Worship Ministry Catalyst

Perhaps the most important relationship in many churches is the one that exists between the worship leader and the senior pastor. And yet, often times it's one of the most difficult. Today, myself and Joe are joined by Dan Thompson as we talk about some of the ways worship team members do their pastor and worship leaders a disservice. We also talk directly to senior pastors and some of the responsibilities they have in protecting and supporting their worship teams. And of course, as usual, other things come up along the way too.

Worship ministry has changed drastically over the last 25 years, and for pianists, that change hasn't always been easy. Today, we hear from Christi Stills who has been a pianist in a traditional, piano and organ worship ministry and has also spent the last 10 years playing with a worship band. Christi also shares with us about her journey as a composer, her success at getting her music out on Spotify, including one song, Lavender Fog, which has more than half a million plays. Christi can be found on Spotify at Christi Stills, as well as on Facebook and Instagram.

A lot of people are speculating about what summer 2021 is going to look like for the church. I think it's safe to say we should anticipate people taking a lot of time to rest and recuperate over the next few months. In fact, it might be what's needed. Still, we'll have services to plan and lead, when people may not be available, we might even be gone. How are we going to thoughtfully lead worship this summer?

As worship leaders we tend to spend the vast amount of our time on musical preparation and leave the spiritual preparation for leading worship until the last minute. We hope that God will "show up" in our corporate worship without having spent time in with Him personally. Today, David & Joe talk about some of the practical things we need to be doing in our personal walk with God to be ready to lead our congregations every Sunday. We also talk about some new worship songs like "Promises" by Maverick City, "The Blessing" by Kari Jobe and "Battle Belongs" by Phil Wickham.

Are you working to rebuild your team after the pandemic? Have you had to deal with someone on the team who is bringing everyone down? How do we build healthy teams? Also in this episode we talk about the importance of developing our leadership skills along with our musical skills. Today, we are joined by Alex Enfiedjian of Worship Ministry Training to share a little bit with us about building healthy teams in worship ministry. This is a conversation you don't want to miss as you're working to rebuild your worship teams post-Covid. And make sure to check out Alex's podcast (Worship Ministry Training) and website with a lot of resources: https://www.worshipministrytraining.com/

You know that time you really messed up the song in the service? Or the time you forgot to put on your capo, or you went to start a track and it was on the wrong song, or you weren't on the right Main Stage patch? Yeah, me neither. Okay. Maybe that happened this Sunday. But how do we handle the mistakes?  We also talk about the catastrophic loss of mentorship in too many churches across the country and what we can do to change it in our church. 

Looking for some good training tools to train your worship team and worship leaders? We'd love to introduce you to Branon Dempsey or Worship Team Training and Worship Team Training University!

In this episode we spend some time catching up with Joe and hearing about his experience in the ice storm, being without power for 10 days. We also talk about David's new album available on Spotify, iTunes and all digital platforms, "Peaceful Piano Hymns". 

Since we got distracted last time when we intended to talk about distractions, we're going to talk about distractions today.

In todays' episode we talk about the idea of worship arts ministry, supporting arts of all kinds in the church and building the influence of the church in society at large.