Featured in Christian Musician, January 2002www.ChristianMusician.com
Formula for a good discussion? Take 120 church worship leaders and put them in a tent with three nationally known worship leader/recording artists and let the audience ask anything they want to know. We start off with each panelist introducing themselves to the crowd.
Jami: I’m from Oklahoma and I’ve been leading worship for eight years at camps, conferences, women’s retreats, kids, college and singles stuff too. I love it. It’s an honor and privilege every time. I’ve been learning a lot about worship and still have tons more to learn.
Lamont: I’m originally from British Columbia, Canada. I now live in New Haven, CT. I’m a missionary and worship leader. This combination breathes into the kind of songs I end up writing. I like to think these songs are worship songs that the un-churched can also sing along with. I’m part of a ministry community up in New Haven where we minister to the Yale University students. We (as the band Ten Shekel Shirt) do a lot of traveling and that sort of thing as well.
Lincoln: I live in northern California, in the Sacramento area. I’m a worship leader. I work part time, like hardly-ever-there part time for my church. I help them oversee the worship ministry and do technical direction (just kind of all-around friend to everybody). I started a youth group in Modesto, CA about six years ago. I started leading worship and didn’t have a clue what I was doing. It was horrible, not that it’s great now, but it’s gotten better. I just knew that was what God was calling me to do. Every fiber of my being said, “do this” … so I did it.
Q: How can I help the youth ministry, teaching them to become youth leaders and youth worship leaders for a youth service?
Lincoln: For me, it was the worship leader at our church who took the time and cared enough to encourage me. In fact, he led the services with me for the first couple of months, because I was too afraid even to talk to the kids. So I would sing the fast songs and he would talk, then he would sing the slow songs. I got to where I could sing the slow songs too, which was a big deal. I remember one week I came in and said, “I think I’m ready to say something this week,” because I felt like God had shown me something. He said, “all right.”
So if you are a worship leader, take the time to take younger worship leaders along side of you. Sometimes it’s a little bit of a sacrifice in quality but you know if somebody had shut me down when the quality wasn’t that good, I wouldn’t be doing this. You really have to follow God’s leading in trying to help somebody identify their calling and all those things. It can be kind of a complex issue. But on a case-by-case basis, just try to encourage the younger people by spending time with them. Really look at their heart and intentions, and also watch to see if the kids are being blessed in the youth group.
Jami: I think too, you help educate them and yourselves on “what is worship?” Is it necessarily a style? Because I’ll run across students who will say “Jami, why can’t our church worship be like it is at camp?” I’ll answer that with something like, “I think worship starts here in our hearts. If you have trouble in your church worshipping with the hymns, there is a heart problem, not so much a style problem”.
There are all these different kinds of styles, but if you’re in love with Jesus, then you’re going to worship in the silence. You don’t need your favorite band and your favorite style. It’s good for those students to be able to stand in a traditional worship service and show that they can worship with hymns. Just like we want the older generation to learn how to worship this certain way, it’s also important that we’re able to worship that way.
Worship is not about style. I hope we’re not teaching our younger generation that it’s style, because we’re missing the whole point if we are. So we can help educate them to be respectful of all styles, because it’s not about “style.”
Lamont: Sometimes it’s good to bring in an outside speaker, to educate some of the adults as well as the youth in that kind of thinking. Sometimes it’s hard for them to understand that there can be more than one form or style of worship. The leaders also just need to be examples of respect for different kinds of music, and ultimately, for honoring God in different ways. I’m in a worship band and we make a lot of noise (laughs).
One of my favorite kinds of worship these days is liturgy. I like to have an Episcopalian type communion once in a while and just sit in silence. For me, it’s almost been too noisy at times, so it’s like, “Lets mellow out a little bit and take some meditation and reflection time.” There is no right form or style, it’s not about that, it’s about a heart thing.
Q: In our church we have worship “teams.” I’d like to know more about how you practice and how you get your team ready for worship?
Lincoln: I’m a real detail oriented person. One thing I hate to do on Sunday morning before service is to practice. If we’re going to sound check, then let’s sound check, but not practice. When we come to rehearsal I like to rehearse and not learn songs.
My theory is, the way you learn a song is the way you revert back to playing the song. So if I learn a song off a chart, I tend to need a chart to play the song. If I learn a song in my heart, then that’s all I need to play the song. I get the music in my spirit over the course of the week. You have to have a balance of not giving people too much new material to learn. You need to be looking at your set list and rotating you music to where people don’t get confused. What I’ve seen work really effectively is getting a good working group of songs and then working in a new song. I try not to do more than one a week, because people can get sensory overload.
It’s really easy to get into rehearsal and waste tons of time. It can be frustrating when you get in on Sunday morning (I don’t know how many of you feel this way) and you rehearse up until you’re supposed to start leading worship. I believe it’s wrong when people from your congregation are walking in and your still fiddling through stuff rather than knowing the songs on Sunday. The best use of a Sunday morning is to take the time to work out the sound stuff and make sure everybody is happy. Then have thirty minutes to relax, have a drink of water and pray with each other. Have time to hang out and then go out clear minded and lead worship.
The other thing I’m a big advocate of is doing sectional type band practice. If you have a choir, have somebody take and lead the choir for the first part of the rehearsal. If you have a praise team that’s separate from them, have somebody take that section and rehearse the songs themselves. The rhythm section rehearses on their own etc. Before this plan of action we would end up spending over an hour and a half on one choir song each week for a five- minute offering. Then all we had left was thirty minutes to spend on the forty minutes of worship we had planned.
Once we realized that this was imbalanced in our priorities, we took the time to separate the choir and the band the first hour. Then when we come together in the second hour, it was beautiful. So organization (just really thinking through the process), and not just having it be crisis management week-in and week-out is really helpful.
Q: How do you handle the situation where you have to choose between a talented musician with a not-so-into-it heart and a not-so talented one with a great heart?
Jami: From my personal experience of being with the guys on the road with me regarding talent-verses-heart, I would always choose heart over talent. Always!
As band mates we live together, eat together. We breathe the same air together. We spend twenty-three hours a day trying to get to the place where we lead worship for thirty-five to forty minutes. I want to be around somebody who is going to challenge me spiritually, edify me, encourage me and also hold me accountable. Because living for God is supposed to be our first priority, not music. That’s supposed to be an overflow of our love for God. What we’re experiencing with God day-in and day-out is more important than music. I want to be around that guy who’s going to help me grow up and not be a baby. That’s what I choose, and consequently, I feel like God has really blessed that.
Q: What do you do to prepare yourself week-in and week-out for worship? What do you encourage the band members to do to be prepared for worship?
Lamont: Getting together, eating together and praying together, just those kinds of things, doing what I call “naturally supernatural things.” Sometimes supernatural doesn’t have to be big, weird and spooky. Sometimes supernatural can be very natural and real. Just doing things like that together is actually great for building a good vibe, so to speak, in a band. People ask me, “How much do you prepare to do your worship?” I answer that question with, “I never stop preparing, This is my life, My life revolves around God; it’s about worship.” It’s an endless preparing, so-to-speak.
One thing that’s under-rated is the ability to be discerning. There are a lot of musicians that can play great chops or sing these cool scales and that kind of thing, but a Hebrew scholar told me that the word “skill” basically could be interpreted as the ability to play discerningly. Sometimes being able to capture the moment in a room is a great gift, talent, whatever you want to call it. I think that comes with being prepared in your heart and your spirit throughout the week. Be sensitive to what the Spirit of God wants to say.
I was just thinking about this festival a couple of days ago, My friend so and so has an opinion about this festival and so and so and I have an opinion about this Festival. I bet you God has an opinion about this festival. Do you think the Creator, Maker of all things actually cares about this festival? Do you think He cares about you guys and all the people here? I think He does. And a good musician will be able to, in a sense, capture the heart and the moment of what God wants to do in a place and with the people.
Jami: I had a guy tell me one time (I never forgot it because it was so humbling), as far as preparing for worship, he asked me, “Hey Jami, how is your private worship?” I remember going, ” uh-oh, I haven’t done that in a while. He just looked at me, deep into my eyes and said, “Look, your never going to take a group of people publicly where you haven’t been privately.” That statement rocked me!
I used to sit in this one little room in my house all the time and play love songs just for God’s ears. I’d write in my journal just to Him. Well, I got just so busy, and I stopped doing that. It’s just a good reminder to all of us that we can’t forsake that private worship that we’re suppose to be doing all the time. It’s a cool thought to think that if all week long we would be private worshipers, whether in our car or whatever, for if we’re constantly being private worshipers and we come together corporately on Sunday morning. How amazing that would be?
