“Who Has the Ball?” is four-part series. This is part two. You can read part one here.
Practice Passing The Ball
Rehearse your transitions! Transitions become smooth when they are rehearsed first privately and then later, with your entire team. Sometimes it can feel disingenuous to behave as you would during a service packed with people while rehearsing in an empty gymnasium or auditorium. Speaking a call to worship, praying or rehearsing a worship leader moment to a bunch of empty chairs isn’t exactly life-giving. I want to encourage you to push through that awkwardness with everything you got.
I also want to challenge any sense that your leadership is any less guided by the Spirit because it’s rehearsed. All throughout the Old Testament we read that those who led worship played skillfully (Psalm 33:3). I don’t know of any skill that can be developed without practice and rehearsal. Furthermore, the Spirit is no less at work in our private practice times and rehearsals than He is when there’s an audience in front of us.
Anything that keeps you from practicing transitions as they would happen in the service is holding you hostage to clunky and haphazard transitions. Your team needs to know how things are going to go in a service and when you make time to actually speak as you would, pray as you would and play as you would, you increase clarity so others on your team (and those you pass the ball to) can easily read, understand and anticipate your platform leadership. Build margin in your rehearsals to rehearse your transitions.
Have a Rehearsal Game Plan
No team wins without having a solid game plan. A winning worship team builds a strong rehearsal culture. At our church, we rehearse Sunday morning. We’ve found that day-of rehearsals bring out the best in our team because there’s less time between a mid-week rehearsal and Sunday to forget how things go. Day-of rehearsals are also less of a withdrawal on our volunteers. Requiring an early morning instead of a mid-week evening is often more doable for busy families.
Our typical rhythm includes three rehearsals where we rehearse the entire worship set. I am intentionally using the word rehearsal because we’ve built a culture where practice is what happens during the week on our own, rehearsal is what we do together. We’ve set an expectation of excellence where we expect our team to come to rehearsal prepared. If rehearsal is the first time we’re hearing a song or verbalizing a moment, we’re bringing less than our best to the altar.
Our band and vocalists start off rehearsing separately. This is an opportunity to get warmed-up, adjust levels and rehearse specific parts within the songs. Our second rehearsal is where we put things together, rehearse transitions while stopping at any point to make any last-minute corrections, musically and vocally. Our final rehearsal is as if the room was full. It’s during this last rehearsal that we are not only rehearsing our learned parts and transitions but our stage presence as well. We stop for nothing in this rehearsal. We welcome that pressure because it accurately tests the fidelity of the sacrifice we’re seeking to bring.
Having three rehearsals may seem overkill to some, but it’s through rehearsing well that we level up our excellence to the Lord. We don’t want phone in our worship, He’s worthy of our very best. Another benefit of multiple-rehearsals is it allows your production team to rehearse as well. Because their preparation is dependent on your performance, multiple rehearsals give opportunity for them to dial-in lighting and levels and have a clear picture of what the service will look like. Well-executed transitions are dependent on production audio and lighting cues. A strong rehearsal culture helps your production team serve the platform transitions by providing clarity on when and how they happen.
If you serve at a smaller church what I am describing may feel unattainable. After all, if you are executing a small worship service with just 2-3 people, three rehearsals is going to feel wrong-sized. It’s true, the larger the operation, the more scaled your rehearsal culture will need to be. However, the principles remain the same. If you serve on a small team (I’ve been there!), consider implementing a three-phase rehearsal plan:
- Give the band and vocalists direction and destination for the service before the rehearsal. You are responsible for giving them the tools they need to succeed, they are responsible for implementing them. In our culture, we provide isolated band and vocal tracks so our teams can learn parts exactly as they are on the recordings as a starting point. When you gather to rehearse, talk through every moment, highlighting the transitions and when the ball will be passed. Let your team know the end goal of the service is and how you’ll know when you’ve arrived.
- Rehearse your team and passing the ball, stopping as often as you need to to get the play right.
- Attempt a “no-stopping” run-through where you put all parts together with transitions as if the room was full.
Scaling these principles to the size of your team will allow you to move forward in building an excellent, strong rehearsal culture while keeping things attainable for the size of your team.
This is the second part of a four-part series. Next time we’ll talk about what happens when we drop the ball and how we can create healthy environments that encourage our teams to “fail forward”.
Travis Doucette • Worship Blog 