[This post is part of a series on Tips For Taking Your Worship Team To The Next Level. Check out the rest here.]
It’s an all too common scenario. Great musicians come. Great musicians go. Young, mediocre musicians get better. Young, now improved musicians go to college. Have you found yourself in that situation numerous times? Have you been so discouraged that you’ve wanted to quit? Is all this church musician transitioning really worth it?
Transition comes with the territory of being a worship leader in the local church. People come for a season and move on. Young people go to college. Wouldn’t you love to have a culture where when some musicians move on, others step up to the plate? A culture where you have multiple players who are skilled and available?
Hope this helps:
1. Excellence attracts excellence
This hold true across all areas. If you want to have excellent musicians, you’ve got to have excellent musicians. Great musicians don’t want to play sloppy, unorganized music. Be sure to make playing at your church an enjoyable experience for people. They need to be able to hear themselves. Utilize a skilled sound tech. A good tech can cover over a multitude of troubles for a worship team and help you and your team focus on your job. Ask this question, “What would I be looking for if I were to volunteer on a church worship team?” Focus on serving your band because they are there to serve the church.
2. Train the young
There’s something about young musicians. They come with less past experience and are easier to train. Especially if you can find young musicians who are passionate about music and have an aptitude for it. I’ve found that these types of kids will grow super quick. And they are the future! There’s nothing more rewarding than raising up the young because they are the future of your church and your ministry.
3. Hold auditions
It wouldn’t hurt to hold open auditions in order to see who’s interested within your local church. I wrote another post on this topic, so I won’t overly repeat myself here. Suffice it to say sometimes great musicians can be discovered. They just need a place to be recognized.
4. Don’t hold auditions
Wait…what?….No, I’m not confused. Churches do this differently. Some hold open auditions while others scoff at the idea. It’s OK to keep your team small and simply recruit people as you go. You can usually spot the musicians from a mile. They hang out around the pedal boards after service and talk about things nobody understands and wear vests and ties and torn jeans and Chuck Taylor’s. These are the guys you want. Instead of saying, “wanna play next week?”, invite them to hang out at your next rehearsal and “unofficially” get an idea of where there skill’s at. This has worked amazing for me.
5. Recruit your current musician’s friends
Do you keep utilizing the same band every single week? Try asking your current musicians about their friends. Good musicians are typically connected to other good musicians.
6. Keep it small and simple
It’s OK to have a small team. Better a small team with excellence than a large team with chaos (I think that’s found in Proverbs somewhere :)) The goal of our gathering is worship and sometimes a simple acoustic guitar will do the trick. Build your team slowly. Build with excellence and take your time. Don’t be in a rush to have a team the size of Hillsong. Patience and excellence in the small things.
7. Identify your “pipelines”
What the heck do I mean by pipeline? Every church has avenues where people enter into church life. Take advantage of those. Our current pipelines are our ministry school, our fine arts ministry, and occasionally I’ll meet future musicians on the weekend. These are areas where skilled people are coming to our churche. What pipelines do you have?
8. Connect with a local college
Do you have a college close by? I’ll bet there’s some music majors or other musicians who would love the chance to play on your worship team. Especially if you live near a Christian college, there may be worship leaders and musicians dying to connect somewhere. My college, North Central University, provided many churches with a lot of great musicians. If you can, take advantage of that.
9. Pray
I’m very practical and action-oriented on this blog. But that doesn’t mean prayer isn’t a factor. I’m of the belief that constant prayer and constant action need to flow together in our lives. Embrace the tension. We pray desperately in order to stay humble and dependent on God, but we don’t sit on our butts and wait for Him to pick us up and move our hands and use us like a puppet. So pray. Pray for God to send you great musicians who love Jesus. I’ve seen it work firsthand. But go do something while you wait.
10. Disciple your current team
Never stop pouring into who you have. Maybe your disappointed with your current team and wish you had all new musicians. You see Bethel and Hillsong and wonder why you can’t just go there. There’s something really powerful about pouring yourself into who you have. Disciple them. Build something. Teach them new things. Place them in contexts where growth can happen. They may just become the dream team you always wanted.
Question: What are some ways you have recruited new musicians? You can leave a comment by clicking here.
Really great post. I’ve lost track as to how many times I’ve said, “I wish I had more musicians.” And while you are right in that prayer is essential to doing anything, sometimes we need to get off our butts and be proactive in seeking out some new recruits. Thanks for the practical application, and the good kick-in-the-butt. 🙂
No problem, bro. Sometimes it’s just plain hard work.
Dude your posts so rock. A couple of ideas:
1. Your first point is SO TRUE. Do the little thoughtful things that make it easy for your players to serve.
“Be sure to make playing at your church an enjoyable experience for people”
2. Network with other ministries areas in your church like young adults.
Totally. Great suggestion.
Thanks for this great post. I really like the practical in your posts.
I especially like the 6th point. This is exactly my situation (1Git+3Voc) and sometimes I wish I had more musicians. But “pouring yourself into who you have” really helps us to grow together as team.
Thanks for the comment, Markus. I think it’s better for you to have I guitar and 3 vocalists who are excellent than to have a stageful of craziness 🙂 That doesn’t mean you should stay small forever, just build slowly. Keep up the good work, man.
A few ways here. 1) Get your team out in the community. Play a night of worship at a coffee shop or in the park. This will attract musicians. 2) Host a contest. Many large music stores do this. Host a drum competition or guitar tournament. 3) Battle of the bands. I have seen all three of these work to some extent. One that I did but wouldn’t recommend is, I literally taught my first team how to play their instruments. I was 13 and was tired of leading acoustic worship. This was crazy time consuming but led to a full-time position directly after I graduated.
Those are some really great ideas, Jerret. I just have a question for you about these. If you gig out like this to recruit, and you attract some great non-Christian musicians because of them, what’s your process for getting them plugged in?
Great ideas Jerret. Really helpful.
Hey, Ryan. Honestly, I don’t really like inviting unbelievers on my team, but my pastor sees the value in extending the invite to them as a way of discipling them. I schedule hang time to pour into them. I really engage them to see if they are open Gospel. If they are, then I assimilate them into the team. By them just being in an environment where there is prayer, the Word, love and worship, they often move into accepting Christ. One thing I would say is never more than one at a time. This can cause almost a negative vibe to a team.
I’ll have to look into that. Thanks Jerret!
Wow! That’s really thinking outside the box! But I can see how worship can be used as an outreach tool! Gonna definitely consider!
I like to think outside the box 🙂
Thanks for the wonderful posts Dave.
We’ve just been though a painful experience where a talented musician left us for greener pastures! I think with ‘Excellence’ also comes the ‘Heart for Worship’ in any/every circumstances. Thanks for the blogs, they are a wonderful learning experience.
Blessings from India!
I totally love these posts Dave! I’m the Church’s keyboardist and the worship team leader too.. I just want to add on Jerret’s first comment. About 7 years ago we held a battle of the bands in our community where 10 bands joined.. Honestly, we didn’t know where it was going but we just prayed for it and made sure there was a bit of Word of God from our youth pastor. Then 2 of the bands got really close with us, we all hung out..
Fast forward to today, one of the guitarists on one of those bands are our most committed musician and we saw him develop into this really excellent player.. Of course on top of that, He loves the Lord with all His heart.. 🙂
This is great, John. Awesome to see the sequence of discipleship!
Excellent post. It really helps to be reminded to just take a step back, identify good people and pour into them.
Definitely, Olaide. Where do you lead worship?
Hi Dave, thanks for the posts and thanks for sharing your insights on a public level. They have been very helpful to me over the last couple of years.
We have a policy on our worship team that states, “You must be a member and must have been attending consistently for at least 6 months before being eligible” This obviously excludes a good number of people, especially our younger crowd, where membership doesn’t seem to be important to them. How do you handle this at your church, and how do you ensure you’re not putting a transient up on the stage?
Thank you David, out of all the posts I’ve read dealing with recruiting team members, this is the most encouraging.