mission

Building a United Worship Team

by

A key to building a united worship team is to have a clearly defined statement. This entry suggests ways to go about developing such a statement, including planning a retreat for this purpose. Start beforehand by asking the right questions of your pastor. Determine what goals the team will have in your church, and work to define team values.

United purpose and action have tremendous power. I think about that when I fly on a jet plane. Air molecules are so tiny I can’t see them. Yet if enough of them travel past the surfaces of a wing at one time, they can lift thousands of pounds off the ground! One of the first signs of good leadership is unity among those being led. When there is heart-unity, we can reach any goal the Lord gives us.

Assuming we have godly people who have a call to lead worship, two important ingredients for building unity are (1) developing a clearly defined mission, with goals and objectives, strategies, and action plans; and (2) having a leader who practices the skills of team-building.

Clearly State Your Team Mission. Many worship teams develop serious problems of disunity as they increase in numbers. Very often that has less to do with disloyalty than with a missing sense of mission.

Joining a group that doesn’t have a clear mission statement is like proposing marriage on a blind date. You are committed, but you don’t know to what. Since everyone has his or her own perceptions of what a worship team ought to do, these perceptions proliferate as the group grows, and the seeds of disunity soon sprout like mushrooms after a cool rain.

On the other hand, if the worship team can clearly state its mission, objectives, philosophy of ministry, strategies, and action plans, those joining will more likely be people who are in agreement. They will probably spend most of their energies helping the group achieve its objectives instead of trying to change the group.

Better Stewardship of Resources. Churches are beginning to see the importance of defining their mission as a whole. But groups within the church also benefit from a specific statement of their particular mission. Can your worship team define its mission and how it will be accomplished? If it can, it is ready for better stewardship of its resources. It will invest itself consistently in doing things that help accomplish its mission, and there will be far less “wheel spinning” than if it has only a vague idea about supplying music for the church.

Give a Greater Sense of Value to Tasks. As groups age, they often lose the vigor and excitement of the early years. One of the reasons this happens is that every growing group has to deal with an increasing amount of “drudge work.” Take the role of the music librarian, for instance. It has little inherent glamour. The music librarian is responsible for acquiring, cataloging, retrieving, and filing the music for your worship team. He or she has to secure performance rights. When the group is young, he or she is caught up in the excitement of it all. But as the group gets older, the person realizes that the job has become repetitive. If at this point, the librarian does not see how his or her task is accomplishing a larger mission, he or she may find reasons to leave the post.

Ask the Right Questions. How can you define your worship team’s mission? It begins with asking the right questions of the right people. Here is an outline of good procedures to follow:

1. Worship teams are accountable to their pastor; they cannot develop a vision independent of the church they serve. Contact the pastor, and set up a time when you can meet to discuss both the church’s vision and your team’s role in accomplishing it. To help your pastor to prepare, you might ask him or her to read this article and the others in this section.
2. Meet with the pastor. Listen to her. Get her heart. Ask her how she sees the worship team fitting into the overall mission of the church.
3. Take your worship team on a weekend retreat. Spend time in prayer, informal talks, and group discussion regarding your mission statement. Write a preliminary draft.
4. Review your preliminary draft with the pastor.
5. Refine your statement of mission over a period of several weeks or even months, if necessary. Nothing is gained by hurrying.
6. After your mission statement is completed, refer to it often. Pray over it. Say it in church. Put it in your church handbook. Your mission statement will be the foundation from which you can discover God’s long-range, medium-range, and short-range plans for your group.

How Are You Involved? What are some of the functions of a worship team? That will depend on your church. On your retreat, pool the ideas of your group based on the roles you have already filled as well as their dreams. Most of all, your team goal will be to make your distinctive contribution to the overall mission of your church.

Just to get your thinking started, you might consider the following:

1. Participate in the strategic planning meetings of the church. When the worship leader is intimately involved in the long-range, medium-range, and short-range planning of the church, he or she is better able to help move the church’s vision forward through the incredible power of worship and music.
2. Prepare the people to receive the Word of God.
3. Prepare the people so that God’s presence may manifest itself freely. Engage in consultation with the person who brings the Sunday message so that the worship time becomes a meaningful and coherent focus of the service.
4. Prophesy to the church through the Word and through music. As a team you do more than sing about God’s glory: You impart it prophetically to the worshiping church.
5. Teach the church to sing. Because we are a spiritual priesthood of believers, all of us need to grow in our musical abilities for the sake of worship.
6. Develop the gifts of the church. Create opportunities for ministry.
7. Teach about worship and worship expressions such as dancing, clapping, kneeling, and so on.
8. Raise up additional worship leaders. Every ministry worth its salt disciples others.
9. Develop a worship awareness among the children and youth.
10. Meet with the pastor to plan services. Perhaps begin by working together on special services.
11. Serve as a resource for special evangelistic outreaches.
12. Sponsor seminars on worship for area churches.
13. Help raise up worship teams in other area churches.
14. Participate in evangelistic outreaches.
15. Develop worship leaders for house fellowships in your congregation.
16. Raise up specialized worship teams to visit shut-ins, nursing homes, hospitals, and jails.
17. Provide a library of resources for strengthening worship in the home.

As is evident just from this beginning list, there are endless possibilities for your team’s involvement.

Define Your Values. Once your pastor and you have identified the goals your team is to have, you will then need to discuss your values as a team. By values, we mean the standards of conduct and professionalism that will be required of worship leaders.

Your values must reflect the values of your church. For example, if your church is casual, your team would be out of place if everyone dressed in three-piece suits and formal gowns.

Most of your values will develop from applicable Scriptures regarding what spiritual leaders are to be like. In addition, you can learn a lot from attending gatherings for worship leaders and church leaders, exchanging ideas with others who have a calling like yours.

A united worship team that shares a common vision can carry the church to the heights of communion with God. Commit yourself to learn how to build a team that is centered around a worthwhile mission.

Arts in Evangelism … It won’t happen fast without Non-Artist-Advocates

by

For the arts to become effectively used in evangelism the Church needs Non-Artist-Advocates or it won’t happen fast, if at all.

Most Christians have some sense that artistic methods, and artists themselves, could be and should be powerful sources of evangelistic efforts.  But most artists and musicians will confirm that they feel most conventionally trained and serving church leadership doesn’t have the foggiest idea or vision of how to envision artists to be used; nor even possess the simple conviction to give artists and musicians permission to come up with ideas on how to engage the community around them for the sake of the Gospel.  In fact, often musicians and artists will tell you that they feel that church leadership doesn’t really trust that they will get the “content” of the Gospel right, or communicate it well.

That may sound a bit harsh. But I’m deciding these days, after some 49 years in Church and mission ministry, to speak more frankly about these things. Though there’s been some very good progress in Church leadership feeling the importance of artists and musicians in ministry, we are still not seriously and aggressively tapping into the reservoir of these dynamic and God-designed “specialists” who God has created to engage the community and culture through their imaginative and emotional intelligence – to encounter the objective (yet transcendent) reality of the Triune GOD we love, worship and serve.

  • Church leaders still remain skeptical that artists and musicians are really declaring enough content about God.
  • Mission leaders still overlook the fact that “indigenous” Christian community formation is expressed through artistic human forms of expressions (metaphors, symbols, and human signal systems*).
  • Congregational and Denominational leaders do not provide budgets or the systems which affirm the development of quality artistic methods and efforts of community engagement via the arts.
  • We are still thinking to much about entertainment, and too little about encounter – and how artists and musicians are the best God-designed facilitators of the latter.

So how could that change?  Well, a lot is needed. But a strategic starting place is the rise non-artistic-Artist-Advocates.  We need Christians, normal and clergy, who will advocate for the reality that we must embrace artistically gifted disciples as ministry initiators – and to have a sustained, long-term plan – we need the following, not very popular, but very strategic, concerted efforts to press for …

  • more artistically gifted people in the clergy (the Church’s gatekeepers, budget developers, and permission-givers);
  • more artists on ‘ministry strategy development’ teams;
  • more non-Christians coming providing a community for Christians in the arts in the marketplace (encouraging them to move forward via those portals into culture);
  • more artistic-ministry efforts.

All these areas are generally initiated NOT by artists but by artist-advocates who are NOT artists, or clergy and Christian ministry staff (like yourself) who are functionally advocates for those for the above-mentioned needs.  Sl I’m praying for you to play into that role — whether you are directly playing the guitar or writing songs or sitting in the broadcast chair.