Itsara

In my last post on the topic, I talked about what worship means in a larger sense, and why musical worship is so important to us. I also mentioned how musical worship should be an overflow of the general worship we give to God all the time. Today I’ll talk about how this applies to leading worship.

Because musical worship should be an overflow of our life’s worship, when we are leading it our first goal should be that we are worshipping within our own hearts. If we are not, if we do not believe what we are singing or we are “just doing our job”, then we are misleading others. Now understand that we may not always feel like worshipping. That’s okay. Feelings come and go and we can’t always rely on them. So when I feel like praising God certainly I should do so, but when I don’t I can still make an intellectual assent that He is worthy of my praise and I can still sing to Him of all He’s done and all that He is. Just because I don’t feel like it doesn’t mean that it isn’t true, nor does it mean that I shouldn’t sing it. And sometimes the act of singing the Truth can be enough to move my emotions again.

Our second goal, when leading musical worship, is to serve those we are leading. We are providing music and words for them to express themselves to God. Because worship is an individual’s heart focused on God alone, and because at the time we are leading we are the ones who are providing the specific form of expression, it is very important that we not draw any attention to ourselves. That is to say, we are already drawing attention to ourselves by providing music, but the people we are leading need to focus on God and not us. This is the inherent tension of leading musical worship (and this is why I’ve never really liked the “band-on-the-stage” form of worship leading, as it just adds more attention to the leader).

In my experience, there are two extremes where we can draw attention to ourselves and distract people from the worship of God alone. The first extreme is poor musicianship. If we have not practiced, if we don’t know the song very well, if we are singing off key, if we can’t keep the rhythm - all of these things can be distracting to those who notice them.

The other extreme is the temptation of the worship leader to play like a performer. We are not performers. In the world, musicians play to draw attention to themselves and to entertain. We do not do that. So if we start to showboat for the sake of ourselves, we can distract others from the God they should be worshipping instead of the “great worship leader”.

Of course, these are generalizations. Sometimes, when the worship leader is humble and real with the people they are leading, it can make a poor musical set into a wonderful worship experience as everyone is reminded that the music doesn’t matter. Also as we’re leading worship we can sometimes do fancy things and have lots of fun and still be genuinely worshipping by doing so - even though it might look exactly the same as showboating to an outsider. The important thing is that our hearts are true and our consciences clear between us and God, and that we genuinely love and care about those who we are providing musical worship for.

I have one more post (for now) about musical worship. It’s something I learned recently about worshipping in a different setting than I am used to.