What values guide your worship ministry team?
I once heard, “When your values are clear, your choices are easy.”
The first step is to determine your values. If you haven’t done this before, it may be a little more complicated than it sounds—and that’s because the values in our culture often need to be named before we can highlight them or change them (if required!).
How do you determine your values? This requires effort, but the best news is that you can jump in, name some values, try it out for a while, and then tweak it.
Here are a few well-known samples to get you thinking:
The Google Company Values:
- Respect the user: Google emphasizes putting the user first, providing the best user experience, and safeguarding user privacy.
- Respect the opportunity: The company encourages its employees to take advantage of opportunities to create innovative solutions and drive the company forward.
- Respect each other: Google fosters a culture of collaboration, open communication, and support among team members, regardless of their position or background.
Apple Company Values:
- Accessibility: Apple designs products to be usable by as many people as possible.
- Education: The company supports and invests in educational programs to empower learners and educators with technology.
- Environment: Apple emphasizes reducing its environmental impact.
- Diversity: Apple strives to create an inclusive and diverse workforce that embraces different backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas.
- Privacy: The company prioritizes user privacy and data security, developing products and services with privacy in mind.
- Supplier responsibility: Apple works with suppliers who share its commitment to ethical practices, fair labor, and responsibility.
I’m not saying we need to model values after major companies; only suggesting that from large to small, operating values are important.
Here are some worship team values that we try to operate by:
Excellence
We live by this definition of excellence: doing the best with what you have! We don’t compare ourselves to other churches or ministries; we strive to be great stewards of the people, resources, creativity, and talent we have in our church right now. We seek to be excellent in the basics, like team prayer, preparation, worship planning, punctuality, correct chords, lyrics and projection, and great Sunday worship times. We also want to be as excellent as possible in the “icing” aspects of worship ministry, such as creativity, risk, boldness, new songs, staging, lighting, production, community, photography, video, sound, development of team members, and everything else for which our people are gifted!
A Singing Church
One value of any worship team is to develop a singing church. Indeed, if your congregation isn’t singing and engaging, you may need to rethink your name of “worship leading team.” This value of seeking to help the church sing brings about great questions and reasons for why you’re doing what you’re doing. It helps answer questions about: 1) sound volume – can your people hear themselves sing? 2) lyric projection – can your people see the right words at the right pace to sing 3) stage volume – does the drummer need to play quieter, can the vocals be heard? 4) stage presence – are the vocalists engaged, and do they share a passion and energy for worship in the way they sing and move? This self-critique of your ministry leadership is much easier when you have the value of a “Singing church.” For example, you’re not just picking on the volume of the drummer’s cymbals; you’re helping the church sing!
People-Focused
The value of “people-focused” helps us lead our people well. We see our team for who they are – not just volunteers, but living out their gifts and calling. We want to empower people in our teams for their ministry, not ours. We seek to develop them with tools to learn their parts and songs in advance with plenty of time to rehearse, well-known and printed expectations of their role as a worship team member, and time with each other outside of the Sunday sound check rush. When we have a value of being people-focused, we spend time greeting the church before and after – not holed up in the back. We make time to connect with the pastor to plan, pray, and encourage. We don’t pick on our church – it’s most likely that they need some teaching, encouragement, and modeling if you don’t feel like they are engaging in worship. As we think about people on our team and in our church, we realize that being the church to each other doesn’t stop when we start serving! We serve together with grace, encouragement, and a hard word now and then once we’ve earned the opportunity. When we’re people-focused, we talk with team members each season to find out how they are doing, how much they want to serve, and how they think the ministry is going. In a people-focused team, we plan community times, Christmas parties, meals, prayer circles, and training. Of course, our ministry is primarily Jesus-focused – and we model his intense focus on people!
Humble Leadership
The value of humble leadership helps us put our trust, hope, and ministry in the hands of Jesus. It keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously. It helps us know that our ministry on stage amounts to a doorkeeper. Though very visible, our ministry in the church is similar to all the other serving roles we can think of to make ministry work. We humbly understand that we are under authority with a witness that matters for the greater church. As a result, we willingly submit to higher standards – what we post on social media, how we live in relationships, how we grow in faith,h and more. Humble leadership understands that not everyone is perfect, and we trust that God is even more at work in our weaknesses! In humble leadership, we ask more questions and listen more. We seek to live in peace with our ministry’s pastor, staff, and other leaders. We sing humbly and respond to compliments with the attitude of thanks and all glory to God!
Ideas to help determine the values that your team can live by:
Pray and brainstorm
Think about some of the values you do have and some you want to have. What is God calling your worship ministry to be?
Gather a team
Get together with some of your leaders and just ask them what they think the current values are and what might be good to grow into.
Reflect on the purpose of the church and your worship team
Consider your church mission statement, the congregation, the style, and the opportunities you have to be a light in your part of the world.
Get a list together
Encourage team members to brainstorm values important to the church’s success. Create a master list of all suggestions.
Prioritize values
Rank the core values in order of importance.
Communicate them and test the values
Publish them and share them with your team. Then, see what might need to be tweaked later.
Reinforce values
Work them into your conversation, invite people to consider them, include them in your prayer, share them with new folks on the team and live them out yourself.
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