Worship Tips Wednesday: 5 Tips for Using a 2nd Acoustic Guitar

One day when I was in high school my parents took my twin brother to a local music store to look at a new keyboard (he was a piano player, while I had quit after 1 year of lessons). While I was at home I got a call on the phone. It was my parents asking me if I wanted a guitar. I had never asked for a guitar so the question confused me. They said my brother was asking for an acoustic guitar and they wanted to know if I wanted one as well. I said sure, and they brought home two basic Yamaha acoustic guitars worth about $100 each.

That was my first step into learning to play the guitar and lead worship.

I took a couple of months of lessons, but stopped after that and decided to teach myself (I did take more formal lessons when I was in college). Less than a year later I was leading worship for my youth group, and the rest is history.

The wonderful thing about the acoustic guitar is that it is so accessible. It doesn’t take a lot of time or money to learn basic chords that can get you playing all sorts of styles of music.

The problem is that because the guitar is relatively easy to pick up, many people do, leaving a lot of worship teams with more guitarists than they can use.

One of the ways to solve this is to have a 2nd acoustic guitar on your team. But how should that person play without getting in the way of the 1st acoustic and muddying the sound?

Here are 5 tips to help people playing 2nd acoustic guitar on a worship team:

Planning vs. Spontaneity in Worship

One of my favorite things to do, on the rare occasions I’m not ministering on a Sunday, is visit other church’s worship services. I’ve had the opportunity to visit a number of different churches over the years, including ones that are essentially opposite in their approaches to worship. I’ve been in Anglican high church worship services, Pentecostal charismatic services, and everywhere in between.

I have found much to appreciate in most of the worship styles I have encountered, liturgical, charismatic, and the broad spectrum in the middle. Unfortunately these differences have often led to more conflict than cooperation, especially over the past 50 years.

One of the main areas of disagreement is over whether worship should be planned, or whether it should be spontaneous. For the decade I was a worship leader I would regularly hear comments from church members on both sides. Some would argue our worship should be more structured; others would argue it should be more free.

So which one is correct? What is better in worship, planning or spontaneity?

Well, I have a few thoughts on that…

The Case for Planning

Those who come from more traditional and liturgical worship styles (at their best) generally tend to emphasize the need for planning and preparation for the different parts of the service. Scripture for reading and preaching come from predetermined readings (what’s known as the Lectionary). Worship songs and hymns are chosen from a limited selection that corresponds with the scripture readings for that week. Other elements like prayers and congregational responses are pre-written and placed at various times to fit the overall arc of the service.

Worship leaders from these traditions will often say that planning services in this way ensures that what they sing, teach, and say together will be biblically accurate and theologically sound. It also builds patterns and disciplines in their people that will help grow them into spiritual maturity.

The more they plan, the more faithful their worship will be to the Bible.

The Case for Spontaneity

On the other side, Pentecostal and charismatic worship emphasizes the expected moves of the Holy Spirit in worship. Songs are often chosen the week of the service, but can be changed at a moment’s notice if the Spirit leads a different way. All prayers are extemporaneous (made up on the spot), and scripture is woven in where and when the leaders feel appropriate. Pastor even feel a tremendous amount of freedom to change the sermon while they are preaching if a new thought or approach comes to mind.

Worship leaders from these churches emphasize the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit to guide and direct worship, and want to submit to the Spirit as much as possible. They will say that by demonstrating this spontaneity on Sundays they are modeling for their congregation how to respond to the prompts of the Spirit in daily life.

So which one is right?

Choosing Between the Two (or Not)

While both sides make the case for their own approach to worship, they often will also criticize the other side. This argument was at the heart of much of the worship wars of the 1980s and 90s.

Charismatics will criticize traditionalists for excluding the Spirit from their worship. Traditionalists will counter that the Spirit is involved all the way through their planning, including through the whole of Church history, and that spontaneity doesn’t always lead to being more sensitive to the Spirit.

Traditionalists criticize charismatics for being too flimsy with their doctrine in worship. Charismatics will counter that it is the Spirit that illuminates scripture and theology, and that without being sensitive to the Spirit we miss what God seeks to say through his word and people.

Over the decade I was a worship pastor I found helpful elements in both traditional and charismatic worship traditions, as well as everything in between. There were times in our service where we would embrace the spontaneity and move of the Spirit and change our plans at a given moment. There were other times we would use liturgical elements to guide our people into the history and tradition of God’s people, and root them in scripture and theology. Each of these approaches, when used correctly (which I didn’t always do) benefited our congregation.

So, as you might imagine, I don’t believe in having to choose one or the other. You can include both detailed planning and spontaneity in your worship leading.

However, it’s not enough to say you’ll do both. Understanding how these two approaches work together is essential to using them both well in your worship.

Here’s the basic principle: Plan for Spontaneity.

If you plan out your service well in the right ways, you’ll actually increase your ability to spontaneously respond to the leading of the Holy Spirit. Selecting songs, prayers, scripture, and speaking topics in advance will give you and your team the opportunity to practice and prepare as well as possible for the worship service. This will increase your confidence when you get ready to lead and play. It will also help ensure that you have the time to think through the biblical and theological accuracy of the various parts of the service.

Once you and your team are fully confident in what you’ve prepared, it will be far easier for you to change things if the Spirit leads you to. Switching a song won’t be an issue because you’ll know the other songs by heart and will have the mental capacity to pull in something you haven’t rehearsed much. Abandoning a pre-written prayer or speaking time for something impromptu will also be easier since you’ll know you have something to fall back on if need be. The more you plan and prepare the more spontaneous you can be while preserving the overall quality of your worship time.

While I appreciate both traditional and charismatic worship forms, I find myself most comfortable in the middle, balancing planning and spontaneity together.

Try this approach this week and see how you like it. Plan out your service and rehearse your team to the point they know the songs really well. Then tell them that there may be a moment or two where you’re going to go off script and they need to be ready to follow you when you do. It will be a little scary but will also give you a whole new level of freedom to your worship.

Do you prefer planning or spontaneity more? How do you balance these in your worship leading? Let me know in the comments.

Worship Tips Wednesday: 5 Tips for Introducing New Songs

This is obviously a pretty unique time in the history of the American Church. Many congregations aren’t meeting in person, instead meeting online. And those churches that have started meeting in person are having to find ways to do so safely, either by meeting outside, or by using significant social distancing measures that completely change the dynamics of the service.

I strongly believe that the best option for worship leaders right now is to fall back on familiarity to help their congregations worship well in the current circumstances. However, eventually we will get back to some version of normal worship, and worship leaders will need to start introducing new songs again. That makes this the perfect time to talk about how to introduce new songs well.

Here are my 5 tips for introducing new worship songs to your church:

On Jon Steingard and Deconstructing Faith

It seems like every few weeks or so there is another announcement of a well-known Christian (I don’t like the term “celebrity”) announcing that they’ve lost or walked away from their Christian faith.  It started with Joshua Harris of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” fame, and has included others like Marty Sampson of Hillsong Worship, recently Youtube stars Rhett and Link.  The most recent example is Jon Steingard, lead singer of the band Hawk Nelson, who put out a lengthy Instagram post about his own faith deconstruction.

Worship Tips Wednesday: 5 Tips For Relaunching Worship

This past Sunday our church gathered together for the first time in 13 weeks. We met outdoors under large tents with appropriate social distancing, sanitization, and masks. Still with all the restrictions we had our biggest attendance of the year (which I know is not normal). And it just felt so good to be with one another again.

As more and more states reopen from lockdown churches are beginning to reopen as well. However, after almost 3 months of online services and a whole bunch of new restrictions, it can be a challenge for church leaders to adapt to this new normal. This is especially true for worship leaders.

So to help you as your church looks to gather again, here are 5 tips for worship leaders as they relaunch their in-person worship ministries.