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Drew Brown passed this great article onto me today.  Its a great read and well worth it for any worship leaders to read.

It came from http://www.ourrisingsound.com

I’d like to start by pointing you to my post on Top 5 things I love about being a worship leader. It truly is an incredible honor, responsibility and blessing to be a worship leader and something I am forever grateful for. It’s really difficult for me to come up with 5 things I dislike without immediately feeling like they pale in comparison to the incredible blessing it is. Even in the trials I hold firmly to James 1:2
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds

That being said I don’t pretend that there aren’t trials and that there aren’t difficult moments. Here are what I see as the top 5 negatives about being a worship leader:

1. You become #1 or #2 reason why people leave the church

You and the preaching pastor will be the alpha dogs as far as reasons people leave the church, in most cases. As much as I joke about this, it does bother me. I understand that there are plenty of churches, better churches than ours for some and that I have to be true to what God’s called and gifted me to do. But when I hear of people leaving because they can’t stand the music, as much as I try to roll with it, it does sting. Not from an artistic standpoint, that rolls of me quite easily. I know lots of people will dislike my music, that’s not what’s important. But I do have to pray a lot about have I failed as a leader to reach out, teach, relate with, minister to these people that are leaving.

On another level I’m glad I’m not immune to some disappointment and hurt when I hear of people leaving because of me. I don’t want to be some ministry zombie. It doesn’t change the truth, vision and mission I’m charged with, but I don’t want to ignore or neglect what I can do to become a better minister and worship leader.

2. Managing creative types can really stink

Artists, and I use that in the broad sense, are the most sensitive, emotional basket cases on the planet. Heaven forbid you tell them they need to practice more, or that they aren’t in tune, or their song isn’t very good. Who am I to judge them and their God given talent? How dare I quench the spirit! *sigh* I am sooooo blessed to have a team of mature Christian men and women who are all leaders in our church in many more ways than music. For me those days are behind me, although once we start building some more teams, there may be more of those days ahead. I’ve been in some pretty awful situations and lemme tell you, they are all too often the norm in the modern church.

There’s a lot to be said about how you organize and run a worship team and develop artistic talent and spiritual maturity. We’ve done polls on this blog about letting non-christians in on worship bands and such and I’ve learned a lot from my past failures on this topic. I could write a valuable e-book on all the ways not to put together a worship team.

3. As you excel in music, you get accused more of not “getting” the heart of worship

If I were to go up on stage with a junky acoustic, with an average band in support, sing in and out of key but do it with passion, nobody is going to accuse me of focusing on music and idolizing it. But if I practice, prepare, write and do all the things necessary to have a tight great band, get up on stage, sound great and do it with passion. There will be a lot of people that say I don’t really understand the heart of worship and that I emphasize musical excellence to a point of idolatry.

I just find it so ill-conceived that the measuring stick for some looks like, poor music quality = band has a heart after God, great music quality = worship leader wants to be Christian celebrity and doesn’t truly get worship. Let me be clear that I just want to be a good stuard and faithful to what God has placed in my hands. The conviction I feel from God on being lazy, inattentive and wreckless with the gifting and gift of this church body placed in my hands far outweighs your weak accusation, so you’ll have to excuse me while I ignore it.

4. Inability to have a single focus in worship

As a worship leader there’s a lot of responsibilities and trains of thought you have to manage in your head while you are leading a song. From song arrangements, to time management, to engagement of congregation, following where the Spirit is leading, taking cues from the sound booth, signaling your band, the list goes on. When you are the primary worship leader for a congregation and leading 99% of the time you can quickly miss being able to be in the congregation worshiping instead of in front leading worship.

Taking breaks is important and we’re working towards multiple bands at LCC.

5. Walking away feeling completely satisfied

This has less to do with being a worship leader and more about my personality. But I wish I could go through a Sunday, drive home and just feel like,

“Man what a great worship time, sounded great, God moved, the body was united and everything went well.”

Instead, no matter how good it goes I go home feeling like,

“I can’t believe how bad I butchered that one song. The mix sounded like crap today I know it. Lots of strange stares on that new song.”

I wrote a post about the mind of a worship leader the day after that explains a lot of my thought process.

It’s something I’m trying to get balance in, but I am super critical of myself and it’s not often I leave with a satisfied feeling and I’m never completely satisfied. But I do rest in that God will accomplish what he wants to accomplish through these weak hands, I have confidence that His faithfulness, not my talent, is my shield.

I feel like it’s been forever and a day since I wrote anything here on ye old blog… so I decided that its time for an update on all things Chris..

First of all, I don’t think I’ve done an offical Blog announcement about Seth!!!  Well he’s here.. he’s now 3 months old, and he’s awesome!!

This picture was take about a month ago, but its by far my favorite shot of him so far!  As you can see, he’s already got so much personality!
For the past few months, I’ve been on Project Serve mode.  We are yet again heading to New Orleans for the March break to do Hurricane Katrina Relief work with Touch Global.

This is going really well.  We have taken on the task of taking 2 buses this year, which is approximately 100 people… it is by far our biggest group yet, but, the numbers seem to be coming in.  Last time I looked at the list we were around 63, but I’ve had people contact me since then to sign up, so I’m quite confident that we will get the numbers.

We’ve got some neat things that our committee here in Centre Hastings is looking at in regards to the future of YFC in Centre Hastings.. I can’t tell you any of the details, but just know that both Jen and I are very excited about the opportunities, and we are asking that you pray hard for us!

Our band has a pretty busy month for February.  Last Friday we played at a big youth rally called “Burn” it was in Roblin Ontario.  There was about 300 young people inattendance, it was so much fun to play for such a large group!  Tomorrow we head to the big city of Belleville to play at “United Worship” which is a Quinte Area Youth Network event that sees about 150 young people every month, when they gather together and worship! Should be a great time.

Also later this month we are hitting the studio to record a demo CD.  The purpose of this CD will be to send it out to other conferences to try and “get on the bill” so to speak for the events in Ontario, so that will be lots of fun I’m sure.  The CD will likely all be covers, as we have yet to really write anything, the goal isn’t to become rich and famous, just wanting to have some fun playing music, and leading people in worship! Pray for us as we take on this project!

I guess thats kind of the main things going on in the life of Chris.  We’ve planned our 2009 vacation for the last 2 weeks of May/first week of June, we will be heading out east to join our Church Army family for a week, as well as spending a week with each of our families.  We will also be celebrating with Shawn as he gets married! I have a few speaking gigs while I’m down there, and a photo gig or 2, but other than that, it will just be a nice time with family and friends!

so tonight is a bored night for me.  Jen is out at a ladies christmas party, and since Seth is not on the bottle yet, that means he goes to, which leaves me home, alone, stranded with no wheels.

Though they are few and far between, bored nights always get me to thinking.  Thinking about the things I like to do in life, the things I’m working on (just the personal stuff, I almost never think about work) the things I do… basically I just end up thinking… a lot

Tonight I thought a lot about my hobbies.. the main 2 anyway, music and photography…. These are my 2 favorite things to do in the world, but I often struggle with not being good enough at them, and I can’t help but realize it’s my own fault, because I don’t put much into them.

When I think about music, I think about how much I would LOVE to be able to write songs, good songs.  Sure I can sit down and throw some chords down, but I’ve always been not so good with the lyric thing… I have a book full of choruses, and verses, but none of them really go together.. every now and then I just get inspired by something, and words come out, but its never a while song, it’s usually just a chorus, or a verse… then it sits in the book, I go back every now and then, trying to add to the chorus (or verse) to create a song, but i just get blocked.  Song writing is something I’d love to be able to do … this is one of the things I thought about tonight.

When it comes to photography, I seem to want to be instant success with it, and I know thats not how it works.  I browse the internet, looking at other peoples images, and I say to myself “why cant you do that?” I’ve only been doing photography for about 2 years, and there really is a lot to learn, I just don’t take the time to sit down and learn it… I’ve got books, I’ve got courses (free ones) bookmarked online.. but I just don’t take the time…

So whats the point of this post… I really have no idea… I’m sitting here, bored… I tried to go out and take some pictures tonight, but its just to cold out.. around -10 I think… maybe the point of this post was to give myself something to hold myself accountable to learning more… it’s down on paper now, and others have read it, so I have to do it… maybe, I don’t know… I was just bored, so I decided to write… maybe I’ll go look at one of those photography courses….

So I woke up this morning, tried to make a call from my iPhone… nothing… no service.. call failed.. that made me pretty upset, since I always have service.. and have never had an issue making calls.  So after a lot of restarting, hoping that would fix it (sometimes a simple restart will correct issues your having) I called Rogers… as it turns out, there is an iPhone outage in Ontario.. doesn’t make much sense to me… I would think maybe a “rogers outage” but they said other phones are working fine, just not iPhones…. are you a Rogers customer?  Do you use an iPhone in Ontario?  Is it working today???  are you a Rogers customer who uses some other phone??? Does it work?  Let me know.