WORSHIP LEADING DYNAMICS

In the "Stand To Reason Blog" Justin Taylor wrote about "The Art of Leading Congregational Worship"

Michael Bynum found this article and brought it by the Vineyard. Justin and James Smith say it so well.

Justin wrote: "I suspect you’ve seen this in church before: The worship band begins to play a well-known hymn. The congregation confidently joins in. Then the band creatively adds a little unexpected extra space between stanzas, and a few people get caught singing loudly through the silence. Everyone is immediately on guard, hesitant. Sometimes we recover, but as the creative liberties increase, the number of people worshiping steadily decreases. We wait quietly, listening, watching the band worship as our limited time together slips away.

The art of leading congregational worship is being lost, and I think we are all poorer for it."

He goes on to quote James K. A. Smith in his “An Open Letter to Praise Bands”:

1. "If we, the congregation, can't hear ourselves, it's not worship. Christian worship is not a concert. In a concert (a particular "form of performance"), we often expect to be overwhelmed by sound, particularly in certain styles of music. In a concert, we come to expect that weird sort of sensory deprivation that happens from sensory overload, when the pounding of the bass on our chest and the wash of music over the crowd leaves us with the rush of a certain aural vertigo. And there's nothing wrong with concerts! It's just that Christian worship is not a concert. Christian worship is a collective, communal, congregational practice--and the gathered sound and harmony of a congregation singing as one is integral to the practice of worship. It is a way of "performing" the reality that, in Christ, we are one body. But that requires that we actually be able to hear ourselves, and hear our sisters and brothers singing alongside us. When the amped sound of the praise band overwhelms congregational voices, we can't hear ourselves sing--so we lose that communal aspect of the congregation and are encouraged to effectively become "private," passive worshipers."

2. "If we, the congregation, can't sing along, it's not worship. In other forms of musical performance, musicians and bands will want to improvise and 'be creative,' offering new renditions and exhibiting their virtuosity with all sorts of different trills and pauses and improvisations on the received tune. Again, that can be a delightful aspect of a concert, but in Christian worship it just means that we, the congregation, can't sing along. And so your virtuosity gives rise to our passivity; your creativity simply encourages our silence. And while you may be worshiping with your creativity, the same creativity actually shuts down congregational song."

"Worship leaders, if you look out over the congregation and you see that we are not singing with you, something has gone wrong. Are you jamming alone up there for extended periods of time? Are you changing well-known melodies just enough to surprise us and make us hesitant to sing out, and/or adding flair that we can’t follow? Are you choosing soloistic songs with complicated melodies rather than musically simple ones designed for group singing?"

"The best thing you can do is to consider carefully the purpose of your role as you make your decisions for each service. You have the noble position of enabling all of us to draw together as one before God to express our love and honor through a powerful medium. If you can keep that goal in mind—the goal of enabling the congregation to worship—and ruthlessly shed anything, however musically tempting, that doesn't advance that goal, we will thank you."

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March 4, 2015

Worship leaders and their team members must overcome the strong desire to "encourage the body" by stopping the music and talking to the people. Rarely the Spirit does want something said. But think it through before one interrupts with speaking. Why?

Because it redirects people from connecting with God to connecting with the speaker. The people are being asked to think about what the speaker is saying. The speaker feels moved to "encourage the people" with a scripture or a few sentences of teaching or exhortation but it's a distraction.

Try this illustration: a couple has prepared for an evening together. A candlelit meal with soft music. The conversation is nice and the couple feels more connected. (This is a married couple.) They move to a more comfortable location and begin to kiss. More and more the day fades from memory. They only sense each other, cozy in this embrace of kissing. Then one partner stops and says, "Did you pay the power bill today?" The other partner comes back from being lost to the world and close to their mate and thinks... "Yes, I did pay it." That evening they never found that   intimate place again.

The same thing happens during musical worship. It's a divine romance. Don't be the one that pulls others away from Him.

- Jim Bentley