Sometimes we love it. Sometimes we hate it. Rehearsal can equal a recipe for disaster – bringing together different people of different ages with different skill levels with different musical experience with different opinions and different styles. Ready for a good time? I hope to equip you in this post with practical advice on how to improve your worship team rehearsals so you can start seeing some instant improvement. It’s possible for you to look forward to rehearsal. It’s possible for you to have consistently good rehearsals. It’s even possible for your team to have fun. It just takes hard work and some time to build momentum.

I think most worship leaders leave their rehearsals up to chance. Here are some things you should begin to implement:

1. Put front end work into rehearsals

• Prepare for your rehearsals like you would prepare for a service.
• Give intense thought/prayer to songs, transitions between each song (musically & vocally), musical arrangements.
• Call/Email/Facebook/Twitter/Text/Go door-to-door to make sure everyone arrives on time. Enforce this in love 🙂
• Depending on your musical knowledge, have ideas for what each instrument should do. You need to ‘produce’ the sound so it’s not mass musical chaos, which is very distracting to the goal of worship. If you don’t have this type of musical knowledge or training, you should find someone you trust who does and work very closely with them.
• Make sure the stage is set for your musicians! You want to minimize distractions and focus on your rehearsal. Too often loads of time is lost finding direct boxes, cords, and making sure the stage and sound is ready. Do this beforehand. TRUST ME!
• Don’t plan a rehearsal covering 400 songs. I typically rehearse for 2 hours and plan to get through 3-4 songs. I spend the most time on one song that I know will be a challenge. I also try and leave time for spontaneous practice too. More on that later.
• Ask the question, “What is the goal of this rehearsal?” Write it down. Plan around it. See it happen.

2. Create a fun, disciplined culture

• RELAX! Don’t be tense, mean, impatient, and rude to your team. You may be leading worship by yourself if you are. Give them a reason to respect you.
• Have fun! Make jokes. Laugh at yourself a lot. Something weird seems to come over us musicians when we’re on a stage with lights and a guitar in hand. You’re not really that good 🙂 It’s healthy to realize that.
• Don’t allow everyone to say whatever they want whenever they want to. The front-end work you put in will enable you to have an organized practice with a specific goal and outcome. Definitely allow your worship team to offer ideas and give input (which may even be better than yours), but realize YOU ARE THE LEADER! Lead them!
• Challenge your team to musical excellence. Less is more. If someone is consistently messing up, talk to them personally. Challenge them to practice on their own and come to rehearsal prepared. If they come unprepared, again, talk to them personally. If you set this standard, over time you will see dramatic improvement.
• Don’t be afraid to confront.

3. Prepare for the spontaneous

• I’ve noticed the best worship experiences are not my breakthrough musical ideas, drum loops, and air-tight arrangements. It’s what happens in between.
• Reserve 10-15 minutes of your rehearsal for ‘flow time’. Take a simple chord progression and flow with it. Teach them how be spontaneous musically, follow the Holy Spirit, and be sensitive to the moment.
• Don’t be solely ‘music-centered’. Pray. Worship during your rehearsal. Lead the way.
• BEFORE rehearsal, take time to pray over your songs, your musicians, and ask for the Holy Spirit’s leading in your practice.

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on my recent post on worship leadership. I’d like to take some time in the next week or so to dive into some of these qualities on a deeper level. There is a way to be a worship leader that is not burned out, stressed, and just trying to survive. It’s staggering to see that the average tenure of a worship leader in the local church is 2 years. Where are the steady, passionate, vision-filled leaders who are building up a worship team of ‘on-fire’ worshipers? Hopefully this stuff will help. Some topics covered will be:

• How to plan for a great rehearsal
• How to plan a great worship set
• The tension between spontaneity & preparation
• How do I get inspired each week?
• Getting behind the vision of your local church
• How to approach personal practice
• Creating a fun, disciplined culture
• What to do when your worship team doesn’t ‘get’ your vision

Anything else I should add?

I recently challenged the worship team at APC to memorize Psalm 40 together. My desire with this is to be more active in preparing our hearts for the weekend worship. What better way to do this than to memorize God’s Word together? Memorizing Scripture is probably the best way to prepare yourself to be a worshipper through the difficult times in life. When the storms hit, you have a bedrock of truth to recall to mind.

I sent this encouragement out today. I hope it blesses you.

“He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord” (Psalm 40:3).

When people see your life and hear your words, what are they taking in? Our daily experience of God’s love and faithful help through pleasure and pain should result in songs of praise.

Now, I don’t mean you should start singing random lyrics and melodies in public when God does something. That’s a bit on the creepy side. Go watch ELF if you don’t know what I mean.

All this means is that as a worshipper of God, you are also a declarer to others. If others are not hearing your praise and declarations of faith, you are probably not worshipping. Silent, undeclared worship is no worship at all. People need to SEE your song in action. People need to FEAR GOD through it. And they will PUT THEIR TRUST in God because of your living testimony.