It happens on a Tuesday at 11pm. You’re scrolling. Their album just dropped. Their stage looks like a Coldplay set. Their worship pastor has a Masterclass. You close the app, look at your bedroom ceiling, and wonder what you’re even doing.
Peter seeing him, said to Jesus, “Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If I desire that he stay until I come, what is that to you? You follow me.”
John 21:21-22 (WEB)
What’s actually going on
Worship leaders compare. Almost all of them do, almost all the time.
We surveyed five hundred of you and the most common emotional word that showed up in your answers wasn’t burnout. It wasn’t conflict. It was fear. And the fear most of you named, in your own words, was this: “fear of being compared to big churches with big budgets and seemingly endless resources.”
That fear is heavy enough on its own. The problem is it doesn’t stop at fear. It shapes the rest of the week. You pick songs you wouldn’t have picked because the bigger church picked them first. You arrange your service to look like theirs. You judge your room by the size of their room. You go home Sunday convinced you fell short, when nothing about your Sunday was actually trying to be theirs.
The worship leader at the church down the road from us said it like this last month. “I love what we do here. But I open Instagram and within thirty seconds I’m convinced I’m playing in the minor leagues.”
The platform absorbs that. The team feels it. Your spouse feels it. You feel it most.
What’s true
Peter does the same thing in John 21. Jesus has just told Peter, in the most specific terms, what kind of life is ahead of him. “When you were young, you dressed yourself and walked where you wanted to go. But when you grow old, you’ll stretch out your hands and someone else will dress you and take you where you don’t want to go.”
That’s heavy. Peter sits with it for about a sentence. Then he sees John following them up the beach. And Peter, in the rawest possible way, says: “Lord, what about this man?”
Translation: yeah, but what about him though.
Jesus doesn’t answer the question. He redirects it. “If I want him to stay until I come back, what is that to you? You follow me.”
He’s not minimizing Peter. He’s protecting Peter. Because comparison would have ruined the calling Jesus had just given him. Peter’s call was Peter’s call. John’s call was John’s call. The only fatal move for either of them was to spend energy comparing the two.
You have a church. Your church is the one Jesus put you in. The worship leader at the church with the album and the Masterclass has a call that is theirs. None of those calls are interchangeable. None of them are rankable. None of them are competing in the same race.
The bigger church is not your peer. Your peer is the worship leader at the church your size, in the town next to yours, who also got the team text that nobody could play Sunday morning. The big church is a different conversation entirely. Watching them and grading yourself against them is like a high school basketball team watching the NBA and concluding they’re failing. Of course they’re not the NBA. Their job is to play their season.
What if you ran your season?
For your team
- When was the last time you genuinely felt good about a Sunday you led? What made it good?
- Whose worship ministry are you most tempted to compare yours to, and what does that tell you about what you’re actually hungry for?
- What’s one move this week that would shift your attention from someone else’s race to your own?
Pray this
Father, You put me here. You put my team here. You put my church here. I’m done watching the worship leader at the bigger church and grading my Sunday against theirs. Take my eyes off them. Put my eyes back on You. Amen.
This Sunday
When you walk into the building Sunday morning, name one specific person who’ll be in the room. One. Pray for them by name before you set up. Then lead the service that’s actually in front of you.
Go deeper
In the network: Search “Comparison and the Worship Leader” for the live training where Chris and I walk through the four moves we make every time we catch ourselves doing this. Free at thechurchcollective.mn.co.
For more on comparison and church size, read When Bigger Isn’t Better.
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.
Joy When the Platform Stops Providing It