“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.”
Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 (NIV)
A worship leader joined TCC last fall and answered the question about her biggest ministry challenge with one word.
Isolation.
That was the whole answer. No qualifier. No second sentence.
I’ve thought about that one-word answer a lot. Because I’m not sure I’ve ever met a worship leader who would deny it. Not the ones who have been doing this for two years. Not the ones who have been doing it for twenty. The job is structurally isolated. You stand at the front of the room and lead a thing nobody else in the building is doing. You have a senior pastor who is not equipped to pastor you. You have a team you cannot fully be honest with because you’re leading them. You have a spouse who is tired of hearing about the volunteer who keeps missing rehearsal.
And so the people who could actually walk with you in the specific weight of this work tend to live at other churches in other cities, and you don’t call them.
I want to talk this week about three calls you keep meaning to make.
Why peers stop being peers
The Ecclesiastes verse is older than the church and older than the worship industry and older than every job that’s ever existed in ministry, and it still tells the truth.
Two are better than one. If either of them falls down, one can help the other up.
The verse does not say the spouse is better. It does not say the senior pastor will help you up. It does not say your team will catch you. It says two are better than one. Two of the same. Two who are in the same labor.
That is what a peer is. Someone in the same labor. Someone whose vocabulary doesn’t need translating. Someone who knows what Saturday rehearsal actually feels like, not in the abstract, in the specific.
There was a time when you had peers like that. In college. In your first ministry job. In the band you were in before the band broke up. There were people who walked the work with you. You could call them at 11 p.m. on a Sunday and say that was a hard one and not need to explain why.
Then the years happen. The peers move to different cities. The friendship doesn’t end exactly. It just stops being the daily presence it was. You see them at conferences and you say we should grab dinner soon and you mean it, and then you go home and the calendar takes over and the soon turns into next year.
Three years later you wake up on a Tuesday morning and you realize you do not have a single person who knows what the inside of your last six months actually looked like. Your spouse knows a version of it. Your senior pastor knows a different version. Your team knows the surface. Nobody has the whole thing.
That is the isolation that one-word answer was naming.
What happens when nobody has the whole thing
Three things start to happen when you don’t have anyone who knows the whole thing.
First, you stop trusting your own read on what’s happening. Because the only person interpreting your life is you. When something feels off about your senior pastor’s response to your budget request, you don’t have anyone to check it against. You start to wonder if you’re being unreasonable. You start to second-guess yourself in ways you wouldn’t if a peer could just hear it and say no, that’s actually weird, push back.
Second, the spiritual stuff starts to leak. Because the only place to take the spiritual weight is to God, and you take it to God, but the human-level reality of the work needs more than just God. James knows this. Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The confession is the human part. The healing happens through it. You can’t replace the to-one-another with just-to-God and expect the same healing.
Third, you start to drift. The way a boat drifts when the anchor is off. You don’t notice it on day one. By day 90 the shoreline you started near is somewhere off in the distance. You can still see it. You’re not lost. But you’re not anchored.
The isolation does that. Quietly. While you’re busy serving.
The three calls
Here is the work for the week. Make three calls.
The first call is to the peer who used to know you. The one you texted on the way home from Sunday a year ago and told them about the senior pastor thing and they laughed in a way that made it okay. The one you have been meaning to call back for months. The one you keep thinking about every time you see their name in your phone.
Call them. Not text. Call them. Tell them you’re sorry you haven’t called sooner. Tell them you want to talk monthly. Ask them if they’re willing. Set the next call before you hang up.
The second call is to someone in the worship-leader space who you have wanted to know better but you haven’t asked. Maybe you met them at a conference. Maybe they’re at a sister church across town. Maybe they lead worship at the church your kid’s friend goes to. The exact one is yours to identify. But there is someone. Send them a text first. Tell them you’d like to set up a 30-minute call to learn about their world. Ask them when they’re free. Schedule the call. Then on the call, listen for 25 of the 30 minutes. Ask about their work. Tell them a little about yours. End the call by asking, can we do this again in six weeks? That’s how a peer relationship starts.
The third call is to a mentor. Someone five to fifteen years ahead of you in this work. Someone whose decades of weeks in front of a Sunday have shaped a wisdom you don’t have yet. You don’t have to know them well. You don’t even have to know them at all. You can email someone whose work has shaped you. You can ask a leader at your church to introduce you to someone they know in another city. The mentor’s job is not to fix you. The mentor’s job is to remind you that the work has been done before, by people who lasted.
Three calls. One peer reactivated. One new peer started. One mentor introduced or reintroduced.
You don’t have to make them all in one week. You have to start them this week.
What the calls are not
These calls are not therapy. They are not crisis calls. They are not the call you make when everything has fallen apart and you need someone to hold you up.
They are upstream of crisis. They are the calls that keep the crisis from being the only time you connect.
The reason the isolation gets dangerous is not the isolation itself. It’s the fact that the isolation is the default and the connection only happens in the emergency. By the time you call, you’re already in the falling-down half of the Ecclesiastes verse. Pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. Pity. That is a strong word.
You want the second half of the verse already in motion before the falling-down happens. If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. The other has to already be there. The relationship has to already be running. The peer has to already know your stuff before you fall.
So this week’s work is upstream. Make the calls now. Not when you need them. Now.
A question for the week
If you fell down this week (and I don’t mean catastrophically, I mean a Sunday that came apart, or a fight with your spouse, or a senior-pastor conversation that gutted you), who would you call?
If you can’t name a person, that is the information.
Make the three calls.
You were not built to do this alone.
Ryan
Going deeper: the piece that named this for the most people is The Loneliest Job in the Church Building.
This devotional is part of The Church Collective’s free 52-week worship team devotional series. Get the first 12 as a free PDF and a fresh devotional in your inbox every Monday morning.
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