Excellence starts with godly self-esteem, which worship leaders need to instill in their team members by helping them to understand who they are in Christ. Excellence is not something we arrive at, but something we continually pursue; it is a state of “being” more than a state of “doing.”
Excellence has become a management buzzword. It may soon find itself on the list of “wonderful words to be used for management by clichés.” Nowadays many people are climbing aboard the excellence bandwagon. But what does it really mean to pursue excellence? As worship leaders, can we define excellence so it is more than a noble-sounding sentiment? How can the worship leader develop a team that pursues excellence?
God Inside: Wellspring of Excellence. For the Christian, pursuing excellence is the inescapable consequence of his or her fellowship with the Christ who does “everything well” (Mark 7:37). This is so because everything we need for life and godliness has already been given us in Christ Jesus (2 Pet. 1:3), and we can access what has been given us by believing his “very great and precious promises” (2 Pet. 1:4). As a worship leader, therefore, your approach to excellence begins with creating grace-based, faith-energized people, for they always tend toward excellence.
Start Building a Godly Self-Esteem. As worship leader, your role will be to teach your team who they are in Christ. For if they have an unbiblical self-image, they will be hurt in at least five ways:
1. They will tend to ignore God’s inspiration. Suffering from low self-esteem, they will think that any thought they have surely can’t be worth much. You can imagine how that can rob a worship team of God’s gifts.
2. They will tend to have a master-slave relationship with God rather than one of fellowship, love, and trust. They will be paralyzed by the fear of “doing something in the flesh,” and won’t budge unless God confirms their proposed action with supernatural events. They will fear innovation, although innovation is a sign of life.
3. They may suffer from a damaged internal guidance mechanism that torpedoes the things they do attempt. Somehow they will manage to inject a fatal flaw into their work.
4. People with low self-esteem often have difficulty receiving criticism or even suggestions from their leaders or peers. This is a serious leadership problem all over the world and is the silent killer of many a church and ministry.
5. Finally, people with low self-esteem tend to think they are failures if there is something they don’t know. Therefore, they have difficulty in receiving expert help, too. They will stay away from training sessions, will resist attending conferences, and may not be willing to receive even their leader’s correction.
Go for the Roots. When someone doesn’t know who he or she is in Christ, he or she will produce bad fruit, setting “aside the grace of God” (Gal. 2:21). To start flailing away at the bad fruit may, in fact, create more bad fruit. If we don’t deal with the roots, we will eventually cut our team off from Christ, for Paul also says, “Encourage one another and build each other up” (1 Thess. 5:11), and he proclaims a spiritual unity that grows out of God-given endurance and encouragement (Rom. 15:5).
The Foolishness of Preaching. Often I am asked, “Then, how can you deal with the consequences of a wrong self-understanding?” I can give no better answer than what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 1:21: “For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.” Every healthy Christian group includes nurture as part of its dynamic. I would encourage you to teach on the theme of who we really are according to the Word.
Spiritual Identity. Your team members must know who they are before they can exercise their gifts. Nebuchadnezzar was the mightiest king of his day, but when God punished him, he forgot who he was and acted like a cow, not a king (Dan. 4:25–33). He was totally ineffective in his leadership role. Similarly, when Christians do not know who they are, the results may be bovine.
Excellence Is a Pursuit, Not an Achievement. In the pursuit of excellence, be careful not to substitute perfectionism. Perfectionists set absolute and usually quite arbitrary standards by which to judge themselves and others. Their standards may be so high that the result is a paralyzing inactivity. Because they dread failure, perfectionists often become expert procrastinators and blame-shifters.
On the other hand, those who are content to pursue excellence are unafraid to scale the heights. For them the chief issue is improvement. The perfectionists’ standards are static. But those who pursue excellence impose no limits on their performance, and eventually will best the standards of the perfectionist. The gospel is clearly an invitation to pursue excellence. Character, as well as the gifts of the Spirit, are presented in terms of practice and improvement (1 Cor. 14:12; Phil. 3:14; 1 Tim. 4:15). One can talk about improvement only when something is imperfect. Those who pursue excellence are not undone by making mistakes.
The Pursuit of Excellence
Confrontation for the Grace-Based. Building excellence, then, begins with establishing people in grace, helping them achieve a biblical self-image, and unshackling them from the fear of failure. But it doesn’t end there. Problems will still need to be confronted; however, our attitude as leaders must reflect the grace-based approach. Otherwise, we will revert to the old law system in which rules, reproaches, and shame are used to keep people in line.
The new covenant perspective sees confrontations as dealing with tshe conflict between flesh and spirit—between the old sinful nature and the renewed person in Christ (see Rom. 7:7–25). Thus, biblical confrontation comes from the position of an ally, working with Christian brothers and sisters to help them stand against their human tendency to sin.
Being before Doing. God’s Word has in it the power to build us into channels of excellence. Therefore, as a leader you will want to focus on what Scripture says we are in Christ. With that as a foundation, the principles of the Law actually become promises of what God will work in us by his Spirit. Only in that context is it appropriate to discuss the parameters of excellence.
Before anything else, excellence must be spiritual. God is more interested in replicating his character in us than he is in getting us to do work for him. Joyce Meyer has said, “We are called human beings, not human doings” (Counseling Psychology: Theories and Case Studies. [Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1975]). Consider, for example, 1 Corinthians 13:1, which introduces a concept repeated several times in the chapter, each time dealing with a different issue of performance without love: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”
Even more pointed are Jesus’ words of warning: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers’ ” (Matt. 7:21–23).
Clearly, worship leaders must lead their teams into spiritual excellence. Godliness is to be preferred over musical skill if we can’t have both.
Excellence in the Word. Closely linked with spiritual excellence is a deep commitment to accuracy, completeness, and honesty with regard to the Word of God. We have already said that worship leaders function in a prophetic role and that they must therefore be equipped with Scripture.
Excellence of the Externals. Although Jesus did not espouse glitz and glitter, we can also safely say he did not found the cult of mediocrity. Outward appearance does matter. External things, such as being on time, having your instrument clean, properly grooming your hair, are all signals to the observer that you mean business.
We are not talking about style here as much as a commitment to doing things well. A three-piece suit, for example, may be completely out of place in a church filled with baby boomers. But dirty clothes and their olfactory offenses are out of place among leaders in any setting.
Artistic Excellence. I have observed an ever-growing tendency toward musical excellence among worship teams. This trend results in the development of musical skills in the congregation, which is a worthy goal. Thus, learning at the congregational level is more “caught” than “taught.”
Forbid Carnal Competitiveness. When we deal with artistic excellence, we have to be especially careful of the flesh. The Bible gives us wonderful, healthy advice on this issue: “Each one should test his own actions. Then he can take pride in himself, without comparing himself to somebody else”(Gal. 6:4). Aside from Scripture, the primary yardstick for measuring excellence is each person’s past performance.
Setting Goals for Excellence. We have now come full circle in the entries in this chapter. If excellence is to be more than a buzzword, then it requires our involvement in setting milestones for progress. That’s what leadership does. It creates and fuels vision and mobilizes people to achieve more than they dreamed they ever could. My prayer for you is that the excellence of Christ in you and in your team will find increasing manifestation daily.