Encouragement For Worship Leaders

I had coffee this summer with a new friend who leads worship at another church in town. We had lots to talk about and our conversation quickly turned to our own worship teams – people who are incredibly committed, love the Lord, love to serve the church and overall a group of people who just have a ton of fun together.

We started talking about finding a way that we could gather worship ministry volunteers from churches all over our town as an opportunity to encourage them and to provide them with a way of meeting one another. If you are involved in worship at a smaller church you know that it can be frustrating to come up against an issue and feel like you’ve got nobody to turn to. For many churches in our town, the same people are planning and leading worship services every week and there really isn’t a way for these people who are all passionate about the same kinds of things to get connected.

So we decided to do something about that.

To give you a bit of a picture, I live in a town of about 35,000 people with maybe 50,000 people in our region. We are pretty rural, lots of commuters. Most of the churches in/around our town would normally have between 100-250 people attending on a Sunday morning and ours is the only one with a worship pastor/director on staff.

This past Saturday we hosted a breakfast at our church and invited worship team volunteers from any church in our town to come. We ended up having close to 40 people attend from 6 or 7 churches – definitely not every volunteer from every represented but that wasn’t the goal for this first one.

We started at 8:00, welcomed people with Starbucks and a chance to just mingle and talk. Some women from our church put together an incredible (no joke – it was incredible!) breakfast for us to enjoy. I encouraged people to sit with people from different churches at their table. We wanted to mix up the groups a little bit.

After some time to talk and eat, we spent some time working through a few questions we had prepared. We gave tables a few minutes to talk about the question around the table and then asked them to share answers with the other groups. A few examples of the questions we talked through -

• How do you learn new songs as a team? How do you teach new songs to your congregation?
• How do you involve and encourage multiple generations when you lead worship?
• Besides music, what are some other elements you include in the worship portion of your services?