Narrowing the Worship Gap

Worship Leaders by John A. White Contributing Writer August 28, 2011

Definition: The worship gap is the distance between your expectations and what really happens.

When I prepare and practice a worship set, I do in the light of an expectation of how the congregation will respond. Sometimes the congregation exceeds my expectations and which is absolutely fantastic. But what happens when we prepare a worship set, practice it and get a sense that God is really behind it and then on Sunday, the congregation seems to be flat and hardly responsive? It is so easy to say that it is a bad worship day, the congregation is spiritually lazy today, there were too many distractions in the sanctuary or anything other excuse that would allow us off the hook because. Besides, as everyone could plainly see, we've done our best. Right!? Yet we know deep inside that God has given us a divine responsibility to lead worship no matter what the circumstances are. I think I have a strategy to help us narrow the gap but it takes a new mindset about leading worship; I would like to suggest that we consider worship leading as a functional process, having inputs and outputs.

Inputs are the things that you gather together to create and perform your worship set. These include God's direction, the lead sheets and sheet music, the musicians and vocalists, the sound equipment and the sound stage you create, your budget, your practice times and places and so on. Outputs are the worship environment you create that the congregation responds to. The figure below attempts to illustrate this worship process. See there might be a gap between our expectation and what happens we ask, "How do we narrow the gap?"

To narrow the gap we must use feedback to help us become more effective. Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Community in Barrington IL, insists that on Monday the staff will review every aspect of Sunday's service. They use feedback to narrow their gap.

Effective feedback requires two things. First we must have our expectations clearly defined; how did we expect the congregation to act? Sometimes we limit our expectations of the work that God plans to do through us so we don't disappoint others or ourselves. We must be bold like Gideon and believe God can do bigger things through our availability than we could ever do with our talent. So take a bold step an clarify your goals then write them down in 10 to 15 words. Your written goals include objective; 25 people raised their hands, 4 people danced in the aisles, 50% of the people looked introspective and contemplative when you sang "Refiner's Fire" toward the end of the set. Examples of subjective goals are how well did we set up the environment for worship and ministry, will people have an opportunity to freely express themselves before God and will people grow as worshippers as a result of this set that we are planning. We should have at least one objective and one subjective goal.

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