Older worship leader, they don’t hate you. They just have a hard time with your music.
I know it can be intimidating to lead worship for opinionated, musically-driven, young people.
But this is a question you must wrestle with.
I’ve really been loving our conversations surrounding engaging multiple generations in worship.
Much of our conversation has been about reaching the elder.
Framing The Frustration
But how do we engage the younger? How does a 45-60 year old worship leader engage a 14 year old in worship?
Is it even possible?
If you’re in that boat, I’m sure you feel the tension.
Your musical style is dated. Not intentionally, it just comes with age.
You have hard time keeping up with the onslaught of new songs being written.
You’re tired. Your back hurts. Your energy level isn’t what it used to be.
You don’t feel the passion to keep raising the bar and reinventing yourself.
Two Options
I believe there are two options here as well:
- Focus your energies on raising up new, young worship leaders and plan to take a backseat to the next generation. If you don’t, you may lose their attention and miss your opportunity.
- Do whatever it takes to stay relevant to the young. Don’t become old and dogmatic about musical style. Keep raising the bar.
How do you pastor those who could literally be your grandkids?
I hope you sense the importance of this question.
Because if we stop reaching the younger – if we stop connecting with the next generation, we will die. We will lose our influence.
We can’t focus on what we like and prefer and “the way it’s always been” or bring back the “good ‘ole glory days”.
God is doing a new thing in this generation. We owe it to the young…we owe it to the church to listen.
This is post is designed as less of a “how-to” and more of a discussion.
Will you help me write a follow-up post? How do you engage a younger generation in worship? Let me know in the comments.
1. Kids don’t really care how old you are as long as you are committed to them and authentic.
2. Engaging youth in worship isn’t too hard as long as you put your whole self into it, use every opportunity to teach them how to respond in worship, and give an open ear to their song requests, and – again – BE AUTHENTIC when you lead.
I think this issue is of the utmost importance, personally… the youth are the future of the church, and without them we don’t have a church. If I were to “aim” a church’s style/taste in a specific direction, I’d keep our youth in mind before anything else, taste-wise.
Great thoughts, Shannon. Would you say style isn’t as important to the youth as authenticity?
I agree Shannon and David – authenticity is more important than style – to a point. We have been integrating some good 15-20 year old players and singers into our main services and they love it. It might not be their preferred style but they love being valued and included. The young people in the congregation are picking up on the inclusiveness. It can be a win for everyone.
What do you mean by integrate? Just wanted to clarify in my head whether you meant in the congregation or on the worship team.
God’s been working with me on the whole ‘preference’ thing. We have flowers and trees on our stage. I can’t stand it. For a long time I struggled with it and then one day God took it and said, “this isn’t your call. Put your preference aside, and do what I’ve called you to do. When you call the shots, then your preferences can be weighed into the decisions.” I said, okay then.
Jason – By integrating them I mean getting them on stage playing in the band or singing in the choir or vocal teams or reading scripture, etc. At first I thought they wouldn’t want to because our music isn’t as “cool”, but I shoot for common ground and it seems to work.
Regarding the flower thing, are you sure God doesn’t want you involved in that decision? Or maybe you can facilitate a discussion regarding it. I have a small group of women mad at me because we rarely use plants anymore. One of the ladies swore at me the other day:)
Haha! You serious?
Haha, wow. That’s crazy. Thanks for clearing that up. I really like those ideas. Not only does it get them integrated and feeling included, but their reading scriptures and doing other stuff, seems like a great way to break up the potential of monotony and predictability of services as well.
I volunteer as the lead guitarist, so what I say isn’t always considered. I do have to say that our worship pastor is awesome and loves input from everyone. I will leave that at that. Even if God wanted me in this discussion, I’m not so sure others do, as I have tried to start discussions about perhaps changing things up. But you know how it is, upholding tradition and so forth. I love tradition and have nothing against it. I spent 5 years in the Marines, I know all about tradition. But even the Marine Corps changes sometimes.
So is your style a little more old school or are you catering to those younger players?
We do the latest music, but when the lead guitarists are in their 40’s & 50’s, it just gives it a more old school feel. They only use delay pedals if they absolutely have to. So the songs may be almost the same, but they will sound different depending on the age or style of the player. I think they are learning from each other rather than putting up with each other.
Have you guys been able to mix generations in your bands & vocal teams? How has it gone?
Interesting how you describe your lead guitarists. I am only 27 and feel much of the same way. I am self taught now for 11 years and everything I learned was from Guns N Roses, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Eric Clapton, and a lot of classic rock. So, while I was growing as a musician, I had the mentality of “if I need a bunch of effects to sound good, I’m not that good of a guitarist.” So, I understand where they may be coming from. Maybe they just don’t like effects. But, I’ve come to learn that the Holy Spirit moves during dotted 8th notes lol! I have now come to embrace effects and have a different philosophy now. I think a good guitarist can utilize effects to give them a really unique and awesome sound. So Good Guitarist + Effects = awesome. Bad Guitarist + Effects = Mess.
This topic can be touchy but is important. I will be kind of honest and say that I think it’s important for anyone of any age to consider the youth. I’ve said the same thing as Shannon, the youth are the church of tomorrow. For example, you know how kids grow up and sometimes they think “I don’t EVER want to be like my mom/dad or both.” If we’re not careful, that’s the mentality the youth will have, and I think I’m still young enough to say me as well. I think some places get this, some don’t, and who knows how many don’t think it’s an important issue. Seth Godin’s blog is pretty relevant to this post.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/09/forward-or-back.html
Thanks for the article, Jason! That has great relevance to our discussion. I suppose this is where we need to be skilled pastors. We want to reach the next generation but we also want to pastor them to not forget where they came from.
Style is important…very important if you want to engage them…BUT..it’s no reason to water down the lyrics…
—I never really paid attention as a kid because I hated the style…(most kids will not pay attention to a bill gaither sound)
I would hope to think that the older generation understand that things change…
We are all now a days are trying to be “younger”…you see these 40 50 something pastors dressed in jeans and cool shirts to attract the younger generation…(and thats cool…the holy spirit does not care what you are wearing when preaching the Gospel!)
I think the older generation gets it…and for the most part they are for it…BUT they will not compromise the message and the content lyric wise…
Style for younger generation that i think is more effective is pop rock…cold play sound is very popular right now in churches…thats cool…
depending on the culture of the church…hip hop might work…and more R&b. (couldn’t say much about this style)
Spanish churches are a little behind…but they are starting the pop rock trend as well…but we mix it alot…with cumbia-latin and polka-latin styles…
I think you’re right, Arny. The older generation has a passion for lyrical truth (as should the young). In choosing songs and in writing songs, we need to be sure that we capture solid theology. A lot of songs seem to worship our response to God more than God Himself, you know?
I think we have to be careful not to put too much focus on the band itself. don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the band being the best band they can be in order to help create the best amosphere possible for people to connect with God. and yes, we need to take into account the people we are leading and what is the best for them. I just fear that our American Idol generation is beginning to put too much focus on the band playing “worship and praise” music instead of what true, authentic worship and praise is all about. I think now days when people say that they didn’t care for the worship and praise, what they mean is that they didn’t like the band. at that point, we are viewing church musicians just as another band and we are allowing our worship and praise to the Father to be dictated by our personal preference in music.
Again, I’m all for being the best band we can be and doing all we can to connect with the people we are leading. I just think we also need to remember what the entire point of worship and praise is…
Great point, Nathan. Love it. I’ve found it’s important to teach your band how to cry out to God apart from music…off the stage. That really tests the heart. Is there anything you do to inspire true worship in your musicians?
I agree with the previous comments as well…authenticity is huge!
I learned some stuff about this two ways. One was leading elementary school age kids for years. Two was by having a bunch of 17 year olds do my album for me. Here are some things I learned:
1) Don’t shy away from theological lyrics. 17 year olds actually want substantive lyrics in their songs. You would not believe how these guys took so singing lyrics like “these you redeemed with Your blood” and “for a thousand generations, Your Word is still the same”. They loved the opportunity to ‘get real’ with a ‘theological’ song when they got in the studio.
2) Pay great attention to the song craft. Songs should be great songs, repeated elements, good rhyme, lots of hooks, etc. Identify some songs that ‘work’ for all ages. Look at what’s there and try for songs in that vein.
3) Energy in leadership is very important. You should be excited to worship and they will come along and worship with you.
4) Its OK for a song to tell a story from the bible in order to illustrate an attribute of God. I found youth really connected when we sang, for instance, about Joshua before Jericho and how this illustrated the trustworthiness of God. These kids are closer to those stories that they learned in Sunday School. Help the bridge the gap between their ‘book learning’and a faith that will carry them through tough times.
Awesome tips. Do you think it’s possible for songs to be so theological that they no longer make sense to young people, young Christians, and non believers? I just wonder if we lose a lot of people when we do hymns without explanation of the lyrics. Any thoughts?
I think if it comes across as ‘too theological’ we need to work more on the song until it contains the same truth but does not come across that way. I also think that we can tend to lose people with vocabulary. An interesting tidbit – I had a song called “We Ascribe” on our EP. In the middle of the recording our producer called and said “we have a problem – we have a 17 year old in the recording booth who doesn’t know what ‘ascribe’ means”. So we changed it (it changed to ‘We will give”) because we wanted to make a record that youth would embrace.
As for hymns, I think we should use them, but I also think this generation of songwriters should make new hymns that talk to this generation. I don’t think we should punt and decide that theological songs have to be old hymns. Rather we should challenge our songwriters to connect these great truths with the younger generation in a relevant way. The songs can still focus on God but have a language that can be embraced. I salute Matt Redman for this – he is a master at it.
I agree with much of what you said. I was actually speaking to our worship pastor the other night and we were just talking about hymns and modern worship. I told him that the hymns are no different from Hillsong, Redman, and Tomlin of today. They are all hymns telling the story of God, connecting people with God, and worshiping God. It’s just a different time period. Give it time and our songs will be considered old and antiquated. Especially at the rate things get ‘old’ in this current culture I’d say give it a year and it’s old haha.
These are great tips Matthew, can you suggest a song for #2?
Well I can suggest the songs from our EP that these guys sang for me! We like to think they bring a theological perspective while at the same time being singable and accessible to a younger audience (from the demographics I can get access to, about 50% of our listeners and downloaders are under 25). We seem to resonate with a wide age group, from what I can tell.
The songs are here:
http://www.weekendwarriorworship.com/www-artist-weekend-warrior-worship/
to this point, the biggest thing I’ve seen/done is just to have a sit down conversation the band for the particular event and have specific, set aside, focused time in prayer before we “take stage”
as for your last question, I don’t know that it’s bad to do songs that are deep theologically. However, I would say that it is possible that there may need to be some explanation/coaching on it. I think coaching is one of the biggest/best things we can do. Often people don’t know what to do. Or maybe they are just taking it all in.
To use sports as an analogy, you cant get mad a little kid who shows up to practice for the first time and does know what to do. you have to have patience and coach them…
my thoughts anyway 🙂
*mad AT a kid who does NOT know
I grew up in a bilingual church that held two services in two different languages. I was a member in an English speaking service, which represented the minority and the demo skewed towards high school and young adults who identified with North American culture. The majority of the church was made up of immigrant congregants who held their culture from home close to their hearts. We had huge age and culture gaps to bridge.
Every few months, the entire church would join together for a “family worship” Sunday. Needless to say, we ran into many episodes of either young people skipping out because everything sounded too stiff and old fashioned, or the old folks refusing to stand, in silent protest that everything is too loud and North American.
I love your points above because we used each of them with some degree of success. Over time, we saw more and more engagement from both sides, and we realized it wasn’t so much what we did or didn’t do that helped bridge the gap. We spent time asking God to teach us about what it means to have a worshipper’s heart, and to help us build an attitude of servanthood – putting others’ needs first, humbly and honestly seeking to understand where the other party is coming from. We also admitted we had a lot to learn from each other.
Granted, after meeting halfway with new hymnal arrangements and some translation work on modern worship songs, the family services were probably a bit of an atrocity to a trained musician’s ears. But that didn’t matter so much anymore because it actually felt like a real family gathering around the dinner table, in all its messiness and loudness, but most importantly, worshipping as one Body in Christ.
Beautiful description, Valerie. I love what you said – “asking God to teach us about what it means to have a worshiper’s heart.” I’m sure you encountered more challenges than we even realize in a bilingual church!
These are great contributions. Here’s mine.
There’s two levels to address – Immediate (Engaging the younger generation in worship) and Long term (Pastoral leadership of the ministry area).
Immediate – if you’re older and leading a younger group I suggest:
1) Expect to connect. Be real, be fun, be energetic.
2) Do songs they can relate to.
Long Term
1) Invest in, raise up and feature younger leaders.
2) Build relationships outside of worship ministry with the younger gen, listen to them, include their input
Great points, Rob. Inspiring to hear how you’re living this.