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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