During the leadership teams recent visit to the Ground Level Leadership conference, a workshop titled ‘The Future of Worship’ was attended. Some valuable points titled ‘ten basics for worship teams’  were shared and going forward we would like to implement these within our worship team at New Life.

 

Ten basics for worship teams:

 

1. Comparison kills – you are a world class you (1 Samuel 16:7)

    

2. Pursue God’s presence over performance – don’t choose attraction over anointing (2 Samuel 6:21). Applies to people and their intent but also songs and song lyrics. Check that lyrics are Biblically and theologically correct. Bringing new songs to practice before introducing them on a Sunday will help us explore lyrics and ensure we are bringing songs that are honouring God and relevant to the position of our people worshiping with us.
    

3. Be a team player – if you’re not you’re in the wrong place (1 Samuel 22:1)
    

4. Invest in your craft (1 Samuel 16:23) spend time in worship, working on your skills and practising songs and rhythms at home
    

5. Preparation is never wasted time. Communicating with the leader and speaker for the service will help with meeting the 7 T’s below. Please see the rota to see who you need to liaise with when you are leading:

   • Theme of the service

   • Time to worship (length)

   • Teach – x2 new songs a month

   • Transitions – work on moving between songs

   • Timely songs – worship for your context/where your church is at the moment

   • Talent – right songs for the right people

   • Target – where do we want to go and how are we going to get there (last song then work backwards
      

6. Be all in for church: worship isn’t an exclusive part of church life, we are all expected to be involved in the wider church and to be around when we are not on worship team rota
    

7. Social and spiritual balance –  we will meet for rehearsals but in the future we want to implement social time so that we still have fun, don’t make it a drag and get to know each other more.
    

8. Invest in the next generation – encourage others to join us – people interested need to speak to Smiv and join in practices prior to joining the Sunday rota. (1 chronicles 28: David isn’t the one to build the temple)
    

9. create a safe environment with permission to fail and where peoples names are safe when they are not in the room. We are a team and our aim is to support and develop our skills and musicality as we worship God.
    

10. Keep turning up

 

Additional points:

• If people can’t sing/play well enough it’s not their time to be leading worship and this is ok. With support and practice skills and abilities will develop.

• We are all worship leaders, our role is to facilitate the music aspect to people worshipping

• In the future we would like to explore the Nashville number system for communicating key changes or changes to song flow when we reach this point

• Collaboration is key in song writing – if you write a song bring it to the team and we can work on it together to refine it, learn it and solidify its melody and lyrics

• Have a boundary for prophetic sharing – ask people to check it out with a leader first before sharing with the congregation

• People in the worship team have their eyes open so that communication can be clear

 

New resources:

Ground Level are working on an on-line resource: worship.church. Churches will be able to access modules on their instruments/vocal roles to develop their skills. It will also have a stream of theological updates for leaders on worship. This is something we intend to explore once it is up and running.

 

Dan is working on trialing a new app, Worship Tools that will place all the worship chats and resources in one place. The app will enable us to share flow of songs, keys, lyrics etc with the computer at church so that everything can be added via the app in your location, and be accessed at church. It also has several other functions that we will explore.