You know how it goes - you send out the song list and anxiously await your midweek rehearsal. The day of rehearsal you get there early and greet your team as they slowly filter in. Once everyone is there, you pray and go to run through your first song and you quickly realize: No one knows their part. So, what do you do? You spend the rest of rehearsal starting and stopping a million times trying to teach people their parts and giving them time to practice what they should have done before they came to rehearsal.

So, how do you get them to come prepared?

Here are 3 ways to motivate your worship team to come to rehearsal prepared:

1 | Have an official STARTING and ENDING time

Parkinson's law: work expands to fill the time available for it's completion.

If people on your team assume there's an infinite amount of time available, there is no urgency in their preparation. And all too often, rehearsals drag on and on simply because there's no official starting AND ending time.

So, set a limit for the length of your rehearsals. You probably already have a starting time (although you might need to stick to it instead of waiting "just a few more minutes for everyone else to show up"). But, also set a stopping time and stick to it because that will force your team work faster.

2 | Have a plan

Now that you've got an official beginning and end to your rehearsal, you need a plan for how you're going to spend that time. Some worship leaders wonder why people waste their time during rehearsals but in reality they never had a plan in the first place. It's in those moments where you are trying to figure out what to do next that the rest of your team realizes: "They aren't taking this very seriously. That must mean I don't need to either."

3 | Get your team what they need to prepare well in advance

Sometimes your team just doesn't have what they need to properly prepare. Only you know what that means for your team. Some teams need chord charts. Some teams just need you to send them a recording for reference. Determine what your team needs and get it to them as early as possible.

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.