Worship team vs Bar team.
Maybe I approach things with too much thought. Maybe I constantly compare what the world does and how the church does things. Almost every time I go out to a “secular” concert or even the little hole in the wall bar that has awesome talent perform and have a really awesome time and talk about it and plan on going back and then I ask myself, what is it that they are doing that the church or worship teams aren’t?
Recently my wife and I were at a small, really small bar to watch this really tight funk/rock band. We were about 10 feet from the stage with the volume at full. The band was so good, the sound was so perfect that the volume did not seem to be an issue. The singer talked to the audience, joked, interrupted his musicians asking them to stop or slow down while he talked to his audience, engaging them, taking them on the journey he wanted them to take. Almost everybody was on that journey.
We had an awesome time and on the way back, I couldn’t help but think of what an awesome time everybody had and what if that had been a worship band, what if that whole setting was a worship setting. Why aren’t worship teams entertaining? Engaging?
You may say that the job of the worship leader is NOT to entertain. While yes, that is not the goal but the keyword in worship leader is “leader”. To lead them to a place of worship, whether you entertain them or bore them to that place of worship is a choice.
My worship leader explained it to me this way - (I paraphrase) “We are on a stage, we are the focus, but, as we lead the people into worship, we begin to go lower and lower and they see God, and we disappear”
So, the key is to get the audience to focus on the worship team. To engage them, to almost be the pied piper, to beckon them to a place of worship.
If you haven’t been to bars or any place that has good secular bands playing, you should. They too take their audience on a journey, they do a better job (generally) of engaging and leading.
Worship team, time to raise the bar.
I sometimes wonder, if we brought a band that played out every night in bars, to the church on Sunday, will we have anything that they would talk about? Will they have anything to learn from us?
Here is another interesting writing, somewhat related to this topic and definitely recommended as food for thought. What you get out of the article and what TWJ believes might not be the same.