The guys at www.entertheworshipcircle.com had a good idea that we’d like to pass onto trench readers.  Everyone knows that at a rehearsal you have to “do the work” to make sure songs, transitions, etc. are tight, but there needs to be room in a rehearsal for musicians to breath and express.   For us, the rare all out jamfest might occur, though not often enough.  Here is a more meaningful idea.  Pick a Psalm and then spontanteously sing it and compose a song. Todd from ETWC describes more:

I started reading until something popped up off the page as though I’d never seen it before. With that sense of mystery, I’d start playing my instrument and start singing the scripture, chewing on it word upon word, line by line. With little effort, I started discovering a pantameter that would work, phrases and strings of words in simple melodies over the top of thoughtless chord structures. I felt like an archeologist uncovering an ancient civilization! These Psalms–whose ancient melodies were lost–were being sung again! I was like, WOW, this is pretty cool. So I had a crazy idea to try this with the whole worship team at our rehearsal. At rehearsal, I did nothing more than print out the text and name a key we’d improv in. I’d start playing the chord structure and improvising the melody over the top. (I’d often never remember the melody and so it’d sound different every time.)

Good stuff from Seth Godin on speaking to the left and right brain in any presentation, click here for the pdf.

Nothing ruins a community faster than leadership that either doesn’t know how to delegate or refuses to delegate responsibly. Moses learned this the hard way. You can read about it in Exodus 18. Moses began his leadership career with a charismatic style of leadership. God had chosen him to be the leader. Moses took this seriously. He was giving it everything he had to the point of emotional and spiritual burnout. His father-in-law, Jethro, happened to be visiting. He observed the horrendous administrative bind in which Moses found himself. He made the suggestion that Moses delegate responsibility. Moses showed both his humility as a son-in-law and a willingness to learn as a leader. Jethro suggested that Moses represent the people before God, being the personal liaison between God and the people. Instead of listening to every complaint and trying to solve every problem, he would delegate that responsibility to others. Persons were to be chosen who hated a bribe, persons of integrity, who would rule over 1,000, over 100, over 50, over ten. Only the hard cases would come to Moses. The smaller matters were decided through this delegated chain of command. [via http://www.standrewspres.org/sermons/serm013005.htm]

Biehl’s lessons on delegating well:

The best leadership developer we have met is Bobb Biehl. We are huge fans and he has consulted with us often. Once in a discussion with our staff, Bobb told us why we don’t delegate well. His reasons, fear that it won’t be done the way we would do it and fear of impinging on someone. Here are his solutions in our own words:

1. Don’t treat people like volunteers, instead think of them as “lay staff.”

People want to be a part of something significant. If you constantly fear asking someone to do anything, you are robbing them of a chance to do significant stuff and robbing the Body of Christ as well. People don’t want to be coddled, they want to be used by God. Don’t catch yourself saying, “Well, what did we expect? They are only volunteers.”

2. When you delegate, give clear expectations up front.

There is nothing more frustrating for a volunteer lay staff than to not get clear instruction and then have the leader come back and say that is “below our standards.” Be clear. For example, if you have a person editing a video, show them an example video of such quality that you would deem acceptable and tell them why (not shakey, no pops in audio, picture quality etc.). That way, if they come back with something that doesn’t meet your criteria, they knew where the bar was set. Don’t forget end of project stuff such as “When you are done painting the set, I need you to make sure all the paint is cleaned up and brushes removed from the stage.” The clearer you are, the more confidence they will have in accomplishing the task. Consider making a punch list.

3. Check on the project/task along the way…praise and tweak.

Volunteers and even paid staff want input along the way. To wait until all their toil is over and tell them, “I wish…..” isn’t fair. Drop in and give them encouragement. Delegating is not abdicating. If you begin delegating well you should find yourself doing this more and more of the time and actually doing the actual tasks less. Remember, Moses only “did” the most serious of cases.

4. Delegating actually means more foresighted planning but will ultimately reduce your stress.

If you wait until the last second to ask someone for help, you should feel bad about asking. But if you’ll spend the extra 20% of energy to think through and enlist help early, you’ll find you gain at least 80% of your time back. Good delegating compounds upon itself. Since you have freed up more time, you have more time to plan and delegate.

Learn from Moses. Leave us a question or comment. We got stories to tell.

This free program takes an image, enlarges it (rasterizes it for you true graphics designers) then allows you to print it HUGE (20 meters) on 8.5 x11″ sheets of paper which can pieced back together for a bizarre mosaic look or if you are a good enough gluer, a regular picture….hmmmm?

Check it our here. (disclaimer: okay, we don’t love the rasterbator name, but the thing works).

[via www.pauldwatson.com]

Upon retirement a very successful Texas high school football coach was asked the secret to his success. He responded. I have a file entitled, “ways to lose a game,” and review it regularly. When I heard this I started my own file called, “ways to ruin a worship service.” I firmly believe we should never make the same mistake twice. So learn from our stupidity.

This past weekend I broke a guitar string during the first song of the fourth service. No problem, I just grabbed my backup guitar… right? One problem, my back up guitar was in tune with itself, but 1/4  a pitch sharp on the whole!!! I tuned the guitar before our Saturday night service, but it sat in the Worship Center all night and it went sharp because of the temperature changes. I eventually got it in tune during the greeting, but I was sweating it for 2 songs just palm muting.

Jordan was out of town this weekend, so when I told him about it, he told me about a time when a kid from the children’s choir had twisted the tuning knobs during their three songs which kicked off the service.  Needless to say,  the first chord…trainwreck.

Way to Ruin a Worship Service: Be lazy on tuning your backup guitar.

I know many worship leaders are not trained graphics designers but are required to generate them none the less.  Also, helps with presentations tremendously (whether preaching, teaching, or whatever).  Two great sites for help…

http://www.presentationzen.com/  a blog emphasizing clarity of presentation.  well worth the time to read the 4 presentation versions of Lessig, Godin, Kawasaki, and Takahashi under his popular posts column.

http://www.stylegala.com/ clearinghouse of web and graphics design.  keep abreast of current trends and technology.

Someone recently fed my reading addiction by throwing a copy of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything on my desk. Tapscott and Williams dissect the collaborative formulas of Fickr, MySpace, YouTube, Human Genome Project, Wikipedia and more. Here is the question:

How do we do wikiworship?  (updated March 24–I am using the term metaphorically, NOT as in an actual wiki.  I have gotten several emails about literal wikis.  How do we create areas/elements in our worship services which are platforms for worshipers to provide meaningful content.  Thanks Bob Kauflin for reminding me to clarify that I am not talking about a free-for-all service with no bounded structures which Paul corrected in the Corinthian Church.  Just talking about different elements that worshipers could have to space to include their creatively generated content)

Chapter 4 The Prosumers: Hack this Product Please is worth the cost of the book alone:

Prosumption…describe[s] how the gap between producers and consumers is blurring. Most still confuse prosumption with deciding what the basics are and customers get to modify certain elements, like customizing your vehicle on the showroom floor [not prosumption]. This chapter describes a new model of prosumption where customers [worshipers] participate in the creation of products [worship elements] in an active and ongoing way. As in Second Life, the user actually innovates and creates.

YouTube and MySpace are blank canvases for users to publish their own content. They contain no content in and of themselves. How do we create blank canvases for meaningful content in worship? Should we even endeavor to do this?

Crawl in and start the conversation.

Very helpful, check it…www.churchrelevance.com

My knees are sore but this might have been the coolest thing I have ever done. The City Museum in St. Louis is a mind-blowing, eclectic adventure that demands participation. If I had the money I would take every worship leader and make them go through it as a learning experience.

Here is what I learned:

1. The experience and building demanded participation.

Everything was meant to be climbed or scaled. At one point my kids ducked into a tiny dark tunnel in the labyrinth of the enchanted caves. Since I had no clue where it ended, Dad was forced to follow on hands and knees.  My daughter had to overcome a “strong dislike” of heights to keep up with us through the massive climb structure outside. She ended up loving it. There was very little to “stand and look at.”

How could our buildings and services “demand” that people get more involved in worship instead of standing and looking? (more…)

The service is drawn from the symbolism of ancient colors used by the Celts to tell the Christ narrative. The service is a series of movements of narrative/media, colored cloth placement on crossbar, and singing. We had a crossbar of a cross (railroad crosstie) onstage laying across two ancient looking sawhorses. These were set on canvas with river rock and sand spread underneath the whole structure on top of the canvas. The banners are very simple fabrics–think as non-gawdy as possible– that were about 6-8 ft long and standard cloth width wide (4 ft?). Each banner carried down was carried like the olympic flag is …”pallbearer style” with the front pallbearers (wearing all black) carrying at shoulder height and the back at waist height, so the congregation could see the color coming down the center aisle. As each banner was carried down, Our PowerPoint screens had pictures, colors and text which corresponded (we will attach the file at the end of this post as soon as we recover it from a lovely crashed hard-drive/recovered and posted at the end of post). Feel free to take this service and hack it. Just do us a favor and comment your “hack” back here so we can all learn how it went down. Click more to see how it unfolds… (more…)

There is no question that one of the more difficult tasks of a WL is recruiting and maintaining musicians and vocalists. In the past 3 days we have been reminded 2 different times how important this is.

On Sunday morning our drummer came in sick as a dog. He had been up all night worshiping the “porcelain god.” Once we realized how sick he was, we called our other drummer. Blake (the sick drummer) played the first and second service. Mark (the well drummer) got here as fast as he could and watched the second service, took notes and flawlessly played in the third service, even though we were playing a new song with several punches and stops.

With a youth band this week, we had a player who is gone because of Spring Break. He forgot to tell us he was going to be gone. But no sweat, we called the other drummer and he is going to sub in.

We do our best to have two bands that alternate weeks/weekends. It is initially hard work to find players and get them experienced with your style and catalog of music, but the pay off is worth it.

Have you ever needed both a good sounding acoustic and electric in the same worship set (without simulating either one–yuck) and didn’t want look like an idiot while a stage monkey brought you a new guitar mid-song? We found a solution….

Here is the schematic: acoustic-and-electric-in-one-guitar.pdf

Perfect in those situations where you need a little more beef under your lead player for certain sections of a song.

All of our singers start on our Bridge Team (think quasi-choir minus all the goofy stuff) of 30-40 folks who sing every other weekend (1st and 3rd weekends). We stay away from the word choir because of stereotypes. Since our visual metaphor statement of existence is “We exist to bridge people into the presence of God” we reinforced it with a name selection. Why the extra effort of a Bridge Team? (more…)