Transitioning – Part 3 – Worship Leadership Team

East City Church continues its path to worship renewal. If you missed the first two posts, you should catch thos now (part 1 and part 2) to get you up to speed with the transition. Today I propose to East City Church the formation of a Worship Leadership Team (WLT).

Creating a Worship Leadership Team will accomplish a few things:

  1. It will provide a great platform for planning worship services drawing from people with various strengths and talents
  2. It will aid the current worship leader, who has previously only led traditional worship, in planning and leading the new form of worship
  3. It will take advantage of the great storehouse of creative talents in the worship arts that may not be currently utilized
  4. It will provide multisensory worship experiences for your congregation
  5. It will diffuse any push back to an entire team rather than perhaps one person

The Concept

The Worship Leadership Team will meet weekly to plan the times of corporate worship. The members represent many disciplines of the arts, such as drama, graphics, video, photography, interpretive movement, and art. There would also be additional people with creative abilities as well as a couple of musicians. Ideally, the senior pastor will also meet with the team (if not in person, s/he will need to send detailed information). He can share his ideas concerning upcoming sermons or special directions s/he would like to see incorporated in worship. The team would take this information and begin to brainstorm ways that will impact the congregation in worship by engaging the senses. For instance, the person with drama strength on the team may conceptualize a powerful way to relay the message through drama. Others may think of a way to engage the congregation through images on screen or poetry or changing the worship space. If the team determines that four weeks from now, we will have a drama, utilize a powerful graphic on the cover of the “bulletin” and use a video from another source, the drama director would have the script written, enlist the team, and prepare the drama for the service, the graphic people would prepare their work, and someone would be responsible for securing the video.The worship leader/minister of music would orchestrate all of these elements into the worship service for the day. Some WLTs would plan every detail of the service, including the music. Others would leave some of those details to the worship leader.


The Steps for East City Church

To form the team and get them functional, East City Church needs to take the following steps

  1. Identify key members with varying talents in the worship arts and enlist them to serve on the team
  2. Schedule a retreat to cast vision and begin to work together. This is a real key. Help the team members understand their purpose and begin to see how the group works together. Great synergy can result!
  3. Plan the first four worship services beginning with the target launch date. The pastor will need to relay sermon information for those four weeks to the team, and preferably talk through what he hopes to accomplish each week.
  4. Develop teams for various disciplines – drama, interpretive movement, art, video, etc. East City church will conduct an interest survey to determine talents of church members in the worship arts.
Hopefully, this brief overview will get you thinking about how you can greatly utilize such a team in your church’s worship life.
Next week, we will look at the importance of developing a song list.

Kenny Lamm, senior consultant for worship and music for the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, is a frequent worship conference leader with a strong focus on equipping leaders in North Carolina (USA) and Southeast Asia. His blog, Renewing Worship, features posts that explore ways to renew–impart new life and vigor to–the worship in the local church.