Posted on January 19, 2021 by Dr. Will Whittaker
Over the last several months, I’ve heard of several churches that have had multiples styles of worship prior to Covid making changes to one, more balanced, intergenerational style. Most of the worship pastors I’ve heard from are excited that their churches are embracing a more inclusive worship experience. For those of you in a similar boat, here are some great guidelines (not exhaustive, of course) for you to use when considering a shift from multiple styles back to one, more balanced, style. To be clear, this is not a call against churches with multiple styles, but rather some practical ways those churches seeking to bring greater unity to their churches by merging into one style may do so.
As a church that is pretty textbook intergenerational and our services are identical with one prevailing style, which has both traditional and contemporary elements, I can say our move in 2014 to two completely mirrored services had its own challenges. While we didn’t have a musical style issue to overcome, we did have several practical issues to deal with. Here was our scenario:
*We had an 8:30 and 11:00 service with SS in between (choir and orchestra only at 11-PT and band at 8:30- same music, but without choir feature; we moved to SS at 8:20, 9:45, and 11 and our worship times went to 9:45 and 11.
*Our shift to back to back services allowed us to use the choir and orchestra for both services (although choir was only in loft for first 10-15 minutes of service–major drawback). The plus was each service got the identical worship experience. To date I have less than a 15-20% change in choir size between the services, because the choir sings and then can go to SS, stay for whole service, or leave. The change did require many more volunteers than we had before, but the dividends have been worth it. I built up the excitement of being involved in the worship services while not having to miss SS.
*Biggest drawback has been parking. Between 10:30 and 11 is the time frame we have the most people on campus at any given time. The 11 worship attenders are starting to arrive, 9:45 attenders are still here, and our largest SS time (9:45) is still in session. We regularly max out parking, so many have to park off-campus.
If you and your staff are considering a shift and have questions, either I, or some other trusted friends who’ve been through shift like mine or a musical style shift, would be happy to talk with you about it!
Posted on December 22, 2020 by Dr. Will Whittaker
I’ve really enjoyed hearing and seeing many church’s Christmas music this season. Never before have our Christmas celebrations been so visible as this year. One thing I noticed immediately, every church fell into one of four camps when presenting their music this year:
Regardless of the camp chosen, I have been very impressed with the creativity I’ve seen and the effort to make Christmas special for each community of faith. Every church has had to make some tough decisions on what to do in their own particular context based on the restrictions of their community, effect of virus on their own congregation, and comfort level. There was NO wrong way to handle Christmas music this year because every context was different.
I chose option four at my church for two basic reasons:
1. Our room (both the platform and congregation space) would not allow us the opportunity to do live presentations without at least 10 different presentations, let alone the issue of how to fit 125 in the choir and orchestra distanced in a space barely able to hold this number elbow to elbow!
2. Doing a virtual recording, using our whole sanctuary space allowed us to spread out like we needed to, and not limit the number of participants in our event this year. My number one goal this Christmas was to make sure that all who wanted to sing and play had that opportunity.
I struggled in the latter part of the summer about what to do for Christmas primarily because I’m a big time planner. Our event, Christmas at Ivy Creek, is the largest single event we do in our music ministry each year. Our investment in this event and the spread of the gospel message was just too important to forgo. By August, I was concerned about our ability to do anything for Christmas. I had thrown out the idea of doing something outside because of the volatility of the weather and I threw out the idea of doing the event up to ten times. As the fall began and we started resuming bi-monthly choir rehearsals, I realized our best option would be to do something virtual–specifically pre-recording something, but it was the first week of October when I finally felt a peace about what to do. At that point, we only had seven rehearsals before we planned to record. I knew it would be too much to ask our folks to learn a whole hour of new music and be able to internalize it. So, I started looking back at previous year’s recordings and I decided we’d do a hybrid virtual concert: some videos of songs from the past and then five new songs (four choral and one orchestra feature). I figured we could learn five songs in that time frame to get ready to record.
Getting ready to record proved to be a frustrating challenge at first! Finding a way to mic an entire room (can you say balance issues!?) and video an entire room with our equipment would not have produced the best result. The balance of orchestra to choir during this season was a challenge. While almost all of our 34 players played, only 60 of our almost 95 singers were comfortable singing. After many conversations and some trial and error during rehearsals, we realized we needed to hire an audio engineer to record the audio for our new songs. This was the best money we could’ve spent to get a real-life room sound.
We decided to record our narrations off-site this year and drop them into our “cornucopia” presentation. Because we gave my video producer only 5 days to edit and create our video for our premiere, we decided to do the narrations in mid-November. This gave him the time to make sure the previous choir and orchestra videos were extracted from the past and the narrations edited before he tackled the new material.
The day of recording went as follows:
These are the safety features we implemented. I’m sure they we are not as strict as others I’ve heard of, but now that we’re over 18 days from the recording, I can say there was no COVID transmitted during our recording!
Our experience recording went so well for us that I’m planning to bring back the audio engineer and do another round of recording for our choir and orchestra at least once more closer to Easter. We are NOT using the choir in person during our regular weekend worship services. We are using pre-recorded anthems to use for the foreseeable future. I am using orchestra and praise team every week. I miss having the choir, but allowing them the platform to sing and record has meant the world to them. They STILL get to be worship leaders, just in a different way. The goal of this blog, and this article as well, is to remind us that all persons from every generation and ability level should have a place to serve. Creativity is a must to make this happen, but it can happen. I applaud the work so many of my colleagues are doing to keep people active in worship ministry throughout this unprecedented season. I’d love to hear more ideas of how all generations are still being utilized in worship ministry.
If you’d like to see our final product, here’s a link to Christmas at Ivy Creek 2020. Below that are a few pictures from the recording day:
Posted on October 2, 2020 by Dr. Will Whittaker
This semester I’m teaching Introduction to Church Music Ministry at Truett McConnell University. My students are church music majors and this class is a required overview of what to expect in local church ministry. One of the assignments I have the students completing are interviews with worship pastors and/or music leaders already serving in local church ministry. In preparation for these interviews, I had the students bring in 8-10 questions they wanted to ask these leaders so we could share ideas and suggestions on which questions might be the most useful for them to ask. The questions they brought in were really great questions. But, what stood out to me was that every student had one or more questions related to resolving conflict and how to have good working relationships with their pastor and staff.
If my students are any indication of other church music students getting ready to head into local church music ministry, then I think we better equip them with conflict management and relationship skills in the best ways we can. But honestly, these students need to start seeing these skills demonstrated as they are growing up in their own local churches. My point is: our church music graduates entering the local church need to be ready to handle the relational side of ministry on par with the development of their musical skills and their worship leaders growing up need to model it for them early on.
Everyone reading probably agrees with what I’ve said. Yet, our time of investment with young people called to the ministry is largely spent on crafting musical skills and platform presence, not the relational side of ministry. This is a mistake!
I’ve asked several pastors over the years the biggest reasons why worship pastors are terminated and very few of them revolve around lack of musical skill. Among the results are the following:
Since not every local church worship pastor/leader has the opportunity to teach in an academic setting, we local church worship leaders MUST invest in those emerging worship leaders in our congregations who feel called to vocational ministry. As a musical leader, you will naturally pour yourself into helping with them understand the musical and technical aspects of worship ministry, but don’t stop there. Spend time talking with your budding leaders about how to develop good working relationships with your pastor, other staff members, and volunteers. Show them how resolving conflict is done in a Christ-like manner. Below are some ideas.
Conflict resolution is important; solid communication is important. These things are taught, yes, but they are more likely caught as your emerging worship leaders are in your music ministry. Model excellence in effective communication and conflict resolution while investing in them one on one to help shape our younger worship leaders into pastoral musicians.
a few ideas (not exhaustive) to consider when confronting someone with the goal of resolving conflicts:
“Intergenerational Worship” is worship in which people of every age are understood to be equally important.
Howard Vanderwell