Wisdom From All Directions
One of the most well-known ancient proverbs from scripture is a push to humility: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.”
So, in that spirit, I’d love to share wisdom from nearly 25 years of worship leadership—not because I’m incredibly wise, but because God has granted me wise mentors, diverse experiences, brilliant peers, complex contexts, and plenty of failure along the path God laid out in front of me.
I hope this series will serve as an invitation to think well about our gathered worship. Perhaps you can share with your fellow worship planners and leaders, adjusting them for your context or arguing with them altogether. No doubt you’ll have your own nuggets of wisdom to add as well. Please share them with us at Reformed Worship, contact@ReformedWorship.org.
“...I’LL TELL YOU WHAT IT IS LATER.”
One of the charms of classic jazz recordings is the regular inclusion of studio chatter before a take. We’re often granted small glimpses into the musicians’ personalities through the banter before they finally count in the tune. One of these celebrated moments was captured by producer Bob Weinstock, as he hit “record” for the Miles Davis Quintet’s run through of the song, “If I Were a Bell.”
No one knows exactly what Weinstock asked the famed 30-year-old trumpeter Davis, but his answer became legendary. “I’ll play it, and tell you what it is later,” Miles declared confidently, before snapping out beats 2 and 4 for his band to come in. The words became the opening of the quintet’s album Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet.
There have been plenty of times as a worship leader that I feel like that statement hits way too close to home. “Here we go! We’ll tell you where we’re going after we get there!” However, maybe you have the opposite problem in your context, where every part of the worship service is so tightly planned that there’s no room to breathe.
PLAN AHEAD, BUT HOLD LOOSELY
I remember sitting in a circle of area worship leaders when a bit of an argument broke out. After one gentleman shared about their church’s uber-planned, highly liturgical worship services, another veteran worship leader marveled, “We don’t plan anything. We want the Spirit to move.” There was a respectful-but-tense exchange about the “right” ways to worship, which impacted me as a young worship planner. That leads us to our second worship leader beatitude:
Blessed is the worship leader who plans ahead but holds loosely to those plans.
I was grateful for that interaction, because it highlighted the reality that every approach will have its strengths and weaknesses, but the Holy Spirit is always at work in preparing us as worshipers. There’s something beautiful in the Spirit’s work in the planning process and formation of the liturgy, and something beautiful in the task of paying attention to the Spirit’s movement in the moment, beyond the liturgical path that’s been laid out.
PAYING ATTENTION IN THE PLANNING
Planned liturgy has so many benefits for worship leaders. The forms and practices help elevate both the retelling of the gospel story and our renewal within that story. The liturgy also joins us with the church throughout history through words, Word, and sacrament. Moreover, these practices are flexible, allowing us to contextualize them for our particular time and place.
The Spirit is at work when we prayerfully and faithfully shape the liturgical form into a plan for our congregation. Thoughtful attention to detail becomes an offering of service to our God and a gift to our congregations when scripture, songs, practices, art, symbol, gesture, and well-crafted language are all interwoven with intent.
But most of us have also been part of services that feel suffocating. Think of a moment after a powerful hymn that makes you want to stand silently in awe of God’s glory, but instead you get whiplash from the launch into announcement about the upcoming potluck. Maybe you’re even in the middle of it, leading prayers that feel more robotic than sincere.
PAYING ATTENTION IN THE MOMENT
“The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath,” is how the NRSV translates Jesus’ teaching in Mark 12. I’d say the same is true of the liturgy. The liturgy is made for humankind, and not humankind for the liturgy.
The richness of our liturgical forms is not a guaranteed box that the Spirit will choose to work politely within. So our efforts in crafting the right words, songs, symbols, and more for our services are not permission to coast through the service.
Admittedly, there are plenty of weeks where one gift of the liturgical plan is that I don’t need to be “on,” but can rest in the well-thought work that was done prior to our gathering. This might be important during specific seasons or moments of the worship leaders’ life. For example, this was true on the Sunday when I was filled with grief over my grandfather’s death, or with the joyful exhaustion of our son being born. But such times should be the exception, not the rule.
Unfortunately, there are contexts where the liturgy absolutely overrules any potential interruption of the Spirit. No leader can pray extemporaneously. No song can veer away from the preconceived arrangement. No preacher will leave her manuscript. There certainly won’t be any unplanned “open mic” testimony time. (That’s not even to mention the gifts of the Spirit, like the unplanned speaking in tongues!). Such rigidity is not healthy.
Find ways to hold worship plans loosely. One of my previous pastors showed this flexibility in a beautiful way. On one occasion he improvised a new ending for his sermon because of the Spirit’s prompting. He felt the need for us to kneel and seek God’s forgiveness for a problematic gap in our mission to our community. He led us into prayer with lyrics to a song that came to mind. Our pianist knew the song, so we wrapped our prayer time by singing the chorus together a few times, and then singing the doxology. It was the Spirit at work, breaking away from our plan on paper and doing a work greater than we could have imagined in the planning process that week.
CULTIVATING AWARENESS
Both practices of planning and paying attention need cultivating. Seeking the Spirit in the moment and being open as a community to faithfully following does not come easily to many of us, particularly worship planners. But it’s also possible to plan really poorly.
I came to love the liturgy, in part, because of the opposite of this experience. My time spent in a megachurch was really formative, but we had no connection to historical liturgical forms. No one at the church would say we were a “liturgical church,” but every church has a liturgy of some type. Ours was simple: three songs, offering, announcements, sermon. Our services were planned around the topic of the sermon, and they were dynamic. For what we were trying to do, we were really good at it.
But I had a revelation at one point that we had just gone six weeks in a row—SIX WEEKS!—without clearly proclaiming the good news of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Sermon series on creation and stewardship were wonderfully communicated as biblical principles, and our songs fit the themes perfectly, but Jesus was a bullet-point, not the actual point.
I actually wept. In this experience, I came to discover historic liturgical practices as a constant retelling of the Gospel story. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection—and our response—stands right in the middle of the service every week. In this way, one benefit of the liturgy is its ability to serve as guardrails, making sure the main thing remains the main thing. We needed to cultivate better practices for planning well.
TREASURING GOD’S GRACE
God’s grace is found in the crafting of scripture, song, word, and symbol into beautiful and meaningful moments of worship. God’s grace is also found in the unexpected and unplanned for. It’s one of the treasures of our role as worship planners and leaders: if we cultivate the prayerful awareness of the Spirit’s work, we get a front row seat to God’s grace in both forms.