worship leadership: engage and create.

Music tends to be the centerpiece of what we do when we design worship services. And songs tend to have shelf-lives.  So finding new music becomes, you know, a ‘thing’.

(On the topic of ‘shelf-lives’ … we’re probably not still singing all of the hymns from the 1800′s. Just a thought.)

The easy thing to do is to shop around for new worship songs by popular artists and choose the ones that will likely ‘catch’ our congregation. I’ve introduced lots of new songs over the years so have a sense of which songs might be successful worship tools for our church.

The hard thing to do is to continually engage with the life of my church on a deep level and create art that comes out of that engagement. Leading worship in one church for a long time means that you stand up every week facing a roomful of people whose stories you know very well, and some you don’t know at all. There are things to be created out of that. It requires digging deep for what the ‘roomful of stories’ needs to give, or what it needs to receive.

Our friend John wrote about this very thing .

Creating is harder than copying. Engaging is harder than shopping.

Time to get to work.