If you are anything like me, you might find yourself wanting to take your worship team through a devotional study but just continually come up short. You go to google and start looking for a worship team devotional and are hit with thousands of options. Hey, you may have found this post here because you did just that! If so, hi, I’m glad you’re here.
The reality is God has given you everything you need to help lead your worship team through a heartfelt devotional study. May I humbly suggest that a worship team devotion should be tailor-made for your specific context, specific team, to a particular time. Above everything, it should be rooted in the word of God. To develop the best possible devotional for your team, you need to spend daily time in the Bible. You’ll be amazed at how much you can do in ministry if you keep to this simple truth.
A Little Bit of Background
That said, I want to give you a little insight into what the Lord has been teaching me lately. For those of you that are new to The Church Collective, let me introduce myself. Hi! I’m Ryan, and I’m the founder of this ministry. We have this website full of fantastic resources for you (albeit a bit old, but they are still quite valuable). We host a podcast and have been doing so since 2013. You’ll find pretty much any worship artist you can imagine on the podcast, so feel free to go through the archives and catch up.
We host conferences worldwide where the heart is to provide them for free for those that attend so that local teams can bring their entire team and get excellent practical and biblical training. We’ve been around the world, have taken a bit of a pause as most have, but are working on some new stuff for 2022. I served for nearly twenty years as a worship and experience pastor at Shelter Cove Community Church and am now serving as the Academic Director for The Belonging Co College’s Southeastern University campus.
My education includes BA in Music an MA in Theology and am currently preparing for my dissertation to finish a Ph.D. in Christian Worship with Liberty University. I’m sharing all of this so that you have some context. My heart is to help worship leaders be the best they possibly can be by helping them realize that they have everything they need to do wonderful ministry. Check out this verse:
You Have Everything You Need to Lead Your Worship Team Devotions
All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 (NLT)
You may want just to take a minute and read the whole chapter. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Welcome back! Did you grab a snack?
Trust that God has Equipped You to Lead
I hope you realize that, in your efforts to lead worship, God will thoroughly equip you to do what you need to do at your church. You can totally go get yourself some worship team devotionals and utilize them for your team. I can personally tell you that there are a lot of them that are fantastic. However, if you think that you need to rely on someone else’s revelation of the word of God to be able to teach your worship team, you are missing out on what the Lord has for you! I want to point you to some passages of scripture that have been incredible for me and my ministry, not so you can go ahead and read this article to your team, but so that you can take the time to go through the passage yourself and see what God would have you share with them. Don’t forget this!
You are uniquely equipped to lead your worship team. Trust that God will reveal himself to you, and you’ll find that your ministry will be wildly effective!
Romans 12 and Living a Lifestyle of Worship
Ok, all that said, here’s what the Lord has been teaching me lately in my studies and ministry.
And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice – the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. Don’t copy the behavior and customs of the world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect. Romans 12:1-2 (NLT)
This has been a go-to verse for me when dealing with worship. Further, it’s a core verse for worship theology that all of us should think through as worship leaders. If you want your worship team devotional to have some lively conversation, ask your team to talk about the fact that singing isn’t even mentioned in these verses. I think that we, as worship leaders, will sometimes let it go without saying that worship is more than music or singing.
But we need not let this fact go without saying.
Helping your Church Understand
Many of the members of our churches do not understand the idea that worship is more than music. Go ahead and ask a handful of them to define worship for you when you see them this weekend. I’ll bet that will tell you something along the lines of worship being a particular style of music or that twenty to thirty-minute block of time the team leads in the service on the weekend. I would even go so far as to say there are members of our worship team who do not understand that worship is far more than the songs they are preparing to lead this weekend.
This passage in Romans is crucial for our own walk as worship leaders. It is also our responsibility to help our worship teams understand this truth. We may even need to unpack it with our senior pastors.
We need to take the time to help our people understand that the time of singing on the weekend is meant to be an extension of a life lived in obedience to the Lord.
Personal Preferences are Way Less Important
The typical fights about what song should be sung, how much haze should be in the room, or what number should be on that dreaded decibel meter. The fight about if a worship leader should be wearing a hat or not stems from a misunderstanding about worship. My personal preferences for style, songs, and aesthetics are secondary to the fact that I love the Lord and am called to live a life of obedience to him. If I am being continually changed by him, spending time in His word daily, and doing my best to recognize the power of the gospel in my own life, why on earth would I care what song we are singing?
I will do my best to participate and sing with all of my heart, not because I like the song but because of who God is. I am living in obedience. Talk with your team about this passage. Listen to what they have to say. During this worship team devotion, have them help define worship for your church and then share it with your church. I would love to hear how it goes! Shoot me a DM on Instagram and tell me how you ended up defining it!
Ephesians 5 and the Horizontal Nature of Worship
Here’s another passage that has been rocking my world lately. I even posted about it over on TikTok, and the response has been pretty crazy, so I think it’s something that we should all be thinking about:
@ryan_loche There’s a lot to unpack with this verse but I would love to hear what you think! #thechurchcollective #bibleverse #biblestudy #worshipleader
“Speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Ephesians 5:19-20
Oh man, there are many things that we could unpack in this passage that I’ll save for another post, but I want to focus just on the first few words. Paul is telling us that when we worship, we are to recognize there is a horizontal relationship going on as well. Corporate worship is not only about my connecting with God. My singing out in the congregation is also meant to minister to those around me and the greater church body that I am a part of.
God needs you to Minister to Others
I love that there are no qualifiers in this passage on the skill level of the singing. It doesn’t matter if we have a fantastic voice or if we couldn’t hit the broad side of middle C if we threw a cat at it from two feet away. I am called to encourage those around me with my worship. Could you imagine if everyone in our congregation understood this? Would it matter what song we were leading? How little would we all care about the volume or if we were able to sit where we wanted?
Our job as the worship leader is first to help our worship team understand this. From there, we need their help to disciple our congregations. The more we can help each member of our church understand that their singing is needed not just for their own edification but for the spiritual growth of the rest of the church, the more heartily they will engage in worship. I would even go so far to say that the concerns that plague so many of us as leaders in our church will continue to dimmish.
So there are just a couple of passages I would encourage you to look at. Let me know how God uses these with your team! I’d love to hear!
Why Should I Focus on Doing Church Online