Beyond Sunday Worship

Worship Podcast

Your Guide to Selecting and Leading Songs for Worship

This turned out to be such a great blog series. One of the things we can never rest from is selecting songs and leading them. We do it so often that it becomes a routine where we lose the heart of the matter – encountering God. My goal was to help us maintain vision in the midst of our routines.

We walked through practical steps to selecting songs, leading songs, and moving people into a place of true worship. Here’s some of the topics we covered:

Do you have any ideas of a future series you’d like me to cover? Let me know in the comments.

10 Scriptures From Jeremiah To Use When Leading Worship

Ever been in a worship leading situation where you needed a Scripture but you just couldn’t think of the right one? That’s why I think memorizing Scripture is so important for worship leaders. Matter of fact, it may be more important than learning songs.When a worship leader understands the scope Scripture and commits much of it to memory, he is better able to lead people in “spirit and truth” worship. Otherwise, he(she) merely relies on a songlist to do the job for him.
Sometimes worship leaders can speak too much and distract from worship. But other times the right Scripture spoken at the right time can unlock something powerful.

[Read more…]

7 Free iPhone Apps For Your Worship Ministry

I love how efficient the iPhone is. With a few amazing apps, you essentially have your personal computer with you wherever you go. In a previous post, I outlined some of my favorite apps.

In this post I wanted to highlight 7 apps that I use on a continual basis as a worship pastor. There is some overlap between posts, but here I’d like to highlight why and how I use it in a worship ministry context.

Did I say they were stinkin’ free?

10 Ways to Define Success as a Worship Leader

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A couple weeks ago I poised the question, “What do successful worship leaders do?” How do we define it?

If it doesn’t necessarily involve big tours and best selling records, what does it involve?


Here’s some ways I define success:

  • A congregation that engages in the worship experience
  • Musicians that improve musically
  • Musicians that grow closer to Christ
  • A team that grows numerically
  • Other worship leaders are being raised up
  • Music serves people rather than distracts
  • A team that worships and has a passion for God’s glory
  • A discipleship plan is in place
  • A team that follows and respects your leadership

Notice that all these items don’t just involve you. Effective worship leaders don’t just look internal, they pour themselves out for others. That’s the nature of leadership and the nature of a successful worship leader.

Notice there were only 9 ways listed. The last one is for you to add. What defines success for you as a worship leader?

Worship Team Workshop Ideas

One of the best things I think we’ve ever done with our worship team is to provide monthly workshops. Since we work with volunteers, mainly who are in high school or college, it’s a great way to unify our team, grow our team numerically, impart to the next generation, and improve our musicianship.

As worship leaders, I believe God entrusts us with musicians and singers. It’s our responsibility to steward them well. I don’t want my team to simply feel ‘used’. I want them to have fun, catch a passion for worship, grow closer to Jesus, improve their musicality, and ultimately be released to serve God in other parts of the world. I hope that is your desire too.

Workshops are a discipleship tool we just started in the Fall of 2010, once a month. If you are a worship leader, I wholeheartedly recommend you do some sort of training with your team throughout the year. You don’t have to do it just like we do, but do something. You may not feel you are even qualified to teach on some of these topics, but I bet someone on your team is. If not, teach what you know. You don’t have to cover the entire encyclopedia of musical and worship expertise right now. Give what you got today. Don’t wait for ‘that time’ to come.

For the remainder of this post I wanted to outline some of the workshops we did in 2010 and some of the key topics we covered. We try to keep our workshops one hour in length, highly interactive, and include lunch (trust me, it helps). Based on mine (and Kate’s) experience, we wrote our own curriculum. Feel free to use this stuff. We didn’t invent it 🙂

KEYBOARD WORKSHOP

  • Check out this post. No need to repeat myself here.

WORSHIP LEADER WORKSHOP

  • Bring in a guest worship leader and interview them in front of the team. We invited worship leaders from other local churches, youth group worship leaders, and young aspiring worship leaders.
  • Do a visionary teaching on “Why We Lead Worship” or something practical like, “Practical Helps for Worship Leaders”.
  • Leave time for Q & A
  • Attend a local conference or worship night together

RHYTHM SECTION WORKSHOP (Drums, Bass, Guitars)

  • Listen to a song and have each team member diagram what is happening using this sheet. (This sheet is from Paul Baloche. Btw, check out his instructional DVDs, which would be another great idea for a workshop. Just watch it and then apply it).
  • Teach on ‘groove’, ‘playing in the pocket’, ‘listening to other musicians’, ‘less is more’.
  • Rotate different musicians in and out, have one of them start a groove, and the others match it. Have the room comment on how they did. Stop and applaud the good you see and kindly point out what went wrong.
  • Pick a couple songs, provide sheet music, and rotate musicians in and out quickly to give ‘the groove’ a try.

VOCAL WORKSHOP

  • Teach on the role of a background singer (matching the tone of the lead, being aware, less is more)
  • Pick a song and demonstrate some options. Have others sing.
  • Utilize a band and do a humorous demonstration of “what NOT to do”.
  • Communicate your personal vision for worship team vocals. Sometimes a simple vision is all it takes to get everyone ‘on board’.

WORSHIP LEADERS: Have you done any workshops before? What are some things you’ve tried?