How do you know if Sunday was a success?
How do you determine if, as a worship team, you are hitting your goals? That you’re serving your congregation effectively?
As Socrates once said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Examining your performance as a worship team is tricky.
We want excellence…but we also know worship is so much more than that.
It’s already too easy for us to get lost in our passion for perfect bass and kick drum synchronization and insatiable desire for innovation.
Where’s a good place to have these discussions?
Say hello to the review meeting. It’s time to get acquainted because you two should be spending a lot of time together.
But won’t a review meeting keep us too performance oriented?
It could. Or it could not. It’s all in your approach. And good performance isn’t such a bad idea, is it? But that’s for another post 🙂
I could think of at least 5 reasons why it’s important to have a review meeting.
1. It will help your team focus – When your team is together, oftentimes it’s difficult to focus everyone on a common goal. Conversations are random. Everyone may have different reasons why they’re there. A meeting time to review how it all went will focus everyone and provide another avenue of discipleship.
2. You can reinforce what you’re teaching them – A review meeting is another place to share vision. As you know, vision leaks and it constantly needs to be placed before your people.
3. It stimulates growth – When your team members expect to review how worship went, they’ll be more aware of their “performance”. They’ll be more mindful of how they’re leading in worship as a musician. They’ll want to show up with something to say.
4. It provides a springboard for discussion – Discussion is difficult to pull out of nowhere. But during a review meeting it comes more naturally.
5. It’s a consistent place to provide feedback – Letting your team members know how they’re doing is essential. They want to grow. They want to know they’re investing themselves well.
A Few Review Meeting Questions
Not sure where to begin? Here are a few questions to get you started. Obviously, this will need to be tweaked for your particular team and your unique vision.
- How did the congregation respond?
- Which songs worked the best?
- Were we physically expressive worshipers? How could we improve?
- Was Christ glorified? Did we present a clear picture of the who He is?
- What about the service is confusing to new people?
I believe this is best and quickest way to see improvement as a worship team. Have fun with it. Challenge your team to prepare for this meeting and have something to say.
Question: Do you hold a review meeting with your worship team? What do you discuss? You can leave a comment by clicking here.
Great practical advice. These are good specific questions. I think if we encourage a culture of regular, honest feedback it solves a lot problems down the road. By the way I have a mini-series on “Guidelines to Evaluate Worship” Would you like the link?
Absolutely, Rob. Would love to read it.
Sure thing, http://www.robstill.com/guidelines-to-evaluate-your-worship-service-overview-part-1/
Great post David. Thanks for the link as well Rob.
No problem, Kevin. Thanks for stopping by!
Great post David. Reviews and evaluations are great for unity and I’ve also found it’s a great way to ‘release’ an ineffective team member as well.
How do you go about “releasing” an ineffective team member? That’s always a tough one for me 🙂
I wonder how to keep a review meeting from being a power struggle or argumentation or pet peeves or passions among parties. Something that helps our group at my secular workplace is assuming positive intent, remaining encouraging and positive in our work relationships, and dealing with what can be handled now and forward without dwelling on past. How a leader and members provide input really sets the tone, and how privately or publicly some things are discussed makes a difference on acceptance and buy in.
Great points, Rhonda.
I like this and would agree with the many benefits, but when do you do this?
I do this after our 9:15 service worship, before our devo time. But I’m working on getting better with the questions and discussion. If you don’t have multiple services, you could do it at rehearsal or do a quick debrief afterwards?
This is something I am going to do periodically. For instance, in a few weeks at our team meeting and then again mid year, etc…Thanks for the questions to ask, and I also appreciate Rhonda’s comment about always reminding the team that we assume positive intent in all discussions. And also, some more difficult discussions would be best served privately. I am enjoying your website, David! Many blessings… Glenda
Glenda, thanks for stopping by! Glad to help out. What else do you do in your team meetings that has worked well?
I like to meet with the worship leaders apart from the whole team first, that way when we meet together, they are able to assert some leadership as well. One thing our pastors have said to me is to meet less and DO more. So, we recently had an All Teams meeting (I’m over all of worship and arts and all teams who have anything to do with Sunday morning worship) and that meeting was sort of a trickle down meeting. So, I handled items that pertained to everyone first, like the importance of using worshipplanning.com, and got more specific as our time together went on. I’ve learned that it’s always important and wise to have an agenda, and to time items if possible. So 35 mins on this or 45 on that and to leave time for Q&A. AND always have something to eat! That softens any blows. =)
Great ideas, Glenda. Thanks for what you’re doing!