Beyond Sunday Worship

Worship Podcast & Blog

6 Essential Qualities Pastors Look For In Worship Leaders

From David: Today I have the honor of featuring one of my favorite bloggers, Michael Perkins. Michael is an incredibly kind, gifted, insightful leader who blogs over at The Handwritten. Check out his blog and follow him on Twitter. And don’t be shy when it comes to commenting. He won’t bite 😉

I pastor a church in Louisiana.

And up until a month ago my wife lead worship for us. You would think having your wife lead worship would be awesome (it is), but it’s difficult when she’s not called to lead worship.

To be honest she was filling a need. And she was coming dangerously close to burning out.

I began to pray for God to “send” us a worship leader that had the qualities that I believe are essential for a worship leader to have.

The qualities are:

Creative

Creativity for worship leaders is crucial. We need worship leaders who are willing to do “different” in hopes of bringing people into a spirit of worship. Too often, we are concerned if people will like it, as we should be, but we cannot afford to allow our worship to become stagnant.

We have to be intentionally creative.

Buys Into Vision

Though pastors are not the only ones who hear from God, they are the ones entrusted to lead the church. It’s very important to buy into the vision that he or she has casted because if you do not, you could do a lot of damage real quick.

Step outside yourself and serve another’s vision; because great leaders are first great followers.

Spontaneous

In other words, be willing to listen to God. God changes the message that pastors preach at the last minute all the time. And He can do the same thing with set lists. If He leads you to change it, then don’t worry about making your team or IT guy upset.

Be faithful to prepare with excellence. But don’t be afraid of the spontaneous.

Listens to God

God may also lead you to sing an “extra” chorus or verse while leading. That’s okay. If service runs 5 minutes longer and people have to wait in line a few minutes longer to get through the buffet line after church, then so be it.

It’s more important that God has his way than your plans were well executed.

Thick Skinned

Leading worship isn’t always going to be rainbows and unicorns. In fact, sometimes it’s really tough. People are more likely to complain about the music and songs than they would the pastor and his message.

Be ready for criticism and don’t take it personally.

Kingdom Focused

Sounds painfully obvious right? . We want worship leaders who are more concerned with growing the kingdom, rather than if their hair looks cool.

We want worship leaders who are leading people to Christ and not just singing songs.

Everything is about The Kingdom.

I said that up until a month ago my wife was leading worship. Well God did send us a worship leader with these qualities.

And I’m so thankful for that.

Question: What qualities would you add that are essential for a worship leader to have? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons (flickr)

Comments

  1. james p. says

    Yes the ability to bring the holy spirit start with our worship service and its hard to do it if your not called by God. I want to thank all worship leaders, cause without you the pastors ability to bring the holy spirit is made much more difficult. I have been told that that without a real good worship service the pulpit seems to be more like a pit youare trying to pull yourself out of. So thank you worship leaders and may God bless you all.

    • Michael Perkins says

      James I agree completely. They help set the tone for sure. An example what you stated would be when I gave the worship team off for two weeks. That meant I had to lead, but I lead using Youtube…it was okay, but I truly gained a lot of respect for what they do.

  2. Arny says

    Song Choice is a biggy for me Michael…

    our songs must be…

    Theologicly sound…

    Focusing on HIM…not us…

    Centering on the CROSS…not us…

    Proclaiming JESUS…not us…

  4. Cheyne ("Shane") Stilwell says

    Thanks for this post, Michael. Really good points here for the role description.

    So true that we need to understand following – I think we can lose sight of how much is on the Sr. Pastor to lead the service as a whole, and how much they need us to be willing to change our plan if needed (going back to spontaneity here).

    I would add “some degree of adminstrative ability”. Typically, that’s not a forte of mine, but I had to learn out of necessity – it’s definitely saved my bacon on certain occasions.

    • Michael Perkins says

      Absolutely on the administrative ability. For a couple of reasons:

      1. to lead your team
      2. and if the church is smaller you may need to help the pastor take care of day to day things to lighten the load.

      Very insightful comment.

    • David Santistevan says

      This is probably worthy of a separate post – how to improve your administrative abilities. A lot of worship leaders have all the talent in the world but don’t know how to manage their schedule or lead a team.

  5. Sarah Wooten says

    Flexible. Hang on the set lists and service order loosely.

    Collaborative. There are a lot of people involved in a service, and someone may have a better idea than you.

    Decisive. It is good to ask for opinions and be open, but when it comes down to it, make a decision and stick to it. Your team will follow you.

    Loving. It really helps if you love God and love the people you are serving out in the congregation. I literally look out at my congregation and have a love attack for them. Sometimes I have to ask for the annointing of tearlessness so that I can get through a song.

    Brave. You lead a band. You lead a congregation. You need to be brave and model worship with your voice and your body. Moxie leadership is essential.

    Steward of time. You can’t help it – there are children’s programs and large numbers of people to move in between services. Especially in mega-services with a service immediately following, you need to have one foot in Heaven and one eye on the clock. Lost in worship, but not too lost. Are you picking up what I’m laying down?

    Spiritual leader. If you are lucky enough to have a band leader, a worship leader doesn’t even have to be a musical leader, but you do have to be a spiritual leader. Engage your teams in prayer and discussion of the sermon. Followup with people about their lives and keep your team connected. It’s awesome, and hard.

    That’s all I got for now.

  6. Jeffrey Estes says

    I really appreciate this post. All of these are not mere suggestions for true worship leaders to have, but they are necessities. I know too many worship leaders who do not have these qualities. Instead of buying into vision, they buck against the vision if it is not what they would like. Instead of being kingdom minded and always pointing people to Christ, they are too earthly minded, and point people to themselves. It is very saddening.

    One thing that could be added to this list (maybe I am talking out of a little frustration) is to have a voice like Chris Tomlin and a professional video. I believe that too often very qualified people who would be and are excellent worship leaders with all of the qualities listed above are over looked because their voice isn’t as great as Chris Tomlin’s, or the quality of the video that they submit isn’t on the level of a huge church with lots of resources. It seems to me like leadership search commities or teams or whatever don’t even take a second to see potential, but only see what is on the surface. I am sorry if this is a little harsh but that is just what my experience has been, even being in conversations with friends who have been searching for worship leaders. They won’t give a person a chance because the quality of their video wasn’t a professional video production.

    Like I said, I extremely agree with the qualities listed in the post. I think that before anything musically is tested, the qualities of the heart should be tested. Am I way off?

    • David Santistevan says

      Jeff, I appreciate your honesty. When it comes to larger churches, they definitely do look for this. And while it can be a bit unfair if you as a worship leader don’t have the resources to do something professional, it does make sense that they want a worship leader with musical excellence. If I was choosing though, I would probably hire a guy with a less quality voice who was a great leader over someone who was simply very talented. A great leader can raise up great vocalists around him – develop a great team. Make sense?

      • Rhonda Sue Davis says

        well, I would say there is good spontaneous and not so good spontaneous. I am a lot like the first part of the list and used to get in a lot of trouble being creative, impulsive and all stops out for the goals. Trouble was no one else could stand working with me or do it the way I did. So they stood back and watched me go or stayed away. Things turned around with my coworkers and service and in people relationships when for one thing I got the “lead up” concept at a catalyst conference (Seth Godin outake included) and over a couple of years got into healthier relating with people and knowing and finding Him among the 24/7 of living (day in day out everywhere). I had gone to a place of no faith whatsoever. And it is really His provision and correction and loving mending of my heart that is in the meaningful work I do, not my doing. My wage paying job is to process almost all day in a mail room (I hope to be as merciful an accountant as He is with me) and on Sunday’s I lead preschool families & staff in worship. I just find it delightful from the list above that perhaps one of the reasons this is being blessed is that I have learned to follow vision, seek his quiet and authoritative voice, able to hear correction and receive clarification from others, and look for what is of Kingdom in all my days. Make it sound like it is all worked out, but you should see our house, and work and preschool class is always a learning and living experience. We are currently having our home routines and interactions tested and tempered for the better. Worship is 24/7 and we all get to lead it, for the big guy audience of one or more. And a four year old can lead with a sincere answer to a question, when they reach beyond the standard “Jesus God Bible” answers. I think when we think we have it figured out better than others maybe that is where some of the things on the list might be a problem. Maybe the everyday rubber to the road heart and spiritual eyes and ears is the key to leading worship.

        Lots of words, to sum up, I think the list of what pastors look for in a worship leader is about engaging (acting and offering) and listening(receiving and adjusting). I think that is cool. I expected it to be musical excellence, people skills, or bible/doctrine knowledge and really glad it wasn’t.

  8. Gangai Victor says

    In a guest post for virtualpreacher.org on the same subject, I mentioned these 7 qualities:

    1. Strong personal prayer life
    2. Ear to listen to God
    3. Team player
    4. Servant’s heart
    5. Skilled in music
    6. Competent in ministry
    7. Attitude of pursuing excellence

    The full article can be found here: http://goo.gl/LHuK0

    My two cents.

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