Heaven + Earth

Thought some of my worship leader and preacher friends would find this quote from Vicky Beeching interesting and entertaining:

“Preachers would be offended if right before speaking, the service leader came up and said “I know you’ve prepared a sermon, but we’d like you to change part of it. Instead of speaking on whatever you’ve prepared, we’d like you to change the second half of your talk to Jonathan Edwards’s sermon entitled “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”… I’m guessing you probably know that one from all your reading??” No one would ever do that! But people feel very comfortable doing that with worship leaders.. We need to gently let people know that we are not a jukebox, we are planning and prepping as much as a preacher does, and that we need their help to not detonate all our prayerfully crafted preparation. Most leaders WANT worship that is well planned and takes the congregation on a crafted journey, so it’s in their interests to work with us on this one.”

I enjoy a pretty fantastic working relationship with our teaching pastors here at Moncton Wesleyan for the most part, but there has been the odd occasion (maybe 3 or 4 times in the last 1.5 years) where I’ve found myself in this situation. It’ll often happen when a guest speaker is visiting and we haven’t had a chance to connect on his/her message beforehand. One time in particular the visiting preacher just decided to launch into singing the last-minute hymn he’d requested before the band could get started. We were left trying to guess what key he was singing in (our keyboard player saved us on that one, thanks Barb!), and then fumbling through the chord progressions because we’d never played the song before as a band. In the end it came off okay but there were definitely a few seconds of sheer terror as all of the musicians looked to me with stricken faces and shrugged shoulders, and I had no answers for them!

So, the next time your teaching pastor asks you to make a last-minute set change, fire this comeback at him and let the passive-aggressive power struggle ensue! Okay, maybe don’t do that, but at least remind him that you actually put a lot of thought and preparation into the work you do too. That’s fair, right?