An Email I Received...

I just came across something in my spam filter and thought of blogging about it.

It was an email from a worship leader from whom I have not heard from for a long time. I subscribed to his mailing list, and soon discovered that he had only one product to sell, and he would email me only to sell me that one product, so I got to see how many different ways he had to plug that one product. It was entertaining until he ran out of ideas…

Then I saw his most recent email. It was on a money-making opportunity with a multi-level payout. To qualify you had to get people to click on internet advertisements, and once there are enough people in your group clicking on online ads you stand to make a handsome 5-figure sum monthly.

I am not going to say if such an opportunity is going to work in the long term, or will it collapse within a couple of months or so. The best way to find out, I feel, is to get involved, but I honestly don’t want to give up even 5 minutes a day to look at online advertisements.

But that is not the point of this post.

What I want to say is this: if you have subscribed to my mailing lists at Invisible Worship Musician, I assume you want information and insight on worship ministry. I am also going to assume that if you want money-making opportunities, you will look for people you respect in this area and consider the opportunities they offer. I am currently in the midst of setting up a secular business of my own, but if you are on my worship ministry list I will NOT bug you over it, because when you signed up I promised not to spam you with irrelevant messages. And that, in our context, refers to anything that doesn’t apply to worship ministry.

As for the other guy, I wish him well. He is the Lord’s servant, and he is accountable to God for what he does with his mailing list (Rom 14:4). On MY mailing list I will NOT promote to you anything that is not related to worship ministry in some way, shape or form.

And if you are on his mailing list too, I’d like you to share with me, either via email or the comments section below on this page, your thoughts and feelings about him branching out into such other matters and emailing you about it. Are you intrigued, amused, irritated or offended?

Let me know!

Worship Musicians - A Sales Lesson

This never fails to irk me.

I’d be talking with some business people, and they’ll tell me what kind of customers they want, usually those who would mindlessly buy all their products at prices way above the market rate. Fair enough. I mean, if I was in business that’s the kind of customers I would want too.

And when I ask, “What are these people like? What do they care about? Where can you find them?” I usually get blank stares. Or they say “Can you help improve the English in our advertisement so that we can appeal to those people?” They’ve probably realized that their advertising isn’t working, so they hope that a quick fix (like improving the grammar) is enough to have hordes of crazed customers banging down their doors, begging for the chance to give them tons of money…

If business was THAT simple, shouldn't I do it myself and take all the money? Come on!

(“JJ, I thought this is about worship ministry?” - I’ll get to that in a moment!)

Those business people don’t realize that you cannot create something, present it to your ideal customer and try to trick them into buying it. Unless you are the only source of a product everyone needs, you have to know what your customers are looking for, what matters to them and how to give them what THEY want to buy, not what you want to sell to them.

Makes sense?

Just as clueless as the business people I mentioned earlier are many church leaders when looking for worship musicians. They approach recruiting church musicians with the same amount of care, planning and thought those businesses approach acquiring customers – almost zero.

Let me put this to you in business terms: when you are recruiting church musicians, you are doing sales. You are selling people the opportunity to be used by God in a powerful ministry that can deeply touch the lives of people, and can oftentimes unlock many other hidden giftings within the servers as well.

And what is the price? The price they have to pay to buy this opportunity is time; time spent on lessons and practice to acquire the relevant skills and knowledge, as well as time spent on rehearsals and service. This is time that can be spent with the family, on the career or the social life, or studying other areas of interest.

(Taking me for example - the biggest reason I am currently a socially-inept worship ministry geek is because of all the time I spent practicing during my younger days. That was the price I paid. This is why I can’t do youth ministry. I totally don’t understand youth, because I spent my youth on scales and drum rudiments!)

Besides time, many musicians have also invested considerable sums of money, both in their lessons and to purchase their instruments for practice. Let’s not include the opportunity cost, all the money they could have made if they spent their free time working instead of practising!

From this we can see that it takes a certain personality type to become a musician. Working with this type of people is like marketing to the affluent. If you try to sell products and services to the affluent without understanding what makes them different from the rest of the market, you will fail.

Dismally.

There is one thing many worship musicians have in common. And if you understand this ONE feature, you will know how to recruit them, how to handle them and how to lead them.

What is it?

Worship musicians very often lack confidence.

This makes sense if you stop and really think about it. Music is very wide ranging and diverse, and after some time the musician become aware of all the areas they are still not good at. Sight-reading? Arranging? Playing in a particular style, such as baroque, classical, jazz or R & B? Playing by ear? Improvisation? Transposing?

This lack of confidence applies across the board, whether the musician started lessons from young or took up an instrument later on in life. Someone who reads notes feels inadequate when facing a musician who plays entirely by ear. Musicians who play entirely by ear often feel insecure because they know that there are many things they cannot practice and train in unless they can read notes. Some of them feel like they are musical fakers, without genuine substance and music skill. And this nagging sense of insecurity remains no matter how much praise they receive for their music and how much encouragement others give them.

This lack of confidence colours a lot of what musicians do and how they think, yet it is something they HATE to admit to. So if you put them in a place where they have to admit their lack of confidence or show that their skills are lacking, they won't turn up.

That is why, when churches are recruiting worship musicians, I tell them to put up their list of worship musician criteria up on their website. And if those churches are following my material, they should embed my Youtube videos on auditioning church pianists and drummers too. Don't tell me that it's difficult for your web-techs. It isn't. I can do it, and I am not a techie kind of person And once that page is set up it is something permanent your people can refer to.

Don't be lazy and say "We'll tell them our criteria when they tell us they are interested". It's very likely that the vast majority WON'T. They will scan through your church website and see if the info is there. If it isn't there, many of them are NOT going to ask. They don't want to bring up the topic, find out that they don't measure up, and then have to admit that to you. They hate that feeling.

This applies if you are announcing your recruitment exercise from the pulpit. Unless you stress that there are criteria and the musicians who wish to join your worship team can find out what they are in a non-threatening way, you are making it hard for them to approach you. If you put the criteria some place where they can check it up themselves, it is a lot less threatening to them.

Imagine that you are a shopowner, you've got many customers walking into a shop but your shop staff ignore them and don't even TRY to give them some information on what you have for sale or find out what they are looking for. As a business owner, should you tolerate this kind of sloppy service? It's costing you business!

But if you have a website or blog for your church and you don't put up your criteria for worship musicians up there, that's costing you worship musicians who may otherwise be a blessing to your congregation. That's fine if you have too many musicians already serving in your church, (let's say your church is smack in the middle of Nashville), but if you don't…

In the end, do you have a heart for your musicians?

If you know what matters to musicians, you will know how to communicate with them, are better able to give them what they want and help them give you what YOU want. But you have to be willing to understand and care for them, not try to make them fit YOUR idea of what worship ministry is like or see them only as resources to be exploited.

Don't give me excuses, saying "This is not how we do things in this church, this is not our culture." If you have musicians who come on board and soon quit, something is wrong. If your church is unable to recruit enough musicians in the long term, something is wrong. And you either fix it or go without good worship musicians. Or you are bouncing from one worship ministry crisis to another, wondering when will a large part of your musicians and worship leaders quit and leave you scrambling to recruit people again.

But if you engage with your worship musicians and work sincerely with them, you will find that you too will grow in understanding and maturity. And remember that the musicians in your church are God's people as well, redeemed by the blood, dear to his heart. Don't look at them only as useful to your successful running of a contemporary worship service. See them as people that God wants to love through you.

Remember, you are selling them the opportunity to be used by God in a powerful ministry that can deeply touch the lives of people, and can oftentimes unlock many other hidden giftings within the musicians too. This is a great product, and we know it will be a blessing to them. Are you willing to do what it takes to get this product to the right people, that they (and you) may be greatly blessed?

The ball is in YOUR court now!

P.S. if you find this useful, please tell your church friends and leaders about this blog. Thanks!

The Four Stages of Christian Maturity

We talk about looking for worship ministers and worship leaders with Christian maturity and character. But what does that really mean? We need to have some idea of what maturity is, because if we do not know what it looks like, we will not recognize it when we see it. Or we will be easily taken in by people who can spout the standard church-ianity model answers and clichés but do not live in the reality of the Christian walk.

What I am giving here is certainly NOT the final word on the topic, but it gives us a good starting point to look at this wide-ranging issue. I've realized that within the church context there are four stages of development that a believer may be at. They are:

1) Un-rooted Loner – A believer at this stage has accepted the salvation of Christ before, but because of anger, bitterness or unforgiveness, chooses to live independently of the other people in church. They have no functional root in Christ to give them consistent strength to walk in the Spirit.

They would live by their own standards of what is right, and they are often contemptuous of what other Christians believe and how they behave. They may accuse other Christians of just putting on a show, of pretending to follow the law and instructions of Christ. They may attend church services out of habit, but they are fundamentally self-centred and loners. One of the best descriptions of them is found in the following passage:

Proverbs 18:1 - A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire; He rages against all wise judgment. (NKJV)

2) Un-rooted Communal – these are believers who are not firmed rooted in Christ in themselves, but follow what they see the crowd doing. If it is fashionable to follow a particular doctrine or worship God in a particular way, that is what they do. Un-rooted Communals rise or fall depending on the godliness and wisdom of the leader of their particular group. If the leader and the rest of the group members are on fire for God and seeking God for wisdom as a body, these crowd-followers will do fine. But they are unable to stand alone, because they are not rooted in God by themselves. They are unable to take an individual stand against corporate mistakes, whether the mistakes of their denomination, church or fellowship group.

One of the best examples of crowd-followers would be the people of Israel during the time of Elijah's confrontation with King Ahab, recorded for us in 1 Kings 18:21-24. None of them dared to stand up for the LORD publically when the nation went into idolatry, but when they saw the demonstrated power of God they rejected the prophets of Baal and followed Elijah's lead in killing those prophets.

3) Rooted Loners – These are believers with a genuine walk with God. They are able to stand up against corporate error and are not intimidated by peer pressure. However, they are tactless and unfeeling in their interactions with other believers. They may be tempted to see other believers as mere crowd-followers, with no root in the Lord. And sometimes that is true. Rooted Loners are individualistic and they see little value in seeking God in the assembly.

They may go seek out people, but they do so for the sake of ministering to them (or correcting) them. They are not open to receiving ministry or correction from other people in the body of Christ, unless that person is clearly some spiritual super-hero, who has written a number of best-selling books, sold many worship albums or raised 18 or more people from the dead.

 

One of the best examples of rooted loners is the Apostle Paul in his early days. When he was converted, he would boldly go into the synagogues and preach Christ (Acts 9:20). But because he did not move in the wisdom and direction of the Lord, he stirred up such great strife that the rest of the believers had to send him to Tarsus (Acts 9:30). And when they did that the churches in that region had peace, were edified and their numbers multiplied (Acts 9:31).

Imagine, being so unedifying to church growth that your church multiplies in numbers and grows in maturity when you decide to do nothing! I would be so discouraged…

4) Rooted Communal – these are people with a genuine walk with God AND a heart both to serve his people and to be taught and served by them. They will seek God by themselves in the personal prayer closet, but they also know that they cannot walk with God alone. So they actively seek out edifying fellowship, people they can serve and be accountable to.

One clear example of a Rooted Communal is King David. We know from his psalms that he had a genuine walk with God; yet he also delighted in seeking God in the assembly. You can see from the following passage that David loved to go to the house of God with close companions, hence the pain he felt when betrayed by such a friend.

Psalm 55:13-14 - But it was you, a man my equal, my companion and my acquaintance.
We took sweet counsel together, and walked to the house of God in the throng. (NKJV)

This emphasis on worshipping God as a community is an important theme in the worship of God's people. Consider this verse:

 

Psalm 122:1-2 - I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go into the house of the LORD.” Our feet have been standing within your gates, O Jerusalem! (NKJV)
 

When does a believer really start growing?
The turning point in a believer's growth in the Lord comes when he or she gets rooted in the Lord. This comes from taking personal responsibility for his or her personal walk with the Lord. Such people will not fall away from God because other believers stumble. They will never leave the Lord because of other believers offending or hurting them, because they abide the Jesus, the Vine (John 15:4) and therefore they will bear fruit even if others do not.

But no matter how much time they spend in the presence of the Lord and seeking him in worship and in his word, they will never reach their highest potential in Christ until they realize what the Bible says in this passage:

Eph 4:12-13 - … to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. (NIV)

In other words, there is no way for a Loner, no matter how sincere or fervent in his or her faith, to fully realize his or her potential in Christ unless the rest of Body of Christ rises up too. The Rooted Communal will seek growth for his/her own sake, as well as for the Body of Christ. The Rooted Communal will be teach and exhort other believers in humility and gentleness, and be open to teaching and correcting from other believers as well, even those who are not spiritual super-heroes.

Why are we looking at this?

Because the nature of worship ministry, especially worship leading, require that we live in community. We cannot lead people if we look down upon them or think they are spiritual slackers that are just dead weight to the Body of Christ. We also cannot be consistently effective in leading people in worship if we do not know where they are at, what they struggle with, or even what songs they know.

The last thing you want is some Rooted Loner with a good singing voice leading worship for your congregation. I have seen situations in which the worship leader thought he could prophetically exhort the congregation into powerful spontaneous worship, and when the congregation didn't respond because they were not musical enough to sing to some abstract chord progressions, the worship leader continued to exhort them to love and praise God with all their hearts. The unspoken message is that if the people cannot sing to some strange chord progression they do not love God with all their hearts.

Do your people need this kind of guilt trip and condemnation? I don't think so!

Conclusion

I do not talk a lot about the intangibles of the worship ministry, because it is not the thrust of my ministry. But this factor, maturity in the Lord, is very important and has a very direct impact on the effectiveness of everybody in the worship ministry. So what stage of maturity are YOU at right now? How about your worship team members? And how will understanding this influence the way you select musicians and worship leaders for your worship ministry?

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