will of God, which is open to us everyday.