I Took My Eye Off the Ball as a Worship Leader. Here’s What I Protect Now.
I’m an entrepreneur. For about 15 years, a big share of my focus went into other businesses, and during that stretch the way I led worship suffered.
That’s a longer story for another day. What I want to share here is what it taught me: the things that keep a worship leader healthy don’t stay healthy on their own. You have to protect them.
The coffee that made me name them
Not long ago, a guy from our church asked me over coffee, “How do you know when someone you’re developing is actually growing?”
I didn’t have a great answer. I had rehearsed with teams, prayed with them, and stood on a lot of stages with them, but I had never built a real framework for developing people.
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That question stayed with me. It turned into four things I now believe every person on a worship team has to carry, in any church. At Southstone we call them the Core4. They aren’t a checklist. They’re a gut check at the heart level.
1. Your heart
You can’t give away what you don’t have. Jesus said, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Not a great song, not a great mix, not a great team.
2. Your mission
If you don’t know what you’re aiming at, you’ll miss it. The mission is making disciples (Matthew 28:19), and worship is the reason for it: more people giving Jesus the worth He deserves. In your church, that mission has a shape, carried by the pastor God put over your house. Get close to it and submit to it.
3. Your craft
Get good at what you do, whether that’s singing, running sound or playing keys. Not to show off, but because skill is something you hand to God and to the people in the room: “play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts” (Psalm 33:3). Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.
4. Your leadership
Leadership in the kingdom isn’t a title or a seat at the front. It’s courage and sacrifice in your relationships, from a humble heart. Jesus “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). Serve where you’ve been placed, and let someone else call you up.
Where it all starts
You don’t get to pick one or two. All four have to be there, but they don’t start in the same place. Your walk with God fuels the other three. So when one of them is missing, look at the first one before you look anywhere else.
And here’s what steadies me: Jesus has already done all four perfectly. He walked in constant fellowship with the Father, knew exactly what He came to do, did it with excellence, and led by laying down His life. We protect these four not to earn anything, but because He’s worth it.
If you want the practical steps for each one, I wrote the full version on my site: The Four Things Every Worship Leader Must Protect.
Nate
