The First 48

They say the odds of solving a murder go down drastically outside of the first 48 hours. Now, as worship leaders, you probably are not having to solve many murders, but one of the things I have found happens best within a 48-hour window is feedback. It is so important to create, establish, and maintain a culture of feedback when serving together.

I have both given and received feedback that was too early as well as too late.

When we give feedback that is too early, often we are reacting rather than responding. It is easy to speak from being held hostage by our emotions, rather than taking a moment to collect ourselves to respond with love, grace, and humility. Waiting a day or two gives us the ability to calm down, and ask ourselves if addressing this is really necessary. It gives us time to consider the individual and their story - is the most loving thing to address this, or simply let it go?

When we give feedback that is too late, we are often remembering our emotions more than the ins and outs of the experience. Bringing something up so far past the time it occurred can begin to seem petty or silly. As though you’ve been holding onto something for the purpose of hurting someone rather than healing what may have been broken.

How can you better love, serve, encourage, and equip your team by finding the sweet spot of feedback?

March 27: Liturgy + Set List

• PRAISE TO THE LORD, THE ALMIGHTY/GOOD GOOD FATHER

  Welcome to this fourth Sunday of Lent. In a world that values personal rights and freedoms above all, in a world that encourages you to pursue your own happiness above all, in a world that says ‘if you can afford it, do not deny yourself any pleasure…’ there is perhaps nothing you or I will do this week that is more counter-cultural, more counter-formative than gathering with the people of God. It is when we gather with the people of God that we learn to treasure Christ above our individual rights and freedoms. It is when we gather with the people of God that we learn to grow together rather than seek our own happiness. It is when we gather with the people of God that we learn to live on mission to the glory of God instead of chasing after temporary pleasures. And this is really the invitation of the season of Lent as well, to be invited into a practice that is counter-formative to the way of the world. To starve the flesh, with all of its selfishness, pride, and preferences, to fast from pleasures, so that we may feast on the goodness, grace, mercy, and love of Christ in a unique way in this season. As followers of Jesus we are called to live counter to the way of the world, and that begins when we gather. And we hope that these songs being slow and quiet the last several weeks have served in some small way as visible and audible reminders of the counter-cultural way we are called to live as followers of Jesus. Let’s hear God call us to worship through His word:

• Call to Worship: Psalm 40:5

• WAYMAKER

• BEFORE THE THRONE

  Sermon: Joshua 15-21

• ON CHRIST THE SOLID ROCK

  Corporate Confession:

  Merciful God,
  We confess that we have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed, By what we have done, and by what we have left undone.

  We have not loved You with our whole heart and mind and strength. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. Merciful God,
  We confess that we have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed, By what we have done, and by what we have left undone.

  We have not loved You with our whole heart and mind and strength. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. (Book of Common Prayer)

  Brothers and sisters, hear the good news: He remembers your sins no more. His mercy is greater than your ability to sin.

• HIS MERCY IS MORE

• Benediction

20 March: Liturgy + Set List

• GREAT THINGS

• Call to Worship: Psalm 77:11-15

  Maybe you are here this morning, and along with the Psalmist, are ready to recount the deeds of the Lord. Maybe you are here this morning feeling like you have been slighted by God. The reality for every follower of Jesus is that, one, God has not given us that which we rightly deserve - which is death - the punishment for our sins. And two, that God has given us Himself. Wherever you may be this morning, you and I have many reasons to be glad. Let’s sing these truths together:

• 10,000 REASONS (BLESS THE LORD)/JIREH

  Can I let you in on a worship leader secret? We don’t pick songs that we like to sing. We choose songs week to week which will hopefully help us respond to God as He teaches us through His Word. And at a higher level, we choose songs to sing that will hopefully form our minds and our hearts. Shape our knowledge and our affections of who God is, what He has done, and who He has called us to be. Over the last few weeks, you may have noticed that our songs have been slower, the teams have been smaller and we have not had drums - all of that is on purpose. This is the third week of Lent, a time where we remember, reflect, and repent as we ready our hearts for Easter Sunday. And we wanted to make space for that remembrance, reflection, and repentance through our gathered time together. One other element we are incorporating weekly is a corporate confession of sin, where we confess our sins to God and to one another. Let’s do that together now:

  Corporate Confession:

  Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy and save Your people whom You bought with Your own blood. Do not turn away from us because of our sins. Remember us according to Your steadfast love, and Your gracious work for Your people. Deliver us that we may enjoy the benefits of Your chosen ones, and share in the joy of Your people, and join Your inheritance in giving praise. Amen. (Adapted from Seed Grains of Prayer, 1914)

  Assurance of Pardon: Ephesians 1:11-14

• I SHALL NOT WANT

• Sermon: Joshua 13-14

  Communion

• I STAND AMAZED (HOW MARVELOUS)

Worship As Pastoral Care

I once heard Bob Kauflin comment that if worship leaders were to do any kind of continued education, he would encourage them to study Biblical Counseling. Isn’t that interesting? Not necessarily theology, or music theory, not necessarily Greek, Hebrew, or composition, conducting, or sight-reading. No, Biblical Counseling. The longer I lead worship the more I am convinced that leading worship is primarily a pastoral function before it is a musical one. It is pastoral because we are dealing with real human souls. Souls in all of their brokenness and joy, souls in all of their immaturity and experience, souls in all of their comfort and distress, and we are seeking to guide, instruct, teach, and care for them through liturgy, song, Scripture, prayer, and preparation.

Worship As Pastoral Care by William H. Willimon, was one of the books that helped me continue to put language to the pastoral aspect of leading worship. Willimon says,

The history of pastoral care shows two dimensions of the care of our souls: (1) the preservation of spiritual health through preventive or protective care as well as daily guiding and sustaining care and (2) the restoration of spiritual and emotional health if and when dysfunction occurs…

Liturgy is education.  The question before us… is not whether our people will learn when they worship.  The question is, what will they learn when we lead them in worship?  We sometimes forget that we are engaged in education every time we lead the congregation in prayer or in the Lord’s Supper or in any other occasion of public worship.  Unfortunately, people often learn things when they worship that we may not have intended - but they still learn.

Public worship is always an invitation to the individual to risk communion, to move out from oneself into the larger body…

We are not simply choosing songs, we are forming people. Conviction and comfort is the work of the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit will often work through the people of God to voice that conviction or comfort. We must be attentive to the voice of the Spirit in our preparation as well as in our leading. We must choose songs that enable…

The line between work and worship, between the everyday, pedestrian details of the workaday world and the world within the liturgy should be a thin and frequently broken line.

When we see the liturgy and gathering as the people of God as more than something we do once a week, but something we inhabit - something which inhabits us - we are beginning to invite the conviction and comfort of the Holy Spirit more fully into the rhythms of our lives.

Karl Barth says: ‘It is not only in worship that the community is edified and edifies itself.  But it is here first that this continuously takes place.  And if it does not take place here, it does not take place anywhere.’ If the community does not worship, it is not a Christian community.  If worship does not upbuild and sustain the community, it is not Christian worship.

The liturgy is ‘the work of the people,’ it is the action, the yearning, the heartbreak, and the outstretched hands of those who are gathered around the Table and the action, the yearning, the heartbreak, and outstretched hands of the God who deems to meet them in the flesh.

Learning To Lead During COVID-19 (Two Years On)

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote about learning to lead worship during COVID-19. Two years on I am still learning. Maybe you are too. I hope these brief reflections can at least make you feel less alone, and hopefully encourage you to keep going…

I believe that hard things do not change us as much as they expose us. And our hearts and lives have been exposed by COVID-19 in ways that many of us have previously been able to avoid or ignore.

What do we value?

Whose lives matter?

Are masks a sign of fear, and going maskless a sign of faith?

Are vaccines helpful and useful, or reckless and untested?

Are there only ever two sides and two options?

Is everything black or white?

What is selfish and self-serving, what is foolish and careless?

Can I be friends with people who think and believe differently than me, or must we now become enemies?

Are we going to be discipled by culture and politics or by the Gospel?

The ugliness of my heart has been exposed in the pandemic: my tendency to judge other people, other followers of Jesus against myself and my own decisions. To look for specs through a log.

When I am attentive to the conviction of the Holy Spirit within rather than an outward condemnation of the pharisee within, I can see these places of friction as opportunities for repentance and prayer.

If we are willing these are opportunities for iron to sharpen iron. For the Church to truly be what we already are - one people, one body, made up of every tribe, tongue, nation, and language. This is an opportunity for us to image to the world our unity not through ideology, politics, or socioeconomic brackets, but by the unifying blood of Jesus.

This truly could be an opportunity to display the beauty of the Gospel.

To make obvious our adoption as sons and daughters of God.

My prayer as I look out on the faces of the congregation,

as I run into people as they stumble over why they have not been serving or attending,

as I field questions about why we are doing this, and why we are not doing that,

as we wrestle with what it looks like to love and honor God and care well for His people,

as we stumble forward,

and as I become more aware of my own sin, is:

God give me Your eyes to see these people. Let me grieve over my sin more than over the differences of my brothers and sisters. Keep me close to You, and tender toward especially those who are loud, vocal, and combative in the opposite direction from my own convictions. Give me the compassion of Christ, who ‘When He saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.’ (Matthew 9:36).

May our divisions be an opportunity for repentance. May our divisions turn us to Christ, the One who has torn down the dividing wall of hostility between God and man, who has reconciled us to become people of reconciliation, who has comforted us to be people of comfort. Amen and amen.

Lent Preparation

Lent is a season of preparation. From Ash Wednesday the following forty days (excluding Sundays), we fast and pray as we ready our hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits to treasure Christ in all things - the gore of Good Friday and the glory of Resurrection Sunday. Even if your church does not follow or celebrate the seasons of the church calendar outside of Easter and Christmas, I believe there is still benefit in personal preparation, and leading our teams to prepare as well.

Easter and Christmas are some of the busiest times in the life of any church. If we do not prepare practically we run the risk of being scattered and frantic. If we do not prepare spiritually our lives are emptied of opportunity for meaning and significance. And that is why we prepare. Because preparation builds meaning and significance into our lives. Because preparation is never about the preparation itself, but making space for something else. We exercise not for the sake of exercise but for making space for a healthy body. We study not for study's sake, but to make space for learning and becoming. Preparation creates space for us to focus on the right things. So as we spend time fasting and praying, turning inward with the Holy Spirit to examine our hearts and lives, and turning outward toward Christ in repentance and faith we are preparing our hearts not just for another Sunday, but for deeper levels of gratitude and thanksgiving for the cross and resurrection.

Whether it is adding a spiritual discipline in this season (like fasting, or silence) or spending more time in prayer and Scripture, how might you prepare your own heart for Easter this Lenten season? Whether it is pulling back on the production of your team, doing fewer upbeat songs, leading a Lenten devotional, or giving your team the opportunity for prayer and silence during rehearsals, how might you prepare your team for Easter this Lenten season? Whether it is through a weekly corporate confession, changing the visuals on the platform, or simply acknowledging and encouraging people to spend the next forty days in preparation for Easter, how might you prepare the congregation for Easter this Lenten season?

Plural Pronouns

We live in a pronoun-obsessed culture.

But rarely do we make conscious decisions about pronouns in our corporate gathering when it comes to songs, readings, and prayers.

In the West, we have often emphasized having a personal relationship with Jesus, at the expense of understanding that we are not just saved to be an individual, but saved to be a people, a part of the family, the body of Christ, His Church. As a result, we see lots of language in our corporate worship songs that emphasize the individual: I, me, my, mine.

But when we gather as the people of God we are once again reminded of the corporate nature of our identity as followers of Jesus. We are the Body of Christ.

When we intentionally choose songs, prayers, and readings that use plural pronouns we are simultaneously reinforcing our truer identity as a people. And countering the dominant narrative and understanding that our Christian faith is merely an individual pursuit.

We need individual pronouns as well. We want to make space for individual praise, confession, repentance, and response. But we need plural pronouns to rightly form what the culture has deformed in the life of every follower of Jesus.

Words matter. So let us think intentionally about how language shapes our understanding of who we are and who we are becoming.

February 13: Liturgy + Set List

• BEFORE THE THRONE

  Call to Worship: Psalm 24

  Let there be no mistake, we gather to lift our eyes to the King of Glory. The One who made and sustains all things, who has pursued us with His goodness and mercy. Let’s sing together:

• GOODNESS OF GOD

• IN CHRIST ALONE

  Sermon: Joshua 5:13-6:27

  If we were honest, each of us desire to be our own king. And more than that, each of use desire all of the benefits of living in God’s kingdom while remaining king of our own lives. We want God’s justice enacted on those who have wronged us. We want to receive God’s goodness, kindness, grace, love, mercy and forgiveness, but we don’t want Jesus to be our King. Because if Jesus is king it means that you are not. Jesus is a king who disrobes himself of glory and majesty, steps into our world to pursue treasonous and rebellious sinners like you and me. Jesus is king and that is good news for you and me. Let’s sing:

• GOD WITH US

• REVIVE US AGAIN

Family and Leading

Whether as a volunteer or as a paid staff member - ministry is not for the faint of heart. It can be easy to become discouraged. It can be easy to work for God without spending time with God. It can be easy to have our time become consumed with pursuing excellence in our preparation, to the neglect of other God-given responsibilities. And if you feel called to some kind of ministry, it can be tempting to see others as an obstacle, rather than co-laborers in serving together on mission.

Whether you are living at home with your parents, are married, or single, or have children, a calling to ministry is not an individual call as much as it is a communal, familial call. I have found Pete Scazzero’s language to this end helpful when he talks about how we lead ‘out of our marriage or singleness.’

And if it is true that we minister out of our marriage or singleness, how should that reality shape the way we lead? I am learning that this idea means we do not lead and serve apart from our family but from our family. We lead as a missional representative of the family to which we belong. What is more, if this is true for those of us charged with carrying the responsibilities for a team, it is true for each person serving on our team as well.

Here are some of the rhythms I am trying to incorporate as I consider what it looks like to lead out of my family, and encourage my team to do the same:

Thank families, not just individuals. We often think that the individual is having to sacrifice their time to serve - this is true, but it is also a sacrifice for the family. Less time with a spouse, or children with their parent. It may mean driving separately, coming early, sitting by yourself, or solo-parenting. This is not just a sacrifice of the team member, but their family unit.

Involve the kids. I like to strike the stage every week. If and when possible, my kids love to help me wrap cables, clean up trash, and carry equipment on and off the platform. This is a simple way for them to feel a part of what we do as a family. And I hope and pray this is the way they will come to see ministry in the future.

Prepare at home. This is a great way to involve our families in what we are doing, and why we are doing it. My kids love to sing and practice with me for a Sunday - they will get out all of their instruments and play along as I sing through the setlist.

Use your home. Whether for team meetings, training, or discipleship - our homes can be a great place to show hospitality, but they can also be a great way for our families to be able to participate with us - in the preparation of cleaning, cooking, and hosting, as well engaging face-to-face with those we serve alongside.

Thank your family. I want to be aware that I am able to do what I do because my wife encourages and enables it. I can do what I do because my kids are willing to give up time with their Dad - this is not my thing, it is our thing, and they deserve credit and appreciation for the sacrifices made as we serve together on mission.

Lead from your family, not apart from your family. And encourage your team to do the same.

February 6: Liturgy and Set List

• HOW GREAT THOU ART

  Call to Worship: Psalm 70:4-5

  We gather not for a spiritual pick-me-up, but to delight our hearts in the salvation of our great God. The One who has enabled us through Jesus to be in right relationship with Him. Let’s delight in that truth together:

• WAYMAKER

• MY JESUS, I LOVE THEE

• Sermon: Joshua 5:1-9

  The people of Israel saw God do great and glorious things and still did not obey. Brothers and sisters, we sit on this side of the cross of Christ and still do not obey. Our obedience to God does not earn God’s love for us. God loves us, so we desire to obey. Let’s remind one another of that truth together - would you stand and sing:

• HOW DEEP THE FATHERS LOVE FOR US

• RAISE UP THE CROWN (ALL HAIL THE POWER)

Shifting The Culture

We are always building culture.

We shape the culture and the culture shapes us.

As leaders, specifically, those who oversee an area of ministry, we have a responsibility to intentionally form, clearly articulate, and faithfully model the culture we are seeking to cultivate.

Intentionally form. You are forming the culture of your team right now. Rather than haphazardly letting it grow wild, cultivate, till, prune toward the kind of culture you believe with honor God and serve His people - both the congregation and the team - well.

Clearly articulate. Much teaching and training is caught, but it is also important to teach, train, and articulate the kind of cultural values you are seeking to develop among the team. We cannot expect people to embrace and embody a culture if we articulate it one time, this is an ongoing, repeated conversation.

Faithfully model. Our behavior reveals our values. I can say that I value being healthy and in shape, but if I do not consistently eat well, and exercise, those are just words, not values. As leaders we always go first - we must show our team how to carry the culture. Do not give up, or lose heart. Consistency is essential in establishing and shifting anything meaningful.

Ultimately real change is only possible through the empowering and ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. But if we neglect to continually cultivate our culture, the strongest personalities and cultural forces will shape, and disciple our team. Our cultures will grow either way, so why not intentionally invest beauty, goodness, and truth into what is growing in your team?

January 30: Liturgy + Set List

• ON CHRIST THE SOLID ROCK

  Call To Worship: Psalm 100

  You will hear no other word from this platform this morning that is more important than the Word of God. That is why we sing God’s Word, we pray God’s Word, we hear God’s Word, we preach and teach God’s Word, and we live our lives in response to God’s Word. It is in God’s Word that we learn about the Word made Flesh - Jesus. Who He is, what He has done, and how He has called us to live. Let’s sing to Him together.

• PRAISE TO THE LORD, THE ALMIGHTY/GOOD GOOD FATHER

• I SHALL NOT WANT

  Sermon: Joshua 3-4

  Elder Ordination

• RAISE A HALLELUJAH