Worship Team Workshop Ideas

One of the best things I think we’ve ever done with our worship team is to provide monthly workshops. Since we work with volunteers, mainly who are in high school or college, it’s a great way to unify our team, grow our team numerically, impart to the next generation, and improve our musicianship.

As worship leaders, I believe God entrusts us with musicians and singers. It’s our responsibility to steward them well. I don’t want my team to simply feel ‘used’. I want them to have fun, catch a passion for worship, grow closer to Jesus, improve their musicality, and ultimately be released to serve God in other parts of the world. I hope that is your desire too.

Workshops are a discipleship tool we just started in the Fall of 2010, once a month. If you are a worship leader, I wholeheartedly recommend you do some sort of training with your team throughout the year. You don’t have to do it just like we do, but do something. You may not feel you are even qualified to teach on some of these topics, but I bet someone on your team is. If not, teach what you know. You don’t have to cover the entire encyclopedia of musical and worship expertise right now. Give what you got today. Don’t wait for ‘that time’ to come.

For the remainder of this post I wanted to outline some of the workshops we did in 2010 and some of the key topics we covered. We try to keep our workshops one hour in length, highly interactive, and include lunch (trust me, it helps). Based on mine (and Kate’s) experience, we wrote our own curriculum. Feel free to use this stuff. We didn’t invent it 🙂

KEYBOARD WORKSHOP

• Check out this post. No need to repeat myself here.

WORSHIP LEADER WORKSHOP

• Bring in a guest worship leader and interview them in front of the team. We invited worship leaders from other local churches, youth group worship leaders, and young aspiring worship leaders.
• Do a visionary teaching on “Why We Lead Worship” or something practical like, “Practical Helps for Worship Leaders”.
• Leave time for Q & A
• Attend a local conference or worship night together

RHYTHM SECTION WORKSHOP (Drums, Bass, Guitars)

• Listen to a song and have each team member diagram what is happening using this sheet. (This sheet is from Paul Baloche. Btw, check out his instructional DVDs, which would be another great idea for a workshop. Just watch it and then apply it).
• Teach on ‘groove’, ‘playing in the pocket’, ‘listening to other musicians’, ‘less is more’.
• Rotate different musicians in and out, have one of them start a groove, and the others match it. Have the room comment on how they did. Stop and applaud the good you see and kindly point out what went wrong.
• Pick a couple songs, provide sheet music, and rotate musicians in and out quickly to give ‘the groove’ a try.

VOCAL WORKSHOP

• Teach on the role of a background singer (matching the tone of the lead, being aware, less is more)
• Pick a song and demonstrate some options. Have others sing.
• Utilize a band and do a humorous demonstration of “what NOT to do”.
• Communicate your personal vision for worship team vocals. Sometimes a simple vision is all it takes to get everyone ‘on board’.

WORSHIP LEADERS: Have you done any workshops before? What are some things you’ve tried?