What I love most about leading worship (I guess besides actually worshiping God) is making disciples. Each member of the worship team is someone called by God whom I have the privilege of pouring into.
I believe sometimes we can short circuit what God wants to do through our worship team because we give excuses. “I can’t afford to hire good musicians.” “I just don’t like asking him all the time.” “This schedule is just too busy for people.” “There’s too many services at this church!” Or we just get into ‘weekly maintenance mode’ and lose the big picture of what we are doing.
Let me ask you a couple questions. What culture are you creating with what you’ve got? Do you have a process within your worship team where individual growth is intentional? Are you creating enough margin in your schedule to dream dreams and seek God’s vision for your worship team?
I’d like to share our process with you in hopes that if you don’t have a discipleship strategy for your worship team, that you would start. Or if you do, keep doing it. I’m not saying this way is the only way. Just let it stir your imagination. And let me know if you come up with even better ideas.
When I’m thinking about worship team discipleship, I’m asking the question, “What can we do WEEKLY, MONTHLY, and ANNUALLY?”
WEEKLY
- 15 minute band devotions on Sunday morning (study a good book and/or book of the Bible)
- Pre service prayer (short, declarative prayers)
- Rehearsals (rehearse songs & ‘flow’ moments)
MONTHLY
- Worship Team Workshops (Vocal, Rhythm Section, Worship Leaders, etc.)
ANNUALLY
- Refresh Night (a rehearsal night where we meet off-site and simply worship, cast vision, and hang out. We do this 3x/year.)
- Attend a local conference
What is it that you are doing? What has been helpful for your worship team?
This is exactly what I needed to read today. It’s amazing how many divine appointments I’ve been having lately, like a friend sending me an email or calling me exactly when I needed a word of encouragement.
I have been a little disappointed with my band. We’ve been together 4 or 5 years, with a couple personnel changes over the years. But I just don’t see/hear us getting any better, and I’m not just talking musically. I couldn’t tell we were growing spiritually.
I wrote a note to a friend last night expressing my concerns and it dawned on me (like it was some huge revelation, even though I should have known this already) that in order to lead worship with a congregation, I had to also lead my band. I have studied worship ministry and they haven’t, so it’s my duty to share my knowledge, and more importantly, my passion, with them.
Andrew, have you ready my free ebook, “Beyond Sunday”? I think it might help you in your situation:https://www.davidsantistevan.com/2011/11/beyond-sunday/
Hi David,
Thanks for your blog, I’m one of the main worship leaders at my church, though we are a very small church God has given us a nice sized group of talented people. But despite the surplus of worship people, our worship ministry lacks so much vision, direction, and DISCIPLESHIP. Reading this was such an encouragement. Especially since my Pastor has just assigned me with the task of developing some type of discipleship program for all of our worship leaders to go through, (we unfortunately don’t have a worship Pastor at the moment so everything is run by a group of leaders) I’ve got a pretty good layout of the type of teachings we are going to incorporate, but I was struggling with the follow-up. Your suggestions sound great, as honestly we aren’t doing any of those things, besides praying before service and practicing. A question I do have is what other things could we do (besides what you already mentioned) to try to maintain that sense of community/family atmosphere with our teams as a whole? Also what are things that I could suggest to the other worship leaders to try to engage our congregation more as there’s such a huge disconnect sometimes with the worship and our church culture.