I have been leading worship at my church for about a year and a half. My partners are a talented praise band that includes a number of professional musicians. I am learning how to respond when people tell me they liked the music, and I usually take the opportunity to express my appreciation for the others who make my amateur fiddling and singing seem better than it is. But one Sunday morning, a remark from a member of my congregation really started me thinking.
This person mentioned that when I close my eyes during singing, she thinks, “She’s so spiritual. More spiritual than I am, most of the time.”
I was taken aback by this comment. How could anyone determine anything about my spiritual life from watching me sing? How could my leadership bring anyone to believe that I was somehow “better” than others? I responded with self-deprecating humor, which is how I generally deflect compliments I’m not sure I deserve. But the exchange bothered me for the next few days.
On the Sunday the comment was made, I felt that I was “performing” my leadership. We sang a song whose lyrics I disliked for aesthetic, grammatical, and theological reasons. Since I hadn’t been able to voice my objections to the primary worship leader (and song chooser) before Sunday morning, I decided it would be best to lead the song as well as I could. This meant that rather than smirking or making sarcastic comments, as I felt like doing on the inside, I sang the chorus with gusto and used physical signals to encourage the congregation to do so as well.
As I led that song, I closed my eyes not because I was seeking a deeper connection with the Spirit, but because I was concentrating on getting my harmony part right. The implication that someone might interpret this behavior as some kind of “spiritual superiority” felt dirty.
This problem got me thinking about a larger tension that many worship leaders face: the desire to lead authentically and the need to communicate to the congregation and assist them in their worship.
I believe that worship is an expression of our relationships with each other and with God. Specific, authentic community is an important part of a church service. To that end, it seems important to bring our whole selves—even the parts that are less appealing—into the church with honesty and humility. Church should be a place where you trust others and you tell the truth, even when it’s not pleasant.
On the other hand, the job of a worship leader is to be both a member of a community and one who helps the community join in the tasks of worship. It seems to me that the primary work of worship leaders is to provide an example, to demonstrate with our faces and voices and bodies that a song is a prayer, or a proclamation of God’s Word, or a blessing, or a psalm of praise. When I lead worship I find myself expressing emotions that I did not bring to church in order to better express the intent of the liturgy. This seems obvious—if something is not meaningful to me, that doesn’t mean it won’t help others worship more fully.
In addition, I believe that liturgy is sacramental: all the acts of worship are meaningful, regardless of my feeling about them at the time. God accepts my confession even when it is half-hearted. This is part of the grace that God extends to us as his broken people. So even if my heart is not in the right place, it’s meaningful to lead others through the liturgy.
Beyond that, liturgy is transformative. By acting penitent or sincere or prayerful, you train yourself to become that way. Theologian Miroslav Volf puts it this way: “People make Christian beliefs their own and understand them in particular ways partly because of the practices to which they have been introduced—in which their souls and bodies have been trained.” Worship is one of those practices. We become shaped by liturgy, so performing worship helps us become worshipful people.
For all these reasons, I feel OK about leading others, even if I am not always as sincere as I might hope. But I hadn’t realized that my personal work-in-progress might come across as more complete that it truly was. On the Sunday I received the above-mentioned comment about my closed eyes, I felt as if I had done too good a job of setting an example—that people believed better of me than was warranted. After all, I wanted to set an example of humanity and humility as well.
But in the end I’ve made peace with this tension. If my striving toward sincere worship has led others to want to live up to my (faux) example, my best self, perhaps that is God’s work as well.
I hope the person who spoke to me after worship is able to deepen her own worship and to realize, as I told her, that sometimes you just have to act like it until you feel it.
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For additional material from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, click here.