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First of all, let me clearly state that I do not lead worship by vocation and that these are merely observations. However, do know that I have studied the worship/arts ministry extensively and am someone that believes the worship leader is almost equally as important to the church as the senior pastor.

Here are 6 things I’d like to say to worship leaders:

1. Be responsible: Do you know why most churches lead off with a set of worship songs before a sermon is given? It’s a way for people to toss out all the junk they brought into the service and start presenting themselves before God. When people have had a chance to open up their hearts to God and forget about the cares of the world, they are more open to hearing and understanding his Word.As a worship leader, God is entrusting you with the church to help lead them into a spirit of worship. Unfortunately, I see a lot of worship leaders that are very gifted musically, yet aren’t taking the responsibility of leadership seriously.
2. Connect with the church: I can’t tell you how many times I have been in a church service and watched the worship leader worshiping God so deeply that their eyes were closed and they were disconnected with the rest of us. For anyone in the service not singing, they were watching one person singing worship and not drawn into the experience. Open your eyes people! While you may think you can lead by example, you can’t get people to follow you unless they get cues to do so. Draw them with your eye contact and expressions. Let God use you to help bring others into a spirit of worshiping him.
3. It’s not a competition: You are not there to compete with the preaching pastor for time in front of the audience. Going over-the-top for the sake of attention really robs God of his time of worship. As long as the music is stopped and people are listening to you speak, the longer God goes without worship. Please do engage your people and give them verbal cues for lyrics, maybe a quick scripture verse comment as you play the lead-in of a song, but please don’t try to be the center of attention by storytelling. It’s all about honoring God with our worship, not about you.
4. Know your people: One of the things that worship leaders may do is get too repetitive in a song. If your people will follow you and give their worship to God, by all means keep doing that. However, often times I’ve seen worship broken when people are asked to repeat a chorus five, six, eight times. If you’re leading, but your people aren’t following, you’re really not leading. If you feel God moving you to repeat a chorus numerous times, watch how your people respond. If they disconnect and start watching you to see when you’re gonna get to the next song, please don’t take them to that place in the future.
5. Cast the vision: While it may be your senior pastor that casts the vision for your church, know that you too are responsible to share that vision with the people. The songs you select can be very important to this. For example, the church plant I lead is called Revolution Church Sacramento. We have two songs that really speak to our vision. Our vision is: We seek to be a church of transformed people that God may use to help transform the lives of others in the Sacramento area. So, one of the songs that speaks to this is Revolution by Starfield, which ties into our name. The other song is God of This City by Chris Tomlin, which speaks to God moving in the hearts of people in our city and a call to the church because greater things are yet to come, greater things are still to be done in this city. Your song selections can help reinforce the vision of your church. Of course, above all else, the songs must honor and glorify God and help reveal Christ
6. Impart your personality: You are unique and you bring that to your church. If you are a naturally bubbly person with a lot of enthusiasm, let that shine in your worship. Be expressive, compassionate, loving, passionate…whatever it is that is you, share that in your worship. It helps to make you more authentic--which actually helps to keep you from being a distraction to worship--and causes people to want to connect with you and worship God together with you. Don’t just be a figurehead on stage singing to God, let people see the real you!

What would you add to this list?

Related posts:

1. Worship Leaders On American Idol…Biblical?
2. 10 Ways for Worship Leaders to Hinder the Church
3. Taking it to the streets
4. God of this city
5. Daily Devotion: Proverbs 20

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 11:32 am and is filed under worship. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.