Worship Leading

Hey guys again! Sorry for springing another blog entry on you so soon...but hey!! Something to grab you out of your average everyday lives for 2 minutes, yeah? I just went to this awesome site by Reuben Morgan: http://www.fivelines.com/

I had a poke around and came across this article...very relevant to me and a few other people I know...You know who you are, anyway...awesome stuff. Very inspirational.


Servanthood and your worship team

Serving well through worship

Peter Wilson serves alongside Pastor Gary Clarke at the Hillsong Church in London. It is a dynamic fast growing church reaching and impacting the city with the gospel of Jesus Christ. He is a great asset to their team and truly has laid his life down to see the kingdom advanced.

LEADING A WORSHIP TEAM

Obviously there's loads of different subjects that I could talk about when it comes to running a worship team, however I’d like to look at just one of them. This is something that has really been on my heart lately and in my experience it is one of the biggest issues in worship teams.

If I had to sum it up in one word it would probably best be described as Servanthood. As a Worship Pastor, I really believe that something incredibly powerful can come out of a strong relationship between us and our Senior Pastors, however it must be based on us as Worship Pastors recognizing that we are 'serving' the Pastor’s vision, not building our own. If you think about it, the Worship pastor and Senior pastor share the platform almost 50/50 in most churches, so we are by default one of the most public representatives of the church. It is therefore imperative that we share the same vision.

Our motive must also be pure. We must die to self, or in other words give up on our own desires and learn to serve someone else's desires. It is often easy to say we are serving the church or serving the Pastor, but in actual fact we are building our own little empire; a worship team full of people that will play the style of music I like, at the volume I like, with a sound system, lighting and staging that I like etc etc. It’s actually not about what we like, it’s what our Pastor wants. That's what we’re there for.

Here's the amazing thing though, when you approach this servanthood thing without your own agenda and without looking for what you might get out of it, it's amazing what you actually do get out of it. The story of Daniel in the bible is a great example of this. The King of Babylon sent his men to look for intelligent, good-looking Israelites who had the ability to learn the culture of Babylon. Once he’d found them he brought them in and trained them in the culture of his kingdom. There isn't a lot recorded about these years of training, however as there were no significant events recorded, we can presume that Daniel faithfully studied and learned the culture of this foreign, God-less land. In fact he studied it so well that he stood out head and shoulders above everybody else, to the point where the King trusted him. At that point Daniel was allowed the freedom to express his opinion and style things the way he liked.

This is the same with us as Worship Pastors. When you begin to serve wholeheartedly, with no ulterior motives (which are very obvious, might I add), you begin to build trust, to the point where eventually your pastor will say, why don’t you do what you want to do, because I trust that everything you do now will represent me well.

I’ve experienced this in the relationship with my Senior Pastor and it's an incredible thing. I’m still serving and still dying to self but at the same time I'm living out my dream. Just remember God placed those dreams in your heart and He knows what He’s doing. He didn’t place them there for no reason. He also knows what a powerful thing it is to learn to die to self and to learn to serve, because out of that foundation of servanthood, He can build something great that brings glory to Him alone.

Please be encouraged by this and make the decision to build a healthy, productive, servant-based relationship with your Senior Pastor. It will undoubtedly produce the best results.

Cheers, D-Man