How should you structure your worship rehearsals?

Question:

How do you structure your practices? Do you spend all the time on music, or do you have time for spiritual development as well?

Answer:

What should your worship rehearsals look like? And, as always, you might have heard me talk about this a million times now, but check out the worship rehearsal blueprint because I will give you a step-by-step guide for how I think you should run your worship rehearsals that lead your team well. And this plays into the answer I'm about to give: Lead your team well, yes, musically, but also spiritually and relationally as well. So, check that out.

But let's talk about those three areas.

The Holistic View of Worship Leadership

Because for a lot of worship teams, whenever we first start out as worship team leaders, we think my primary responsibility is to get my team to be able to play these songs for Sunday.

At face value, it's like, yeah, that is kind of the front-facing responsibility that you have. But if we want to be good worship leaders, good worship team leaders, then we need to have a holistic view of our worship ministry, and it can't just be, "Hey, we're going to show up, run through our songs, and then leave." We need to pour into our worship teams musically, but also spiritually and relationally as well.

Prioritizing Spiritual Development: Devotionals and Conversations

So, I always have time for not just the musical side of things. That's a given. That's basically why we're gathered together on Thursday nights for my team. But then we've also got the spiritual side and the relational side.

So, what does that look like? Well, let's start with the spiritual side first.

I always like to do a devotional during my worship rehearsals. I like to have a regular routine of a devotional time. And whenever you hear devotional, I think a lot of people freak out, and they're like, "I don't know how I'm going to come up with 15 minutes, 20 minutes worth of content every single week that I have to teach my team."

First of all, you don't have to come up with it on your own. There's other resources out there for that.

For instance, I wrote "We Are All Worship Leaders" so that you can start to have a regular routine of devotionals in your worship time. So, get a devotional if you need one.

But if you want to start just really simply, if you've never done this before, all you have to do is come up with a poignant question to ask your worship team.

I did this for so long, and it was just so beneficial because I don't have to come up with a 15-minute lesson every week. I don't even think that that's the most effective way to lead worship team rehearsals. That's why I didn't do it.

But a question that you ask, a question something like, "What was the most significant time of corporate worship that we had this past year?" Ask that question, and then say, "How can we facilitate more of those moments?"

Your worship team could easily have a 15-minute conversation about that, and it wouldn't just be you speaking at your team for 15 minutes while they're staring at you trying to get to the portion of the rehearsal where you can actually play some music.

During that time, they would be able to give their input, and you would actually do a lot less talking. You would probably only talk for ten percent of the time, and your team would talk for ninety percent of the time.

And so, ask these questions. You could ask, "What is God teaching you right now?" What is the newest thing that God has been teaching to you personally? And then your team has the opportunity to speak into each other's lives, and you facilitate a conversation and not just give a lecture.

Lectures are boring; conversations are fun.

Let's have more conversations in church and not just lecture people the whole time.

Guiding Conversations and Building Relationships

That being said, I do want to add the caveat: We are still the worship team leader. So, this doesn't mean that you absolve yourself from leading the conversation during your worship rehearsals. We are still responsible for guiding that conversation in the right way. But guiding the conversation doesn't just mean speaking at people for 15 minutes. It can be asking the right questions.

When people say something, you can say, "Actually, I think this about that." And if they say something that you don't agree with, that's how I would handle it: "Actually, I was thinking about this, and it says this in Scripture," and you just kind of gently steer the conversation back on track.

And you can accomplish a lot more and get your worship team to buy into whatever concept you want them to buy into if you simply allow them to work through it in their own minds instead of just teaching them and spewing words at them for 15 or 20 minutes.

So, to answer the question, do I spend all my time on musical things? No. I spend it on spiritual things and also, hopefully, in that answer I just gave you, also see that I spend time on relational things. A lecture isn't relational; a conversation is relational. And as we have conversations with our worship team, and they aren't just all sitting in rows and me up front speaking at them, as we gather in a circle and have a conversation, our relationships are strengthened. People get to know each other better, which strengthens the worship team, which will also ultimately allow us to play music better together because we know and trust each other better.

So, these things all work in tandem. But do not just focus on the musical side of leading worship. You need to focus on the spiritual side and the relational side to make sure that your team grows closer to God and grows closer to each other.

If you need a plan for your worship rehearsal, check out the worship rehearsal blueprint.