We are in week 2 of our 6-week #oneworthitall fall tour, and I’m reminded of how easy things go in everything music when you have a team that is as prepared and musically talented as these guys this fall. It’s really freeing to know you have musicians who know their parts and will, more than anything else, consistently bring music that inspires people to worship and allows them to get lost in the experience of encounter.
It’s also reminding me of the challenge many local church teams face in the area of excellence. Excellence can be an illusive thing: when we are honest enough to take inventory of our teams, we can easily see musician limitations. Very few of us week in and week out lead teams that look like #elevationchurch or #christomlin ‘s team at a #passionconference. Conversely, many of us serve in teams where there is an element of excellence (maybe the heart or the head, but not both), but we see the whole package as something just out of reach. I have seen many incredible musicians be worship leaders and similarly struggle with finding true excellence across their church’s platform.
In talking with musicians and volunteers, many have a strong desire to be the best at what they do, but feel as a team they are missing the mark in terms of the intangibles. Often I’ve found that musicians want to improve, but their not sure how. If you’re a musician at a church and have felt this frustration, you’re not alone; I’d like to go through a couple of areas where you can focus on to begin to develop a culture of excellence in perspective as you serve in the area of music and worship at your church:
1. VISION. VISION. VISION. Lead the Worship
Teams that are musically excellent often fail to get the heart right, and I think part of it is because in our pursuit of musical excellence we can quickly lose site of the EXCELLENCE that we so desperately need in terms of leading worship. There are not stages to this: if you’re on stage on Sunday morning, you’re leading worship. There is no way to get around it. What you do, your body language, your facial expressions, your preparation—or lack of it (we’ll get there)—will lead people either to Jesus or to something else: but it can’t be ignored. I think one of the healthiest ways to pursue excellence as a worship musician is to catch the vision that you are a worship leader. Just like there are no sideline seaters in life and in calling, worship team is an active participation in leading worship. That’s a high calling! If my task in that is playing guitar, I can ask myself: did I invest time this week as leader of worship in my role in a way that my Heavenly Father would say “well done?” It doesn’t mean you have to be the next John Mayer or Jeff Beck to be an excellence worship musician. It does mean you have taken the time to understand the vision of God’s calling. There’s a line in the movie “Kingdom of Heaven” where the priest asks:
Does making a man a knight make him a better fighter?
Yes.
Is the obvious response. Have a vision for the high calling on your life and your teams’ ministry, and the intangibles will follow.
2. PRACTICE. PRACTICE. PRACTICE. (Did I mention, practice?)
You can’t avoid it. You can’t escape it. It may come faster for people, but you’ll ultimately need to get serious about practice. I know… None of us need that… Nobody at first enjoys practice, just like most people don’t enjoy exercise—until they see the results. Consistent practice will both (1) unleash your God-given abilities and talents and (2) create and develop new areas of excellence you never knew you existed within you. It’s a simple thing that we all think we can get around, but the truth is most of us will never learn a song—and even fewer, that song well—unless we take the time to learn the ins and outs of our parts. If you’re a drummer for instance, here’s an effective method for approaching practice:
– Find an mp3 or video of the song with an order close to what you think it will be
– Get a piece of paper and divide the song into different parts on your paper (VERSE, CHORUS, CHORUS 2, etc.) so that there is a list. Organize it as a two column thing with space between each
– Go through each of the parts you’ve just listed and write down what beat the drummer on the recording is doing. What will help you remember, make the paper your own so that you can read it and remember it.
– Practice the parts for each, then begin putting the parts together, ultimately going in the order of the audio file.
– When you practice with the team, ask the worship leader for a song order that you can generally follow.
As a standard both at church and on the road, our teams always come with a knowledge of the songs ready to play exactly as the mp3 is played; while we may change the order in practice and they may not always get the fill or the lead exactly, there is an understanding that everyone comes with a strong knowledge of the song and where it is going. As a worship leader, it also pushes me to know the songs well and where they will be going.
Practice can easily be dismissed away with excuses like: It’s for The Lord anyways, so let’s just do our best [which often really means whatever is left at the end of the week] and let God do the rest. I think that’s a fundamental flaw in our understanding of both Grace and God’s heart. Preparation and excellence resound throughout the Old and New Testaments, and second best is never something God desires or delights in. If you are someone who has let something like this define the way you prepare for worship, I would take a hard look at the approach and ask yourself: is that something God would do for me? Would he prepare for something in my life with that kind of carelessness? Would I want him to?
Practice matters. Enough said 🙂
3. OWN IT. INNOVATE IT.
When we have a vision for the high calling of our role and have taken the time to know our craft, our music, and our Creator, we get to enjoy this amazing place of creating. Pros learn the music and then have this amazing way of making it their own. It’s this incredible thing where they can play the notes or the fills, but they know the part so well that how they play it changes—it becomes a part of them. When we take this kind of ownership as musicians, we get to enjoy together the wonderful realm of music creation, which is by far one of my favorite aspects.
Bands who don’t do the first two things and end up trying to create, typically make mediocre and/or mission-less music. Musicians who try to create but have not taken the time to practice or be inspired in their craft tend to draw attention to themselves through weak leads|solos and|or out of place solos and parts.
Your church needs you to be the best you can be as a lead worshiper through your craft. Learn it as best as you can, trusting that this kind of “best” is something God honors and delights in. Excellence is within reach, much closer than we typically think.
As an electric guitar player in the church I agree that it takes practice, practice, and more practice. Even then, you may make mistakes. But, when you do you can recover from them because you know where the song is going and what comes next. When you are practiced to the point of being (almost) tired of the song, then you really know it. And then, when you play for the church you will have no stress or fear. You are practiced!!