First, a funny story that shows how church music has evolved over the years. My worship pastor is out of town this weekend and I am filling in for him. I told my mother that I was “leading worship” at three different services this Sunday and so she started telling everyone that I was preaching. It’s a good thing for everyone that she misunderstood what I meant by “leading worship.”
Category: <span>Leading Worship</span>
This post is part of a series on the five things I need to remind myself of every morning. Click here to read the rest of the series.
As a lifelong performer, I can share a ton of stories about times when I stepped out to perform and things went very wrong. There was the time in high school where I was singing a solo on “Who Wrote the Book of Love” and forgot the lyrics (a very common issue for me.) I started trying to make them up and keep singing but if you know the song, you know that the lyrics rhyme. My lyrics most certainly did not rhyme or even make a lot of sense!
With the ever-increasing emphasis in mainstream churches on “worship” (put in quotations because here I am using that word specifically to refer to the music portion of a church service, especially in churches that have a “worship time” in their services somewhat delineated from the preaching of a sermon), advice abounds on how to improve that aspect of the service. As a sometimes worship leader, it is certainly a goal that those in the congregation would be engaged in and get some benefit from the music I’m leading and this portion of the service. Many worship leaders (myself included) get frustrated from time to time with the feeling that people aren’t as engaged as we feel they should be and might even feel discouraged thinking it is their fault that every single person isn’t singing and raising their hands in all-out worship. So we look for answers on how we can improve, thinking that if we as worship leaders just do the right things, we can lead a congregation that worships in this way.
This past Sunday I was blessed to be able to lead two songs during morning worship. One of them is one of my favorite all-time songs and has been a special song for our church over the last couple of years. This arrangement of “Redeemed” by Big Daddy Weave includes the choir and is just a great version of a powerful song. The other song I led was Chris Tomlin’s song titled “At the Cross (Love Ran Red.)” I love how this song’s lyrics take you right to the foot of the cross.