50 Worship Leading Tips Rookies Should Learn and Veterans Should Relearn

- Learn more people’s names than new songs.
- Take a Sabbath every week.
- Make deposits in younger leaders and withdrawals from older leaders.
- Pray for and defend your pastor even when he doesn’t deserve it.
- Leave more things at the office when you go home.
- Ask how it might impact your family before asking how it might impact your job.
- Learn more theology than musicology.
- Welcome divine interruptions in your routine.
- Surround yourself with those to protect you from your own stupidity.
- Place more focus on people than projects.
- Celebrate the Lord’s Supper more often.
- Begin all worship planning with Scripture and Prayer instead of songs titles.
- Drink more coffee with senior adults and students.
- The original song key may not be the best key for congregational singing.
- Practice leadership as much as you practice your guitar.
- Cast vision for the future without denigrating the past.
- Not all thoughts that enter your mind have to exit your mouth.
- Don’t feel threatened when someone else gets the credit.
- Affirm volunteers in public, correct them in private and pastor them in both places.
- Don’t randomly blow things up without considering where the pieces might land.
- Help grandparents and grandchildren worship together.
- If you don’t guard yourself spiritually, emotionally and physically no one else will.
- Public worship will never succeed without private worship.
- Understand the difference between knowing you can and deciding you should.
- Never stop being a student.
- Always err on the side of grace.
- Build bridges from the platform to the pews.
- Turn house lights up and volume down occasionally to see if they are even singing.
- Don’t determine the worship language of your congregation based on how you might appear to other worship leaders.
- You’ll always sing too many or too few hymns or modern worship songs for someone.
- Filter songs theologically before musically.
- Wake up every morning feeling unqualified in your own power to do what God has called you to do.
- Keep your focus on where you are instead of where you wish you were.
- Spend as much time on relationships as you spend on ministry job placement sites.
- Not all staff problems originate in someone else’s office.
- There are lots of other churches but you only have one family.
- Your attitude may be the only change necessary.
- Scripted, explainable and rational aren’t always worship prerequisites.
- If you try to succeed alone you’ll also fail alone.
- Setting boundaries ahead of time gives you the resolve to say no.
- What you once learned is not enough to sustain your entire ministry.
- The worship service you prepared may not be the most important worship that occurs this week.
- Just changing the music won’t grow or kill your church.
- Not every worship song is appropriate for congregational singing.
- Leading music doesn’t necessarily mean you are leading people.
- Worship even when you aren’t the leader.
- Your musical talent may help you secure a position but leadership and relationships will help you keep it.
- Don’t lead worship just because you don’t know how to do anything else.
- If you’re saving your best for where God might call you next, why would He want to?
July 14th, 2016 at 9:16 am
[…] This post was originally published at David Manner’s blog here. […]
December 28th, 2015 at 8:46 am
An excellent list. Thanks!