Have you ever been on stage, getting ready to start singing, everyone is listening to the intro music and ready to give their all in worship, and then it happens… You start to sing and NO ONE goes with you. The song is too high. The women are screaming and the men don’t want to sing in the key that you are in so they try to sing lower and they are growling. But you’ve already started the song and you hav to finish. You’re stuck in Wrong Key Land. You can’t get out for another 3 minutes or so. Those 3 minutes feel like FOREVER! You can’t do anything to fix it. You wonder why you ever started singing in the first place. You want to cut off your hands and hide in a box for a month…okay maybe not THAT bad but you get the picture.

Right now I am still in that stage at my new church. Worship leaders will tell you this and non worship leaders may have never thought about it, but churches have a key. And sometimes finding that key takes a little time. Sometimes you find it rather quickly, like I did at my previous church. Sometimes it takes a few weeks, like it’s taking at my current church. My hope is that it doesn’t take too long because people will eventually stop singing and they look at you in that ‘poor kid, he has no idea’ look.

If you’re an experienced worship leader that has experienced this, how did you fix it? Or did you? If you haven’t had much practice with this, just know that it WILL happen.

Being a worship leader is SOOOO much more than putting worship sets together during the week, running rehearsals and singing on Sunday. It even goes past the numerous workshops and planning meetings that seem to be never-ending. It takes us past webinars and blogging. Sometimes it is as simple (and as difficult) as being a shepherd within the church in which we are serving.

Encouragement can sometimes be the hardest thing to do even though it can be one of the easiest things to execute. We spend so much time making sure that all of the big time, super important, worship leadery things are taken care of that sometimes we overlook the people that are helping us out on a day to day and week to week basis. I have found that it’s easy for me to let my perfectionist nature when it comes to music overtake my desire to be an encourager of the people that are giving of their time and talents to the ministry as well.

I’m thinking about this a lot today as I’m going to prepping for the first choir rehearsal at the new church. They have been excited to have a choir with a consistent leader before I ever walked in the door good. Well I’m in the door and they have been chomping at the bit. Sunday after service there may have been 1700 people come to me saying that they would be there tonight (which is funny because there were only about 125 people there). I am working through music and all these things and plans for rehearsal, but I am also making sure that I have ways built into my teaching that are encouraging and loving so that we move forward together. I believe that this whole choir concept is going to be a little different than what some of them expect and that’s the plan. I’m ready to see what God’s gonna do because I think it will be fun. I’ll let you know how it goes…