All churches worship uniquely and in a style that suits their context and community. There is no one way to worship. In this video, Director of Lifeway Worship, Mike Harland, explains the piece of advice that he recommends worship leaders should ignore.
The entire video is above, and the complete transcript is below.
I do get questions from time to time about advice for someone that’s a worship pastor or preparing to become a worship pastor. But if I was going to answer the question: “What piece of advice would you advice someone to ignore as they’re aspiring to lead worship?”, it might be this one. I think any time we associate church growth with a particular style of music.
For instance, some churches might be tempted to think, “Well the church down the street’s doing so well and they do worship this way. If we did worship that way our church would do well too.” And that just isn’t true.
Worship is all about context and about the community where you are. There is no single music approach or worship style that’s going to generate some kind of spiritual result.
So I tell worship leaders quite often that spiritual objectives can only be accomplished in spiritual means. Music will never unify in and of itself. You won’t find a music style that will unify a congregation. There’s no such thing. The nuances are too many.
No, it’s a spiritual thing that God does and a leader of a worship ministry better be thinking more like a shepherd than an artist. And the piece of advice I would tell them to ignore is the advice that says: If you do it this way, your church will grow. That may not and probably will not be true.
