worship team

Getting the Most out of Rehearsals

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Many churches ask for some practical ideas for their worship team rehearsals. Often, these practice sessions become mundane and boring. I don’t necessarily have the final word on how to handle these sessions, but here are a few practical tips.

One of the major questions asked is, “How often should we get together as a team?” There are no right and wrong answers to this question, since there are so many variables involved. It must be determined by your situation. But once-a-week practice works best in most cases. It is difficult to work together musically in a given service if you are not very familiar with one another’s abilities and musical styles. The ability to “flow” together as a team is made possible largely by working together often. Without this regular interaction it will be difficult, at best, to be “tight” musically.

The length of the practice session should also be determined by your particular circumstances. A team of two musicians will probably not require as much time for rehearsal as a thirty-piece orchestra. Remember, then, that as your team grows, your practices may need to be longer. Don’t lock yourself into a certain practice length now and, if and when you change it, end up with disgruntled musicians. Let them know that there may come a time when your preparation sessions may have to change.

Another common question is, “What should we do at our rehearsals?” On the surface, the answer would seem obvious. However, by looking a little further, one can turn up some hidden ideas. Several are listed below, but keep in mind that all of these do not necessarily need to be a part of every practice. They can be intermixed and used at appropriate times to accomplish the necessary agenda.

Worship. This is an often overlooked part of the practice time. It is difficult to lead in worship on Sunday mornings as a team if we never worship together at any other time. Our job is not just to provide a musical background whereby others may worship—we are to be the leaders in worship. If our times of preparation consist only of “playing music” and not actually worshiping God ourselves, we are sending the wrong message to our musicians. We are telling them that the music aspect is more important than what is coming from the heart. Spending time in worship together as a team is vital.

Prayer. This, too, is frequently left out of many practice times. We should take time to pray for one another, for the congregation, for the pastor, and for other concerns. Pray and seek God’s direction together for a particular service or series of services. All of these are important in building team unity.

As the leader, it is necessary to strike a balance in your own participation in the times of prayer. You should be an example for the others in prayer, but don’t make it your time of prayer. Don’t spend the entire time praying aloud and not allow the others to pray also. Encourage them to make their requests known to God (Phil. 4:6).

Learning New Music. Finally, we get to what everyone thinks practices are all about. Please keep in mind, though, that this is number three on the list.

When attempting to learn new songs, it is usually best to have music for all musicians. Some may be able to share, but asking twelve musicians to gather around one hand-scrawled 3″ x 5″ note card is a little too much.

Some teams prefer to have separate vocalist and instrumentalist sessions when learning new songs. This helps them learn vocal harmonies and various instrumental parts without interfering with one another. This, again, will depend upon your particular situation.

One important note on this: always try to learn a song thoroughly before using it corporately. This can save a great deal of embarrassment for everyone. At the same time, it should be understood that working on a given song for months without using it for a corporate service can be very frustrating to the worship team members.

Reviewing Old Songs. This is especially important if you add new people to your worship team. Most people simply assume that the new people know all the old music. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. It is good to have a “working list” of songs and occasionally be certain that everyone on the team is familiar with all of these.

It is also worthwhile to sometimes take an old song and do a new musical arrangement for it. This can go a long way toward bringing new life to something old.

Evaluate Previous Service(s). This can be very helpful as long as you don’t become scrupulous. Looking at what you did musically as well as considering the overall response can be beneficial for future reference. This is not so you can repeat something that worked but to evaluate why things happened as they did and what could have been done differently. This is not a time to be super-critical. Simply look at what happened for the purpose of learning. A great deal can be learned from sincere evaluation.

Introducing Special Music. These songs usually involve a bit more work than the praise and worship songs. This is, in part, because the special music is often more intricate, but also because the congregation will not be singing; they’ll only be listening. Most churches will spend more time “polishing” their special music.

These ideas are not necessarily all-inclusive. There are probably numerous other practical suggestions that you know about or are presently using. Potentially all of these can be used in one form or another.

It is important to maintain the interest and the enthusiasm of your musicians on an ongoing basis. By doing this, you’ll have a more contented and productive worship team.

Worship Leaders and Planning

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Planning is a continuous process. Scripture encourages planning, and God promises success if we will invite him to be part of the process. A retreat is an ideal time for long-range planning and a time to offer suggestions.

In the book of Proverbs we read, “A sluggard does not plow in season; so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing” (Prov. 20:4). Sluggards are tragicomical figures. Can you imagine what kind of person would fail to plow, sow, weed, and feed, yet go out in the fall, surprised at not finding a harvest?

The sluggard fails to realize that today’s decisions will determine tomorrow’s results. He or she needs to learn that planning is a key to reaping a harvest. Worship leaders also need to plan. They are looking for a harvest of people who can enter into the presence of God unhindered, to bring him pleasure, and to be a channel for his power to be manifested in all the earth.

I know congregations in which there is a steady growth in worship life and power. They are blessed with growing numbers of people committed to worshiping the Lord. Their music is filled with life. People stand in line to become part of the worship team. They are able to field two, three, or more complete worship teams. Most of all, the power of God is evident in their times of worship, so much so that there are testimonies of physical and emotional healings occurring during the worship. Such power in worship comes, in part, from the dedication and the spiritual quality of the leaders and their people. But spirituality cannot be divorced from getting a plan from God for the worship life of the congregation.

God’s Views on Planning

God more than allows us to plan, as if he were giving in to our weaknesses. With wonderful promises, he encourages us to plan. But he wants to be involved in the planning process. Our plans must be submitted to the Lord to succeed. Planning becomes carnal only if God is not invited to inspire and lead the process. But he promises that if we commit to him whatever we do, our plans will succeed (Prov. 16:3).

I have a friend who once stated proudly in his worship service, “We never publish a bulletin, and we never plan anything in advance because we want to be inspired by the Holy Ghost, and we don’t want the devil to know in advance what we’re going to do!” But that’s not really a scriptural view. For God’s inspiration can work flawlessly through the process of thinking, organizing, and planning.

The process by which Luke wrote his Gospel is a clear example of that. Luke did research as any historian would. Describing his strategy, Luke tells us he “carefully investigated” the stories about Jesus and wrote them down in an orderly fashion so Theophilus might be assured in his faith (Luke 1:1–4). Though Luke studied, researched, and in an orderly fashion recorded his findings, we receive his Gospel as “God-breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16), written by the Holy Spirit himself. Therefore, inspiration is not excluded by, or even limited by, the ordinary use of human intellect and planning.

Prosperity. When we plan, we open one of God’s channels to prosper us: “The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty” (Prov. 21:5). This power-packed promise contains three main concepts: First, there must be plans. Second, there must be diligence. Third, our plans and diligence must help us avoid hasty “crisis management.”

Unity from Planning. Planning has an amazing ability to unite people. This is especially true if they are allowed to contribute substantially to the process. Unless insensitive parents or other adults quash it, children have an unquenchable desire to do. “Let me, Mommy!” is the cry of just about any child I have ever known.

A worship team that lets its members have a vital share of the planning is responding to that God-ordained drive inside of people to create! It’s unfortunate that in most churches the real doers have to live by the creed, “It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.” Only the bold and perhaps slightly rebellious will be able to develop their potential. The submissive may have trouble flowering to their maximum under a rigid system.

Maximizing Group Gifts through Planning. Planning is essential to the stewardship of our gifts. For instance, let’s suppose that your worship team is asked to minister at a large outdoor rally. If you plan ahead far enough, you will discover that your bass player has connections with the top supplier of sound systems in your five-state area. You further discover that if he has six weeks or more notice, he is able to arrange for a manufacturer’s demo of its top-of-the-line product free of charge. You get $25,000 worth of public-address equipment for a weekend, and it doesn’t cost you a cent! It takes planning ahead to benefit like that.

Some Basics about Planning

The exciting business of planning with the Holy Spirit is a big subject. To date, the best single resource I have seen to guide you through the process, short of retaining a professional consultant, is a book by Dr. R. Henry Migliore, titled Strategic Planning for Ministry and Church Growth (Tulsa: Honor Books, 1988).

Retreating Is Ideal. My favorite format to initiate planning is a retreat lasting at least a weekend, but preferably a whole week. The format should alternate between structured meetings during which the group works through a formal planning model (such as the one presented by Dr. Migliore) and relaxed times that give attendees the opportunity for informal interchange, walks, prayer, meditation, and so on.

What should be involved? Your long-range plans for worship can include matters such as these:

1. Gradual upgrading of the sound system.
2. Upgrading of musical instruments.
3. Securing permission to perform copyrighted pieces.
4. Publishing a recording of your group.
5. Establishing and increasing funding for the purchase of music.
6. Plans to attend worship seminars and symposia.
7. Increasing congregational awareness of the importance of worship through special sermons, nights of worship, etc.
8. Increasing interest in worship leading as a ministry.
9. Involving young people more in worship and worship leading.

This list could go on almost indefinitely. What is included on such a list will depend greatly on your mission statement.

Involve Everyone. Everyone who is involved in the worship life of the church—whether in a leadership role or as a selected representative of the congregation—ought to take part to some degree in the worship planning retreat. In addition, questionnaires can be distributed to the remainder of the congregation ahead of time, seeking responses about the worship life of the church.

Preparation for Planning

A good planning retreat requires much preparation. You must have attractive facilities, good food, and restful lodging. Even more, there must be spiritual preparation and practical homework.

Prayer, fasting, studying worship, and attending worship seminars and conferences are all-important preparations for the retreat. If you are filled with the Word of God and godly advice about worship, your retreat will be very fruitful. Practical groundwork would include arranging for substitute worship leaders on the home front, as well as advertising the retreat to the congregation. It’s important to let everyone know what you are doing, what your goals are, and why you are doing it. It would be very helpful if the pastor would support the idea of a worship leaders’ retreat from the pulpit, explaining to people how such planning will benefit the whole congregation and the work of God in your community.

The Product of Planning. No planning program is complete until there is a written organizational plan encompassing all the items that are part of your planning model. I am convinced that writing a coherent statement about anything I am wanting to do helps me understand my task far better. Not only that, the written plan will help to keep you from “management by platitudes,” in which vague statements of an undefined hope replace real goals.

Planning Is a Continuous Process. Part of your commitment as you begin planning is to decide that you will do planning continuously. This is necessary, first, because your written plan must be your working document—your written orders. Just as a contractor continually refers to blueprints, so you must continually check your progress against your written goals to see if you are on target.

Unlike those of the contractor, however, your plans will continually change. You are not building with static materials on the unmoving ground. Your materials and your ground are continually changing. If your plans are not adaptable to changing situations, they will be like Saul’s armor to young David: Their weight will keep you from the battle.

And, unlike the contractor, you can never say your building is finished. So, if you are working with a seven-year plan, you can drop year one when it has ended, but you will have to add a new year seven. Every week you and your team ought to devote some prayerful time to check your progress against your plans. Every year, at least, you ought to update your long-range planning.

Finally, plans dealing with people must involve educated guesses. Most of us vastly overestimate what we can accomplish in the short term (although we tend to underestimate what we can do in the long haul). Consequently, you probably will need to adjust your plans to a less ambitious pace.

Planning for Worship Services

The concept of planning can be applied not only to overall goals for the worship team but for the worship services as well. Each worship service can be a piece of the master plan. If your congregation is involved in strategic long-range planning, you have tremendous resources for planning your worship services, sermons included. For instance, one of the issues a church considers in planning is its strengths and weaknesses. Similarly, in your services, you can encourage the strengths and prophesy solutions to the weaknesses!

Planning and Spontaneity. Planning does not exclude spontaneity. As with your longer-range planning, so in the services, you must retain flexibility. The Holy Spirit may not reveal all his plans to you because he wants to be able to use someone else in the congregation in a significant way. For example, I have ministered on several occasions with a worship team in which we sensed it was God’s will to have a healing service; but we had no clue as to how the service would be conducted. But as we obeyed as much as we knew, the Lord gave his Word to someone in the congregation, revealing what else was to be done. And in every case, the service was a wonderful experience of his manifest presence.

Who Should Be Involved? As with large-scale planning, so planning the Sunday morning and other services needs to be open to all the people in the congregation. Ideally, they should be encouraged to call you or even to attend the planning session if they feel they have an insight from the Lord for the service. Of course, the pastor and other church leaders could make extremely valuable additions to the service planning.

Tools for Planning. How do you plan a worship service? Here is a simple outline that I have found to be effective:

1. Pray at your planning meeting.
2. Ask the preacher or teacher to tell the group what word he believes the Lord has given him.
3. Ask the others present to share any Scriptures, songs, hymns, prayers, insights, or perceptions they may have had that they feel relate to the service you are planning. If they have been going through some difficulty, encourage them to share that. Often what we experience is common to many others in the body.
4. Arrange the parts of the service for an orderly flow. For instance, if the Word deals with a need for deep repentance, starting the service with songs of rejoicing would be very odd. Such a sermon ought to pave the way for rejoicing, not the reverse.
5. In that regard, I also believe that every service ought to end on a note of victory unless the people remain unrepentant.

Plan to Plan. There is a great potential for blessing hidden in faithful, prayerful planning. You don’t have to be an expert planner to start. As I said to a perfectionist friend of mine once, “I like my way of doing things better than your way of not doing things.” Ask the Lord to help you, purchase a good book, attend a seminar on the subject, and start!

Building a United Worship Team

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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.