I was talking with a worship leader friend of mine over lunch about calling and the subject of ministry as a career came up. I am not, nor have I ever been, on staff, I am as I like to say full time volunteer. I’m not against paid staff at all, I believe there is plenty of biblical basis for it and I hope as our church grows we’ll be able to support more of our leaders.

But I do have a lot of friends/acquaintances in paid staff positions and I know a lot of them have experienced one or both of these:

• They left a church they loved and served to go to a church that could pay them. If their old church could have paid them, they would have stayed.
• They have serious theological or ministry philosophy conflicts with other leaders (elders, pastors) in the church and if they weren’t on staff or had another job option, they would leave.

Neither of those sit well with me at all. Sometimes I find myself wishing that I was on paid staff, but then most of me is really thankful that I get to do full time ministry but not depend on it to support my family financially. That tension I can only imagine becomes difficult at times when you feel called in one direction, but have to consider the financial impacts to your family.

So the question is “Is your primary reason for staying at your church your pay?” . Since this is a worship blog I expect most answers to be from worship leaders, but if you are on paid staff in any capacity please feel free to answer. This poll is totally anonymous, there is no way for me or anyone else to know who answered what. I said very early on in this blog I wanted to ask hard questions of ourselves and I think this qualifies.

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The number of songs a worship leader has in regular rotation can really make a huge difference in how easily a congregation enters into worship, how bored the congregation and band are with the songs, how well the band performs, etc… It’s an area of worship I hope leaders put thought into and not just leave as an afterthought. In an attempt to find out how many songs worship leaders have in their rotation I began a poll that asked simply how many songs are in your worship rotation? Here are the results.

The value in bold is how many I have in my rotation. I understand that 78 worship leaders is not a huge sample so there’s probably a large margin of error here. But just play along and lets assume this is an accurate representation.

When I saw over 60 in rotation I was blown away, if that’s the case that means you’re only playing certain songs once or twice a year. At that point I’m not sure why you’d even have those songs in “rotation”. Sure maybe you bring them out for a specific purpose, but rotation? Maybe others are just way more talented than I, and that’s not hard to believe. But here are the problems I see with rotations that large:

1. The congregation spends more time reading words and remembering the melody than worshipping.
2. The arrangement isn’t all that tight and tends to be simplistic because it would be extremely difficult to have over 60 songs arranged in creative ways and not struggle to pull it off.
3. You end up keeping old (possible stale) songs in rotation longer because you play them so infrequently they seem fresh, though years have passed.

Some benefits I see:

1. Lots of material to be able to build more content focused sets that support message series and such.
2. Keeps the band on their toes.

What benefits and drawbacks do you see from having such large worship song rotations?

I use about 30 songs in my regular rotation. This is probably on the low end for being the only worship band at our church. I would imagine most churches in a “praise band” setup would have a larger rotation, but I guess we’ll find out in this post. Our vision at LCC is to raise up multiple bands that have small rotations so we aren’t overlapping and if we are they are different arrangements. This results, hopefully, in a few things

1. Tighter set -  bands are playing fewer songs so they have more opportunity to experiment and perfect their arrangements.
2. Familiarity – Congregation gets to connect with songs better and have a chance at memorization so they spend less time staring at the lyrics and more time focusing on Jesus.
3. Freshness – when new songs come in, older songs are getting pruned instead of an ever growing rotation. This takes the pressure off the band for introducing new songs so they don’t feel like their work load gets larger and larger.

The last point is important because we want to keep bringing in new songs but typically it’s at the expense of an older song that just doesn’t seem to be relevant anymore. That’s not to say we don’t play any old songs, because we do. I’ll bring back older songs, hymns that bring diversity to the set and a freshness to the set as a whole.

So how many songs are in your rotation? And it would be great if you could describe in the comments what kind of worship band organization you use, praise band, multiple bands or something else.

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We’re in the middle of a lot of posts on using loops in worship services, so I wanted to see where the majority lies in regards to usage of loops. No right or wrong answers here, just helpful to me for some ideas on future posts.

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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.

Let me layout the scene…

You walk into the sanctuary and the worship leader opens with a nice prayer and then the guitar player opens with a great riff and off we go into the first jam. But in the middle breakdown the worship leader starts preaching on making a joyful noise and encourages you to dance and shout. When the song is over he does a prayer segue into song 2, and then prays again during the breakdown.

Into song 3 the worship leader has a sermonette on the power of unity and how he wants everyone’s hands lifted, hey you in the back, get your hands up! In between the 10th and 11th repeat of the tag the worship leader reads 3 entire psalms cause God really laid it on his heart this morning. Now you’re repeating the tag 10 more times before a soft prayer is read on the intro to the ministry song.

Now there are tears as the worship leaders speaks over the congregation, prophecy pastor, prophecy! Worship leader goes off melody to speak all the verses so he can make it more intimate. So far it’s about 50/50 prayer and talk to actual singing. Jesus walks amongst the church and the worship leader doesn’t notice cause he’s flipping through scripture to find his closing prayer.

Aaaaaaaaaand scene!

So how does all that talking hit you in the congregation?

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We started a poll a couple months back asking, “In general, how should worship music relate to culture?” Here are the results, which show % of total voters, not votes, since you could choose more than one answer. (That’s why it adds up to more than 100%)

• 34% – Counter-cultural in some ways
• 29% – Uni-cultural in some ways
• 16% – Counter-cultural in every way
• 12% – Subcultural in some ways
• 9% – Uni-cultural in every way

I agree complete with the top 2 choices, in some ways our worship music has to be counter-cultural and in some ways should be uni-cultural. The subcultural choice is difficult and perhaps many voted without reading the kick-off post which defined subcultural as being “unconcerned with the dominant culture it finds itself in.” I’m going to give those voters the benefit of the doubt, but I think most of the church that defines itself as having a “contemporary worship service” fits into this bucket.

What frightens me is that almost 16% of people who voted think that our worship music should be counter-cultural in every way. I’ll explore what that really means and why I think that’s a bad perspective. When we say “every way” here’s what that means to me:

• Spiritually – spirit residing in the musicians, spirit communicated and proclaimed in songs, doctrine believed and communicated and spirit in the congregation
• Stylistically – what our worship music sounds like, instruments used, production, songwriting, etc…
• Usage – The how, when and why music is played and sung.

Spiritually we must be counter-cultural

Our hearts our regenerated and now desiring to see the name of Jesus glorified. Our music should be born of that spirit, no longer seeking to glorify ourselves or our sin. What we sing in our sings should be counter-cultural, the message of the cross is foolishness in the world. And lastly the congregation, those listening and joining in song should be counter-cultural from crowds in the world. Those seeking comfort, peace, excitement, joy, transformation of some kind in the music and performance. Our worship better not be that kind of idolatry, we better be counter-cultural and using music as a unifying tool and biblical expression of our worship of Jesus, not as any mediatory avenue.

Stylistically uni-cultural with innovation

I’m a firm believer in contextualization in musical style. There is no point in human history that reached a perfected musical form that is moral and the rest now immoral. Obviously 16% of the people on this site disagreed with me, they view that anything the secular world uses in music stylistically is bad and should be rejected. I would argue that a style or musical instrument or tool carries no intrinsic morality, but that it is amoral and could be used for God or idols.

Contextualizing our style and being uni-cultural with innovation means we assess our culture, see what musical style is grabbing the worship of the lost and redeem that style, innovate and point people to Christ in it. The result is a church that has some relevance to it’s community and culture but is distinctly counter cultural in spirit and message. Why should our worship music style be a barrier to entry in our culture?

The innovation aspect is important here because we don’t want to just copy secular music. One aspect of secular culture that the church should just receive is innovation. Remaining relevant while innovating is no simple task, but there’s an attitude of progression and experimentation that needs to be present in our music. Find boundaries and press them creatively. Acoustic guitars and piano are not the only means to unify a body of Christ, you can be musically innovative and not leave behind your congregation.

Usage should be counter-cultural

The lost, and to be honest a lot of the church as well, use music in many idolatrous ways. Here are a few:

• Comfort – We let songs minister to us to make us feel better, music becomes our priest instead of Jesus.
• Motivation and Inspiration – Not only do we use music to motivate and inspire us but then often times the object of our motivation and inspiration is music in itself, meaning music has become not just the means to an end, but the means and the end.
• Healing – Not just Marvin’s sexual healing, but we use music to heal our hearts, minds and bodies.
• Confession – Here again music can become not just the mode of confession but the object that receives our confession.

I’m going to go deeper into the points above on a follow up post, so I will explain and give examples of all those soon. Many churches are sub-cultural in their usage by ignoring all of these points which leads to ignorance and inability to address the music culture. In many cases the church ends up in the same sin the world is with our worship music.

The church should be counter-cultural so we address the points and make sure we let God redeem this, change and mold our hearts so that Jesus is our only comforter, motivator and inspiration. Jesus is our healer and hearer of our confession and profession.

If you voted and would like to talk more about your vote or if you disagree with me, please leave a comment and let’s hammer this out.

If you’re new to this blog you’ll notice I like doing a poll on a certain topic before I take my thoughts to the world. The idea of how worship music should relate to culture is one I’ve wrestled with for a long time and still do now. I’m interested to see what kind of thoughts we have out there on this. Let’s make sure we have our definitions agreed upon first.

• Countercultural – Purposefully exhibiting behavior in opposition to the dominant culture which it resides in.
• Subcultural – Behaving as a distinctly different culture which exists within another culture and that has not been assimilated. A subculture tends to be oblivious to or unconcerned with the dominant culture in which it exists and just carries on in its own culture bubble.
• Unicultural – I made this word up. What I mean by this is exhibiting the same behavior as the dominant culture in which it resides.

I’m letting you choose more than one answer because I know I would. Obviously the “every way” choices are mutually exclusive so only pick one answer if that’s your choice. I’d love to hear your explanation of your choices in the comments. I’d suspect a disconnect in many of our ideas of what should be the case and what is the case. So let’s hear those gripes as well. Let’s get this party started.

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