“I myself will search for my sheep and look after them. As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep.”
Ezekiel 34:11-12 (NIV)
A worship leader joined TCC last fall and answered the question about her biggest ministry challenge with this line:
“Feeling like I’m sometimes left out of the loop of what’s happening and finding out last minute because I’m not within the paid staff circle of communication but still heavily involved.”
Another one said it shorter:
“Communication with leadership.”
If you read those quotes and felt a small pull in your chest, this devotional is for you.
I want to say something this week that might be hard to hear. I’m going to say it gently.
The senior pastor you keep hoping will pastor you is not going to.
That is not a statement about him personally. He may be a good man. He may love Jesus. He may even love you. He just is not equipped to pastor the specific weight of the work you carry. The job he was trained for and the job you are doing have very little overlap in the rhythm department. He does not know what your Wednesday night looks like at 9:47 p.m. when you’re still finalizing the closing song. He does not know what your Saturday rehearsal does to your nervous system. He does not know why your Monday is a crash day. He thinks Monday is your day off because nobody told him your job has a different relationship to Sunday than his does.
And here is the deeper layer. He cannot know all of this until you tell him. And you have probably been quietly hoping he would figure it out so you wouldn’t have to tell him. And the years have rolled on and he hasn’t figured it out and you are still carrying the weight and now you are tired and a little resentful.
I have lived in that hope. So has every worship leader I have sat with long enough to ask.
The work is to let that hope go.
What Ezekiel is doing in 34
Ezekiel 34 is not a chapter you reach for on a Tuesday morning. It is dense. It is angry. God is speaking through the prophet against the shepherds of Israel, the religious leadership who were supposed to care for the people and instead used them for their own benefit.
The whole chapter is worth reading. I want to point you to verses 11 and 12 specifically.
“For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them. As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep.”
I myself. The pronoun matters. God is naming the failure of the existing shepherds and saying I will do this myself. He does not promise to fix the shepherds. He does not promise to make the senior pastor into a pastor for the worship leader. He says he himself will look for the scattered ones.
The scattered ones in worship leadership are real. We are in a particular kind of scattered. We are inside the church building and inside the staff meeting and inside the budget conversations, and we are also alone in a way the rest of the staff is not. The Ezekiel 34 promise lands here in a way it does not land for everyone in the building. I myself will look after you.
That is the first move.
The reframe you have been waiting for
If God himself is going to pastor you, and the senior pastor is not, then a few things have to change about how you carry the work.
First, you stop waiting on the senior pastor to ask the right question. He probably is not going to. Not because he is bad. Because the right question is, how is your soul this week, and the senior pastor is paid to ask, how is the team this week, and do we have everything ready for Sunday. The two questions are not the same. He is doing his job when he asks his question. You can stop expecting it to become the other one.
Second, you stop hoping that the church staff structure will produce pastoring for you. The staff structure is built to produce a Sunday. It is good at that. It is not built to produce pastoring for the worship leader. That is not what staff structures are for. The pastoring you need has to come from somewhere else. It has to come from peers. It has to come from God himself. It has to come from a mentor outside your own building. The staff structure cannot do it.
Third, you stop being quietly angry that the thing has not happened. The anger has been protecting you. It has been saying, I am justified in feeling unsupported. You are justified. The anger is honest. And the anger is not going to bring you the pastoring. The anger can rest now. You can lay it down. The pastoring is coming from elsewhere.
Where it actually comes from
If God himself is the one who will look after you, the practical question is, how does that pastoring actually arrive?
It arrives through scripture you read for yourself. Not for the set list. For yourself. Not in five-minute bursts. In 20-minute slow reads that let the passage actually find you.
It arrives through peer relationships you have to build on purpose. The senior pastor is not going to introduce you to them. You have to do it. The peer at another worship-leading church across town. The peer at the worship-leading church across the country who you met at a conference and never followed up with. The peer in the community you have not joined yet because it felt like an extra ask on top of everything else.
It arrives through a mentor you find on purpose. Someone five to fifteen years ahead of you. Someone who knows the specific weight of the work. Someone whose calendar you can be on, once a month, for an hour.
It arrives through a spouse you tell the truth to, if you are married. Not the curated truth. The whole truth. Including the parts where you are tired and angry and underpaid and sometimes hoping the senior pastor will figure it out.
It arrives through small communities of worship leaders who agree to read scripture together, talk about their actual lives, and pray for each other. Not networking. Pastoring.
It arrives through God himself in the silence of a Tuesday morning when you sit with him for 20 minutes with no agenda. That one is the most important. The other channels carry the water. This is the well.
What this means for The Church Collective
I want to name something honestly. The Church Collective exists in part because of this Ezekiel 34 reality.
The senior-pastor pastoring gap for worship leaders is structural. It is not getting fixed at the denominational level. It is not getting fixed in seminary training. It is not getting fixed in the next generation of church planters. The gap has been here for thirty years and it is going to be here for thirty more.
What can happen is peer-built pastoring. Worship leaders walking with worship leaders. Small enough to know names. Honest enough to say the hard thing. Cadenced enough to actually become a rhythm.
That is what TCC is built to be. The Monday live is part of that. The weekly devotional is part of that. The community is part of that.
And the donor tier, which is fifty dollars a month, exists for the same reason. Your fifty dollars sponsors another worship leader’s full access. So someone who cannot afford it gets pastored. And you get the direct group training as a thank-you. The math is buy-one-give-one. The reason that math matters is because the pastoring has to spread or the gap stays a gap.
I am not selling you the donor tier this week. I am naming what the work actually is. Pastoring spreads when peers carry it together. The mechanism does not have to be TCC. It has to be something. The structural gap will not close on its own.
A question for the week
The question this week is two parts.
Part one. Where have you been waiting for a person in your church staff to become the pastor you need, and how long have you been waiting?
Part two. If God himself is going to do the pastoring, and it comes through scripture, peers, a mentor, your spouse, a small community, and silence with him on a Tuesday morning, which of those channels is the most empty right now, and what is the smallest thing you can do this week to start filling it?
The pastor you keep hoping for is not the one you need.
The one you need has been there the whole time, scattering himself into a hundred small channels that don’t look like a senior pastor’s office.
I myself will search for my sheep.
Let yourself be found.
Ryan
Going deeper: the data behind this gap, written for your pastor to read, is Your Worship Leader Is in the 3.4%.
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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