This series will now take an undoubted turn into the more practical elements of worship leading. Upcoming topics include leading a contemporary band, instrumentation, managing worship practices, developing your musicians, and the art of leading a worship service. One of my favorite things to do is to breathe fresh new life into old hymns. Many have attempted to do this and about half as many butcher the classics. A word of caution: just because it’s old doesn’t make it good. Many old hymns are just as trite as contemporary music; they just used bigger words while doing it. The number one way to butcher an old hymn is this: screwing up the rhythm. It sounds simple enough, but there’s actually a complicated reason for this phenomena. It will require a little history. Music has two basic elements: meter (rhythm) and melody. European classical music heavily emphasized melody. The timing of…

Successful radio stations have implemented the set list principle for decades. The basic idea is this: people like to hear songs that they know. Likewise, people have a limited tolerance level for hearing and becoming familiar with music they don’t know. Thus, radio stations have gone to a “top 40” format or even a “top 20” format. These stations do this because if you tune in to their station for 10 or 15 minutes in the car, you’re going to hear a song that you know and will likely continue to listen. New songs are introduced incrementally. This is a great principle for worship music. A classic worship leader mistake is to hear a new song, love it, and lead it that Sunday in church. Good worship leaders have more discipline than this. Here’s my formula: have 2 months worth of music in your set list. If you normally sing…

Michael Foster is a church planter in Cincinnati who recently posted this about a worship band he likes. Many of the thoughts that I’ve been expounding upon at length are summarized on his blog.

In this post, I’m going to make some recommendations for CDs and songwriters that I respect and appreciate. Good worship songs are hard to find. When I was first learning to lead worship with Campus Crusade for Christ, I was given this hint for choosing songs: they had to be (1) singable, (2) playable, meaning that you had to be able to play it on the guitar, and (3) have good content. But worship music is becoming more and more sophisticated and worship leaders are discovering that people have a high threshold for musical complexity in worship music. This is great, because you can only go so far with 3 guitar chords. Let me begin with a disclaimer: the recommendations in this post are not exhaustive, but they are road ready, having been tested on my own congregation. Every worship set is like a meal: you need to have the…