January 16 2009
Poll Results: Worship leader, shut up and sing!
Tagged Under : leading, poll, worship
The results are in and they are conclusive. 83% of you said worship leaders who speak a lot either annoy or distract you during worship. I heard some complaints about how I started the poll, some saying it’s skewed for negative responses. My response to that is I’m not Zogby, I’m just a worship leader trying to run a little blog here and connect with my peeps. So it may not be the most scientific poll in the world, but I think it gave me a pretty clear idea of where people are at.
Personally I don’t like to talk a lot when I lead worship. I open in prayer and that’s usually the only speaking I do in a set. I may sing some prayerful phrases in a ministry time song or such, but rarely if ever do I do a full talking breakdown. I leave that to my pastor to come up at the end, who’s much better at leading a time like that.
As with everything there is some balance required here. There’s a time to pray, talk, be silent, sing, play…but I agree with the results here that excessive talking is really distracting and annoying.
Feel free to browse our poll archive and vote in any you’ve missed.
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I think my question is “what is defined by these users as alot”? I get ticked off when I see results like this – because people have the wrong idea about Worship Leaders. They think “shut up and sing”. Duh. Leading songs – yeah, shut up and sing. Leading worship? Pastoring worship? That takes some teaching, some exhortation, some focus.
Fred,
I think when responding to this I was reminded of myself as a young leader. When people would not respond the way I wanted them to my prodding became less and less encouraging and eventually was just attacking the congregations heart of worship. I think that teaching on worship is right… just not between every song. If God starts moving I always want to say something instead of allowing the Holy Spirit room to work.
[...] post was inspired by Kyle’s poll over at OurRisingSound.Com. Seems Kyle took an informal poll that said “When a worship leader speaks a lot during the [...]
haha 83% wow.
That makes me feel better by not stopping to talk.
at least i’m not annoying my congregation- normally I say a Good Morning type intro before we get started and then a prayer in between our last fast and first slow song of the set- that seems to be nice. but yeah, I don’t really “talk” during worship because it interrupts the flow of the services and sometimes I may mess up what the Holy Spirit is doing in someone’s life during worship if I start talking about what “I think” God wants me to say- I would rather save my talking points for the chances i get when I teach on Wednesday nights on worship. then, i have more time to expound on something that I may have wanted to say during worship that may have been misconstrued.
This is very timely! We have this discussion as part of every programming meeting. We always evaluate after each Saturday night service and the worship speaking is always something we discuss.
Of course, we encourage the worship leaders to follow God’s leading but sometimes it’s hard to get a good read on the audience when your leading, so it’s difficult to know whether to keep encouraging them or just to let them go. thanks.
[...] caused this from Kyle, My mind cannot grasp your last sentence. You wouldn’t call someone an adulterer unless there is [...]