Leading worship, whatever that means

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 16 October 2005 22:51:28

What does ‘leading worship' mean in your church? (If you have one). In our church, it generally means choosing however many songs, and leading the music for the first half of the service, anything up to an hour or so of loud happiness (slight caricature but I bet you know what I mean).

That's not what I did this morning. Well, not exactly.

It's probably about a year since I led worship, what with having a baby and everything. That's the longest time I've just been on the ‘receiving end'* for quite a while. So, I discovered (or rediscovered) some stuff:
- I find it really hard to engage with loud sung happiness for an hour
- I really like doing stuff other than singing, although I do like singing
- No matter how much they say they don't, people do look at you and decide how ‘worshipful' you are by how much you appear to be getting into it
- No matter how much they say they don't, people mean ‘singing' when they say ‘worship' (in our church at least)
- A large proportion of the songs we sing are rubbish either musically or theologically, or both

So anyway. I was put back on the rota to lead worship. I think maybe I said that might be okay a while ago, but it still came as something of a surprise to see my name down. Big panic, as I know what people expect, and didn't feel I could deliver that with any shred of integrity, given the little list above. Mr birdie helpfully suggested I should just furnish people with paper at the beginning, and tell them they had an hour to worship through the medium of wax crayon. This, he said, would kill two birds with one stone, by being more my kind of thing, and ensuring that I was never asked to lead worship again.

I was tempted.

Chickened out though, and I think in the end I had a foot in both camps, but I was fairly pleased:
- It was brief (five songs, no repetition)
- It was quiet (just me singing and the lovely A on guitar. This was scary as one advantage of loudness is you get a band to hide behind)
- Crayons were involved (this was funny. At the beginning of our practise time, as A was tuning up and doing guitar stuff I don't understand, I set out a table by the door with paper and writing implements, and a note saying ‘please take a sheet of paper and something to write with'. Towards the end of practise I looked round, and it had all been packed away! Someone obviously thought ‘this can't be for this morning! Must be something the children were doing!'. I had to get it all out again)

Anyway. Positive comments afterwards, people seemed to engage really well with the crayon-y bit, and enjoyed having a bit of hush for a change.

This means I've got to do it all again of course.

By ‘receiving end', I mean being led, rather than leading. Not actually being worshipped myself, obviously.. Although I'm sure there's a time and a place.