An Antidote for Insular and Isolating Worship Expressions
" - all of them trained and skilled in music for the LORD... Young and old alike, teacher as well as student, cast lots for their duties."
The cost of better church music is a growing gap between those with the skill and those without the skill to engage actively in church music ministry. I like the music and I appreciate the growing openness in worship settings to art and excellence. My great concern is for a polarization and positioning within worshipping communities and worshippers. A portion of 1 Chronicles 25 hints quite matter-of-fact at an antidote.
I was listening to a popular preacher speak disparagingly about a university ministry: "still with two guys leading worship with acoustic guitars." In some ways it is exciting that the folky, guitar-driven worship model has given way to bands. Loud, polished and performance savvy bands. Personally, as a professional musician, there is a side of the growing artistic excellence in church music that provides a small bit of job security, which I enjoy. However, fundamentally, it breaks my heart to watch the pool of people serving as worship leaders and musicians shrink as performance value rises. I am old enough, to reflect on "the old days" with rose-tinted spectacles - defending the university ministry "two-guitar guys" to my preacher friend out of fondness for the past. But, there are numerous, and quite nobler reasons to defend those guys against the worship snobbery that creeps in like a cancer.
David's tabernacle worship team offers a vision that may inform our practice of worship leadership today. First, we see a response to the polarization of those with the skill and without the skill to participate - training. The passage in 1 Chronicles 25 documents a systematic approach to training and supervision. I am on a quest for communities of faith that model a commitment to training and supervision of worship artists and musicians. Please help!
Two congregations that are making strides are Peninsula Community Church (PCC) in Rancho Palos Verde, CA and Desert Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Lancaster, CA.
Martin Allen, the worship leader at PCC, has attempted to bring on his staff resident artists who are committed to training people in the congregation and community. A teaching space was set up and the worship ministry provides a small amount of organizational support for arranging lessons. The church has historically relied heavily on paid musicians from outside the church. However, the attempt at providing a structured training culture is allowing PCC to maintain a high level of artistic excellence with an expression that may eventually flow authentically from the congregational community.
Behind the scenes, supervision and mentorship is a great strength of the worship ministry at DVCF. There are many expressions of corporate praying and singing outside of the main Sunday experience and multiple venues on a Sunday morning that have distinct worship music expressions. Paul Loppiccolo has a twenty-plus-year tenure as the worship pastor at the church. DVCF does not have a structured training environment. Yet, supervision in a systematic way is helping the ministry grow in dramatic ways.
Loppiccolo developed a three-week orientation to worship ministries that includes an audition. He attempts to match individuals with expressions that fit their current skill level as a starting point. For Loppiccolo, the scheduling of teams, a task usually seen as an administrative task, provides a platform for focused pastoral ministry - placing people in environments and relationships where growth takes place.
Set teams are shunned and instead Loppiccolo looks to grow people through the ad hoc training that takes place when stronger, or seasoned people are linked up with weaker or new folks. For example, he mentions, if a drummer is weak with time he will schedule that drummer with his strongest bass player for a few weeks or a month. A young worship leader may be scheduled to play in support of another worship leader as well as in environments that allow them to lead out.
It seems that long ago, in David's tabernacle worship team, someone - probably many - caught the positioning disease. Positioning stems from a prideful protection of a "right" to participate. Age, tenure, skill-level are common markers of a protected position. It affected temple worship enough that a wise person devised an antidote: they cast lots for their duties. It wasn't only the young and inexperienced that drew straws for their time on stage. Young and old, teacher and student, they all cast lots. Likewise, today, we need to remember our human tendency to claim and protect a role - excluding others. We need to build into our community a system that reminds everyone of the grace that invites and evokes worship ministry.
Too many worship leaders describe the request from people wanting to be involved as singers and instrumentalist as a troublesome chore. The process of vetting those wanting to be involved in worship ministry often is designed to keep those requests at a minimum. A few years ago I was at a worship conference and the presenter discussed his "pay-your-dues" philosophy of raising up worship leaders. He gave an example of a young inexperienced worship leader that he trained. The young woman came to him excited about worship ministry and asked how she might "plug-in." He mentioned that he asked her to start coming to rehearsal to just watch. After describing a number of hoops he had the young girl jump through on her way to participating on stage, he summarized his thoughts with, "worship ministry is a privilege and if someone has to pay their dues they appreciate it more."
Disheartened to the point of disgust. The pay-your-dues practice in worship teams stems from an entitlement ideology. It is not a new problem. Worship ministry leadership is not a right or privilege to appreciate, or protect. Worship is a response to God's extravagant grace. The guarding of position that grows from a "privileged" worship ministry perspective expresses the depth of grace the unforgiving debtor displayed in Matthew 18. Whether your team draws straws like those serving in David's tabernacle or internalizes the practice of laying down rights to position in some other way, refusing to guard position for the sake of status of benefit is essential to the health of a worshipping community.
Casting lots just may be a best-practice strategy for scheduling your worship team. However, an inclusionary model found in 1 Chronicles is directly linked to a commitment to intentional training and supervision with humility.
