“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to You, LORD, my rock and my Redeemer.” Psalm 19:14
In Psalm 19 the cry throughout this passage is that creation, all of it, are a witness to God, His glory, and His handiwork. As I think about worship and lyric presentation, this passage serves to remind me of the heart of everything we do. I want to be a part of joining creation with my church in worshiping our great God together. Since we are going to spend eternity worshiping our great God together (Revelation 19) we might as well seek to worship well together now.
“After this I heard something like the loud voice of a vast multitude in heaven, saying, Hallelujah! Salvation, glory, and power belong to our God” Revelation 19:1
1. We serve our God excellently as a heartfelt response to the astounding truth of who He is and how He as saved us.
These next two points are where we transition to the role of a lyrics presenter. These are the operating procedures that I follow in my church and how I train my team.
2. Serve people on stage well.
Our job is an important one. People on stage are tasked with “leading the congregation into worship” but so many times in many churches these people are memorizing their music and also working to memorize lyrics so they can engage the congregation. I am so thankful for our worship teams at my church. I realize I am not gifted to serve in that role in front of our church (1 Cor.12:12), I like being behind the scenes and so I want to do all I can to serve the team on stage no matter if it’s the band, the worship choir, the pastor, or greeters. If there is something that I can do to help and serve them, making their opportunity to worship with our people easier, then I want to do that. This really comes down to flexibility. As a lyric operator we need to be flexible to change if there is anything that needs to be adapted to better serve those leading on stage in front of the people.
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3. Serve and lead the congregation excellently.
“Does this help our people enter into worship today?”
This question requires looking at it from different angles to see how this fleshes out in our churches. Leading and serving our congregation excellently means:
- Transitioning slides timely, before we sing the next words, so that our people can ‘sing the words and join in worship’.
- It means ensuring our lyrics are clear and uniform so that our brothers and sisters aren’t hindered in reading them.
- It means setting an atmosphere with tasteful backgrounds that don’t distract but enhance worship.
- It means seeking to do this excellently and mistake free so that we wouldn’t be a distraction in worship but instead our excellence would allow people to encounter Jesus only.
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The first two outcomes here also serve our Worship teams since they are reading lyrics on Stage Displays (many times). So this is where serving both the congregation and the worship team by leading them in the song is important. If we know the music we can transition slides before we sing the next set of lyrics that way the people of our church and worship team can read them and sing the music accurately.
The last two deal more with the atmosphere and what our church will see. The best way I have found to handle serving and leading our congregation and worship teams well is knowing the music, practicing excellently and having a run through of the music so that any small glitches and mistakes can be corrected. This will ensure that we are not surprised by things at our worship services and that we ourselves can fully engage into joining in worship with our people by using our gifts to encounter and worship our great Lord together.
Following these guidelines will help us serve and lead in our church well. Mistakes are going to happen the question is always how do we handle those. Do we accept mistakes when we miss a cue, botch a slide or miss a lyric? Do we seek to learn from what happened so that we can grow as a leader and seek to not make the same mistakes over and over again?
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I am praying that we would be servants who serve out of a heartfelt response to God and what He’s done, and that we would be known as servants who love the people on stage and our people in our church by leading them in worship well!