Leading Worship in a Church Plant

The Courage To Let Your Spirit Fly by Stephen Poff

About the Author - Andy Moyle

Andy Moyle leads The Gateway Church Plant, King’s Lynn. He has been involved in church leadership for many years, and King’s Lynn is his second church plant.

This Article

Friday, 6 March, 2009 - 10:58

Andy has helpfully documented many of the processes he has gone through in his church planting experience, and here shares about worship leading in the context of a church plant.

The church hall is packed with people and the air is charged with an anticipation of meeting with the Almighty God. Quickly everyone takes his or her place as the worship leader cues the band. Within an instant, the entire congregation ignites into heartfelt, dynamic, spirit filled praise.

Cut to a church plant. The School gym is not packed. Church notice sheets rustle behind the din of chatter as people take their seats. Various backgrounds and experiences are represented in the congregation. Some people have never experienced spirit filled, New Testament worship. Others don’t even know the Lord. The question is: How does the worship leader lead this group?

My first church plant launched with a small group of pioneers and quickly gathered a few families from non-charismatic backgrounds who were interested in finding out more about our expression of church life. Many had never encountered the Spirit and were unused to the freedom of worship for an extended period.

As leaders, we quickly recognised we were on a journey and needed to get a vision of what we wanted our Sunday meetings to look like. Some of the questions we thought about and made decisions on were: How long should the worship time be? How directive is the worship leader? What sort of band do we want? Would a band encourage or discourage participation in a small setting? How do we involve children? We decided that we wanted worship on a Sunday to get to a place of intimacy and encourage charismatic contribution and congregation participation.

Todd Hunter the leader of the Vineyard movement in the US writes, ‘Nothing can kill a church plant quicker than a worship leader/senior pastor split. This may seem like a drastic statement until you realize that in many churches with contemporary worship, the worship leader is second in visibility to the pastor.’

In the early days, I delegated responsibility for worship too early, which meant that I had to step in at a later point to lay down the vision and values that I should have conveyed at the beginning. This also enabled me to form a team and then to hand over to an excellent leader who could take the team forward.

There are lots of reasons why leading worship in a plant can be so different to an established church and most of them stem from the nature of the settings themselves. See Table below for differences.

Practicalities of leading worship and developing a team

• Pray for your musicians – you will need a guitarist first. As the church grows you can expand the team, but beware of making the team too big when you are still small – a band that’s bigger than the congregation is not a good idea!
• Remember, there are two aspects to leading corporate worship – spiritual (flow of the Spirit, handling contributions, response) and musical (playing and leading the band musically).
• Make sure you and the worship leader have clear expectations of your differing roles. Someone with high musical leadership but low spiritual leadership will need more directional input from the leader.
• Our church leadership team chooses the church song list. We have had to leave off complicated songs because we can’t play them and the congregation can’t sing them!
• Be careful of burnout! After two years, our musicians serve two weeks on and two weeks off.
• Don’t let it get so busy and technology oriented that we forget it is about relating together and to God, about hearing from Him and being changed into the likeness of His Son.

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