Week 3 • Season 1 • Worship Team Devotionals
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.
Colossians 3:23-24 (NIV)
What’s actually going on
Sometimes the question isn’t why am I in ministry. It’s why are we doing what we’re doing on Sunday morning, exactly?
Are we trying to give people a powerful experience? Are we trying to help them sing? Are we creating a moment? Are we creating a service that holds up to a livestream review?
Most of us, if we’re honest, started out wanting to help people meet Jesus. And then somewhere along the way the metric shifted. The clock got tighter. The feedback loop sped up. Now we’re optimizing for things that, if we slow down for a minute, we don’t even fully believe in.
We talked to a worship leader last month who said this: I plan our setlist so that the modulation in song three lands on the lyric where my pastor wants the energy peak. And then he said, I don’t even know if that’s worship anymore. I think it’s stage management with a Bible verse on top.
He wasn’t being cynical. He was being honest. And honesty is where renewal usually starts.
What’s true
Colossians 3:23 says it twice in two verses, just slightly different ways: you are working for the Lord. The Lord is who you serve. Everything else, your pastor, your livestream audience, the parents in the back row checking their phones, even the people in the room who actually liked it, every single one of them is downstream of the audience of One.
When you can’t remember why you’re doing this, that’s where to come back. Not to a strategy. Not to a worship philosophy. To the audience.
The audience is Jesus. The point is His name. Everything else is faithful service or faithful failure, both of which He’s fine with.
If your why has gotten tangled up in things that don’t last, today is a good day to set them down. Not in a dramatic way. Just quietly, the way you’d set down a bag you didn’t realize you were carrying.
For your team
Three discussion questions for your pre-rehearsal team huddle.
- If you had to write our team’s mission statement in one sentence, what would it be? (Now ask: is that what we actually do?)
- What part of how we plan Sunday is for the people, and what part is for the room, and what part is for the Lord?
- Where do we need to come back to first principles together?
Pray this
Lord, I have served audiences I forgot I was serving. Bring me back to You as the one I work for. Strip what doesn’t matter. Make me faithful to the One I started this for. Amen.
This Sunday
Before the first song, look up, not out. The Lord is in the room before any of us.
Go deeper
In the network: Search “Where Are Our Priorities?” in the TCC community for the live training on coming back to first principles when ministry has gotten complicated. Free at thechurchcollective.mn.co.
This is Week 3 of 52 Weekly Worship Team Devotionals from The Church Collective. The first 12 (including this one) are available now — grab them as a free PDF. New devotionals drop every Monday morning. Free, denominationally diverse, 501(c)(3). Made possible by our Supporters: become a Supporter or give one-time.
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When Your Gift Is Not Your God