Can You Hear Them? (10 Tips for Unleashing a Singing Congregation)

 

This past I week I had the chance to be part of the congregation while one of our teams lead worship without me on stage. (It’s one of the great joys of leadership when you get to watch the team you have trained and cared for lead with as much excellence and power as if you were on stage with them.) I had been standing in the back row worshipping until it was time for me to come forward to do the communion meditation and prayer when I got to the front row it hit me. The congregation was singing out LOUDLY! There are few things on earth that I love more than that sound.

Backing up a bit, I was having a conversation with an elder at another church recently and he mentioned that he has noticed a growing trend of people standing and watching the band and vocalists during worship instead of singing along. He then asked me if I thought that was okay? I told him it was not only NOT okay, but that there were some simple ways to make it easier to help and encourage them to do so with joy.

Loops in Worship with iPad and BeatMaker 2

We’ve been using Ableton from a desktop for running loops and tracks in worship for a while now and I’ve been looking for an easy portable alternative. I’m a big proponent of having a backup system so when things go wrong you’re not frantically trying to pull things together or troubleshoot. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to afford a macbook yet so I turned to my handy dandy iPad to look for solutions. There are a couple options out there but I wanted something that I could use immediately without having to upload or process anything and that wasn’t dependent on an internet connection. Additionally, I wanted to be able to control things with the Keith McMillan Softstep that I already owned.

I’m excited to say that after hours of trying out apps and digging through online forums I’ve found something that works like a dream.

Just, like… talk good and stuff (Tips on Speaking for Worship Leaders)

They’re listening. I know sometimes we wonder how much of what we say from stage is sinking in but they’re catching much more than we might think.

Scary isn’t it. More often than not, the things we say from stage can have as much power as the songs we lead. Actually, when thoughtful spoken words combine with our music the impact is multiplied.

Once I realized that I needed to work on my communication, I began paying attention to other worship leaders to see what I could learn. Here’s some of tips and pitfalls that I’ve come across in the past couple of years.

Worship Design Team (Role #5: Video Producer/ Digital Narrator)

Narrator- A person who gives an account or tells the story of events, experiences, etc.

Jesus was a great narrator. He told stories about a relationship between a father and his two sons, a farmer throwing seeds left and right, and the investments of 2 wise servants and one scared lazy one, and many others. Jesus used images, situations and people from everyday life that were familiar with to help communicate truth in a powerful, compelling way. Telling stories has always been one of the most effective ways to draw people in with a message that is memorable and has the potential to shape behavior.

Worship Design Team (Role# 4: Tech Director/The Wizard)

The band comes in and their mics have been tested and work, the lyrics are in the same order as the way the vocalists sing them, stage lights go off and on at just the right time. It’s just like magic…well almost. In the wizard of oz, the great oz was just a really smart person behind a curtain pulling levers and pushing buttons to give the effect of magic.

Enter the tech director. They’re not behind a curtain but they are usually the one behind the tech booth who knows what most of the buttons, knobs, switches and sliders do and how to make them work together to look like magic. The difference is that the tech director isn’t alone. They are usually running around behind the scenes directing a whole team of people who are working technology simultaneously to accomplish one goal. That goal is to clearly facilitate a worship service so that people can experience the gospel of Jesus without distraction. They do this by supporting each other, the team on stage and running and troubleshooting technology.

Creativity: Finding The Right Ideas (Scratching 201)

So in my post about killing bad creative team meetings one of the major parts of designing worship services is about gathering various elements that will be pieces in the puzzle called scratching. Scratching is the process of intentionally looking through any resources and compiling elements for a worship service. One of the hardest things about scratching is knowing where to start. Creativity is not about finding ideas, it’s about finding the right ones.

Untangling Church A/V

“I’m in over my head” he said with an embarrassed and terrified look on his face. I was leading worship for a conference out of town and as we were setting up I asked the volunteer who was running the sound system a question. The worship leader had left for another church a couple of months previous and the tech director had quit a couple weeks before as well. As we worked together to cobble together a solution I was struck with a powerful realization. I said to myself, “I don’t ever want this to happen to anyone who serves in my ministry!” And then I choked because I realized it could.

Killing Bad Creative Meetings (tips for Creative Teams)

Running effective and productive meetings is hard. As I’ve talked with other worship leaders and ministers I’ve found that running a creative meeting seems to be even harder. When I ask how colleagues run creative meetings, the response is usually something like “not very well”. I’ve been working on killing bad creative team meetings in the last couple of years and have identified some of the pitfalls as well as a couple of solutions. I think that a lot of the difficulty comes from our understanding of creativity. We tend to treat creativity as if it’s this magic inspiration that appears at just the right time.  That explains why sitting in a room and looking at a sermon title with a section of scripture, waiting for the good stuff to come pouring out rarely happens.

Song Set Coach (Excel in Worship Planning: Tool #4)

In baseball, it amazes me how stats are kept on everything. How many pitches thrown in a game, in a series, in a season and in a career.  How many fly balls are caught, how many base hits are made, how many fouls.  They probably even keep numbers on how many times a pitcher spits or something silly like that.  Stats are kept so that progress, growth, and success of teams and players can be tracked and recorded.

What if we thought about worship song sets the same way?

Lowes and Worship Ministry (stage design lessons learned)

Check out our Worshipleaderlab Flikr account to see examples of our stage designs.

When I took the job at Lakeside over six years ago, stage design was not even a blip on my radar. I walked in to a “gymnatorium” or a “sanctanasium” (whichever you prefer) and thus began my journey and daily experiment of taking a multi-use room and turning it into an useful worship space.  Over the years I never would have imagined how much time I would spend in home improvement stores problem solving and dreaming up stage designs. As I get a chance, I will go through the individual stage changes and walk through the materials used in the ones we’re particularly proud.  In this post I simply want to point out some of the lessons learned over the past six years of doing stage design. I wish I had known about the website www.churchstagedesigns.com earlier because it would have answered a lot of questions for me. However, I’m glad we did things the way we did because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to pass on the following lessons I’ve learned along the way. Here’s some things that it takes to do stage design in the local church.