Dear Worship Leader…

Thank you for the work you do in our churches, our meetings and our gatherings every time we meet together. Without your direction, moments of
communal worship might be chaotic for many in the audience as well as intimidating for those who don’t necessarily have a culture of worship in their private lives.

However, can I say a few things from my many observations over time?

Your job is to lead the army of people standing before you into the mood, the attitude, the heart and the act of worship of God in the 30 mins or so you have and not the following:

1. NOT to come and sing your favourite songs or playlist

Your favourite songs are great but you need to ask yourself if they are suited for communal worship or if they point our focus on God or ourselves.

Some songs are vertical (i.e. directed at God) e.g. Lord You are Good by Israel Houghton and some other songs are horizontal (i.e. more for the benefit of the body of believers) e.g. I need you to survive by Hezekiah Walker.

If you decide to select songs that are horizontal at the moment of collective worship, then you are not ministering to God or point us to God. Some other songs are also faux-vertical. If you are singing to God and the focus is about God but from the perspective of you, then whilst it’s great, it still about what God has done for you or who God is to you rather than worshiping God for who God is.

Please understand my heart, this is not about right or wrong but about collective worship. Whilst God putting bread on your table might connect with you, it might not resonate with another and in that moment, they disconnect and this is the danger of faux-vertical songs because the experience is not fully communal. You need to be mindful of this sometimes when selecting songs.

Also, because you love Chris Tomlin or Martha Munnizi doesn’t mean all the songs you lead should be songs they’ve written or sung or songs from an album you’re seriously feeling right now.

Again, ask yourself – will these songs help everyone focus on God at this moment.

Otherwise, those songs can be done as special numbers but not as songs in moments where you want to help everyone focus on God.

2. NOT to showcase your singing ability or vocal genius

I am grateful to God for blessing you with such a great gift vocally and for the grace bestowed upon you to develop your musical genius. However, while you want to give God the best offering from your lips, leading us into worship might not be the time to showcase all the tools you have.

You need to know that everyone will not able to sing as well as you or run vocal riffs as well as you can or be able to jump from octave to octave. So, whilst you choose to cover songs that Kiki Sheard has done or Kim Burrell has done, note that not all of us trusting your lead can sing technically well or will be as creatively beautiful as you are

Find songs that are simple for everyone to sing. Find songs that will not make your church members struggle to follow. It may have 4 verses and be seriously wordy or might be only one verse comprising of only two sentences. If others cannot follow you and sing it comfortably, again, it might be best to minister the song as a special song sometime later. You would have succeeded in leading no one anywhere.

You can imagine how you as a leader will feel if you were to lead the popular and simple hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ and your accompanying pianist is playing complex jazz chords or playing riffs all over the place. You will be frustrated because it can be distracting. Similarly, there are many frustrated in our churches because what is being led from the front is way too complicated for them to follow.

3. NOT to display your music teams hard work over the week

I know it takes a lot to source songs, score the music, arrange parts and get the praise team or the choir sounding as good as the recording the original song came from or even better.

However, don’t get carried away with wanting to be the best version of yourselves and perform at Stellar Awards or Grammy Awards standard to the point where all of it becomes too much of a showy distraction.

If you want to incorporate new ideas, be careful to be sure that it doesn’t become too much or obviously a distraction. You know how it feels when you are stuck in an elevator with someone who just emptied a bottle of perfume on themselves? You find it choking because it is simply way too much.

Also, if you’re borrowing a secular tune (which most people do sometimes) to arrange a known song on, approach with caution as some might just switch off the moment they hear the bass line of a Heavy D song. That’s another discussion for another day but you should be careful that your rearrangement is done tastefully without creating offence.

The beauty of anything spectacular is to give us transient shows of it not leaving us there permanently. If you want to re-arrange a song, yes please do but don’t make it too complicated that we can’t, again, communally join in or follow.

Also, if you are arranging vocal parts, please be reminded that people in the audience will try to replicate what they hear. Ensure the melody is clear and not clouded or coloured by complicated voicings or harmonisations.

4. NOT to entertain the audience

I do understand that “where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty” (2 Corinthians 3:17) and that there are “pleasures for forever more” (Psalm 16:11) in God’s presence but let’s not get carried away.

You are not here for us but for God. I find that as Christians, most of us don’t go clubbing or raving at varying owambe parties on the weekend. We don’t need to make our time of worship a substitute for that.

I’ve been in churches or worked with music teams where the phrase ‘High Praise’ is always used loosely to mean the time to sing songs (most of an African Ariya or Party slant) where we can dance silly. The songs must be fast tempo-ed and we must sweat by the time we are done.

But is God glorified through this? You need to ask yourself this question.

Again, this is not about being right or wrong. This is about being in a posture to ensure that God is glorified and people connect to God. If singing fast songs for the next hour will lift people up to heaven, then praise God. If it’s fifteen minutes of repeating the same slow song, then praise God.

We shouldn’t come out to lead with the mind to entertain or to make people ENJOY the session you’re leading. Music is spiritual and carnal at the same time – whether you like it or not, we will enjoy that time of praising God because God’s presence is pleasurable but it’s not about entertainment. It’s not a time to welcome people into church till we attend to more serious matters or wake people up from being lethargic.

5. NOT to confuse people who feel they can’t catchup with your performance and decide to watch you instead

Following on from points discussed before, it’s easy to confuse people and make them feel helpless.

People in any performance-based setting (whether in church or otherwise) and except they are musicians, tend to follow things from the front with their eyes not their ears.

If you raise your hands, there is a likelihood that people will somehow copy you. If you’re jumping up in a particular way, people might end up mirroring your actions also.

Hence, you have so much power to change the mood of the room you’re in by what you’re doing or not doing.

Don’t do too much as eventually people will not follow and just fold their hands to watch you. Don’t paralyze your song with adlibs. Don’t keep asking people to jump, sit-down, turn-around (Father Abraham song style from Kids Sunday school days) – unless you’re leading a youth meeting, many will struggle from all the physical activity and eventually will sit down.

If you are also singing a song, mean what you’re singing. If the song says you’re bending your knees, don’t stand there like a stick. If the song says lifting up holy hands, let your hands be lifted. Again, people watch than hear when in church.

If the song is about joy or dancing, then let it show on your face and dance too. You can’t lead people where you’re not going either.

6. NOT to come and distract our focus on God when we are trying to connect

This point is a little sensitive but again, if you’re leading people in worship, you need to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit.

I think these are the two requirements every worship leader should attain to:

Ephesians 5:18-33 King James Version (KJV)
18 And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit;
19 Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;
20 Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ;

and

Colossians 3:16 King James Version (KJV)
16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.

If you notice, but scriptures end in a similar way but start differently namely, be filled with the Spirit and having an indwelling of the word in all wisdom NOT JUST MUSICAL WISDOM.

If you are leading people to God, be led by the God’s spirit. Just because you’ve prepared a set that has 17 songs doesn’t mean you should run through everything more so if by song number 3, you can see that God is clearly moving in the room and it’s as a result of that song.

Learn to linger in his presence! Learn to hear what God is saying. If God has put a scripture in your heart, then share it because it might just be for someone at that moment.

To balance this also, there are worship leaders who talk just way too much. In any conversation, it has to be two way. If you are leading people into the throne room of heaven, leave gaps where people can actually talk to God or hear back from God.

You don’t have to talk through all the time you have to be in front. If you’re asking people to worship God, then let them. If you’ve asked people to praise God, then give them time to actually do that. If there is a musical or instrumental gap, let it be. It’s

usually a great time for people to connect to God and to focus.

Using every opportunity to blow tongues is also not a measure of your spirituality. I know you are “speaking mysteries to God and edifying yourself” but it’s not beneficial in a communal setting unless like Paul said, “you will interpret it also” (1 Corinthians 14:27-28).

It can become distracting over time if you keep using it to fill the gaps or to show that you’re very deep or spiritual.

7. NOT to get in the way of what God is doing in people’s lives

We do sing a lot of interesting songs in Church. If a song says ‘Lord have your way’, then don’t be the one that one standing in the way.

I say this, again, with a sense of humility and caution because it is ambiguous and can be easily misconstrued but if your life is sinful, if you’re living a double life, if you’re not who you claim to be, you have missed a valid point.

God expects us to worship him in Spirit and in truth (John 4:24) and sometimes our music can be noise to God (Amos 5:23) if we are not living as God will expect us to live.

Don’t be the person that hinders the move of the Spirit whilst yet still singing songs of revival or songs of visitation. Please remember that the first biblical worship leaders were Levites. They were singing or musical Levites. These guys were as good as our men of God equivalents in our day and time. They didn’t become less of a Levite just because they sang. They were always Levites who just happened to be musically gifted. You are as good as a ‘Pastor’, except that whilst most ‘Pastors’ minister and teach the word, you minster and sing the word!

It’s not just that you sing music or lead songs or play an instrument alone. You are called into the kingdom of God’s dear Son (Colossians 1:13) and made Kings and Priest of our God forever (Revelations 1:6) and it’s not just about singing alone.

It’s about being all that God will have you be as someone with a healthy relationship with God. Your talent will only take you far in fooling all of us or your church but eventually, there is a place you get to that your lack of truth will show. Be it a test of your character, be it a hidden secret, be it a work in progress in an area of your life – eventually your need for God will make all your pretence crumble!

So, don’t neglect your personal walk with God just because you’re making music for God and leading people in God’s presence. Importantly, the BOSS is GOD! Let God be boss! don’t get power intoxicated because you’ve led 50,000 people or 400 people into worship at several meetings or events to not listen to what God is saying to you when you have that microphone handed to you.

God was in that room before we all arrived and God is ready to heal the sick from the first song you sing but because you are not sensitive, you go with your own agenda and stand in the way of what God is doing!

In closing, it is communal for a reason and everything you do has to reflect this from the simplicity of the songs to your orchestration of music to your delivery of all that you do.

Everyone could be carried along with your leading AND NONE SHOULD BE LEFT BEHIND in the landscape of God!

I thank you for the hard work you do but doing the wrong things very hard doesn’t make it right!

God is not moved by our gymnastics or performance and while your heart might be right, you are not leading anyone. You are just extending your quiet time into a noisy space. Let God continue to lead you as you lead us all.

God bless you!

Lastly, stay up to date with all you need to know about African music at SOA,right here.

‘Femi Aboluwarin is a musician, photographer and IT tech from West London.

‘Femi loves cinema, the arts, writing and observing life at large.