“Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.”
Galatians 1:10 (NIV)
I sat in a green room a few years ago next to a worship pastor I had never met. Bigger church. Bigger budget. The kind of guy whose Instagram you don’t follow on purpose, because something about the camera angles makes you feel smaller.
He was tired. You could see it on his face, but you could also hear it in the way he was describing what his week looked like. Three services Sunday. Two services Saturday. Vocal pre-record Friday. Two corporate writing days a month on top of the band rehearsal cadence. He had a Pro Tools session open on his laptop while we talked. The clock on it said 11:47 p.m. local time, the night before.
I asked him what his church was excellent at.
He laughed in a way that wasn’t a laugh, and he said, production.
Then he said something I have not forgotten.
“I think we built a thing that nobody can stop now. Including me.”
The lie that lives one floor above the truth
There is a small truth, and there is a bigger lie that lives one floor above it.
The small truth is that doing the work well matters. The room feels it. The team feels it. The Lord is honored by craft. You don’t have to apologize for caring about your in-ear mix or your transitions or how you phrase the chorus.
The bigger lie is the one I caught myself believing for nearly a decade. The lie says, if I am excellent, the worship will work. The lie says, the issue with our Sundays is a craft problem. The lie says, if I just get the band tighter, the click cleaner, the production sharper, the lights more responsive, then the room will encounter God.
Paul writes Galatians as a hot letter. He is angry. He has watched the church start drifting toward performance and human approval, and he names it without flinching.
Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God?
It’s the question every worship leader has to answer eventually, even if you never speak the answer out loud. Because the answer changes what your Tuesday morning looks like. The answer changes what you do with feedback. The answer changes whether you go into Sunday from a tank that has something in it, or whether you go in performing, hoping nobody notices.
Excellence as the goal will turn your Sunday into a product. Quietly. Slowly. The way water erodes stone. You won’t see it happen. You’ll just wake up one Wednesday morning, four years in, and realize the thing you used to love about leading worship is the thing you now resent about it.
What I keep hearing from the room
When the 594 worship leaders who joined TCC told us what their biggest challenge was, this theme showed up in a way I didn’t expect. The exact words:
“Battling all the wrong motivations and working (imperfectly) to pursue Christ above all else. Pressure to compare myself with others, earn acceptance through performance-based metrics.”
“Pursuit of comparison, perfectionism, and fear of never being good enough.”
“Not feeling like I’m good enough.”
“The fear of not doing a good enough job.”
Read those again. The word “good enough” shows up four times. The word “comparison” shows up twice. “Performance-based metrics.” That is not the vocabulary of someone who lost track of God. That is the vocabulary of someone who got very good at hitting a target that was never the right target.
And here is the thing about being very good at hitting the wrong target. It feels like winning. Until it doesn’t.
What the right target actually is
Reverence is the right target. Not excellence.
Excellence is something the team and the room can produce. Reverence is something only you can carry into the room before the doors open. The room can feel the difference, even if no one in it could tell you what they’re feeling. They can tell when the person on stage has spent the week with God. They can tell when the person on stage has spent the week tightening transitions.
Excellence is downstream of reverence. It works in that direction. Reverence is not downstream of excellence. The other direction does not work.
You cannot rehearse your way into reverence. You can only walk into reverence in your own life with God, and then carry it into the room.
This is why the question this week is not, how do I tighten the team. The question is, what does my Tuesday morning actually look like?
If your Tuesday morning is gain-staging and chord chart edits, you are leading from craft. There’s nothing wrong with that. The team needs it. But it is not the engine.
If your Tuesday morning is fifteen minutes in Psalm 27, and a walk where you don’t listen to a podcast, and a phone call to the one peer who knows what your last six months actually looked like, you are building the engine.
What you do with the green-room guy
I keep thinking about that pastor. The one in the green room with the production session open at midnight.
I don’t think he was a bad leader. I think he had built a thing he did not know how to dismantle. The system kept demanding more excellence. The metrics rewarded the production. The senior pastor never asked about his Tuesday morning. So Tuesday morning got allocated to the only thing the system measured.
You are probably not that pastor. Most of the people reading this lead a team that does not have a Pro Tools session and a vocal pre-record. Your scale is different. But the same engine is running. It runs at every scale.
The question for the week is the same one Paul asked the Galatians.
Am I trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God?
Not as a guilt trip. As a diagnostic.
Where in your last week were you working toward an audience of people? Where were you working toward an audience of One?
The room will eventually feel what you spent your week working toward. You can’t fake it. You can only redirect what your Tuesday morning is for.
Reverence the platform cannot fake.
Ryan
Going deeper: the personal version of this same confession is I Confused My Competence for Faithfulness.
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.
The Team You Inherited Is the Team You Lead