This is an extended quote from an email newsletter I receive each week from worshipideas.com. This little newsletter pointed me to the Bose Personal Amplification system that each of my churches purchased for our PA system (and they sound incredible!).
[Joe Wood, this week's guest writer, leads the praise choir at one of upstate South Carolina's mega-churches, Brookwood Community Church. Brookwood has over 4,000 attendees each Sunday and is similar to Willow Creek.]
"We practiced for six hours and the director was still mad at us."
It was Father's Day, and I was eating at a breakfast that our church provided for the men singing in our once-a-year men's choir. I'd just told the guy next to me how great the group sounded, and that's when he said it. "Yeah, I can't believe we did it in one rehearsal. The last church I was in, we did this; and we practiced for six hours and the director was still mad at us." I was stunned, and really didn't know what to say.
You see, I used to be the same kind of director. I was old school. I was a "crack the whip" kind of director ...
hammering on all the flaws. I think I learned it that way.
After all, I studied music at a Christian college where you felt like you were in trouble all the time. We focused on flaws and "scored points" in finding them. But then, years later, I sang in a volunteer community choir directed by a Jerry Step, a local minister of music. Jerry's primary training tool was encouragement. I think his spiritual gift was encouragement. Jerry would gush over everything we did.
He would even gush over things that I didn't think deserved to be gushed over. It didn't take long for me to long to recognize, though, that Jerry's encouragement motivated us to work harder. His encouragement painted an image of what we could sound like. And before long, we sounded about as good as Jerry had been telling us we did. More importantly, it was fun singing in Jerry's choir. When rehearsal was over, we went home feeling good about what we'd accomplished and looking forward to our next rehearsal.
So I started trying out Jerry's method on the groups I directed. And it worked! I was amazed at how people responded to encouragement. Instead of listening for flaws, I started listening for things that the groups were doing right and pointing that out. When I found a flaw I tried to approach it in an encouraging way ... like complementing someone who was doing it right and explaining to the group what that person was doing. It was transformational! I discovered that my groups made much more progress in an encouraging environment than they had under my old school ways. In fact, they started getting better than I'd thought they could be.
That's when I started to become passionate about working with "average" musicians ... and it's one of the reasons that I'm so excited about the emergence of the Praise Choir in so many of our churches. If you put a bunch of regular people who love singing in a group, and give them encouragement, a vision, good coaching, and music that fits their voices, they can sound great. Mix in their love for God, and passion for worshipping Him, and they can be a powerful voice that encourages the church to worship!
I'm so glad that the guy I was talking with at breakfast had the experience that he had with us on Father's Day. I think now that he knows he has a voice that God can use; and he knows a little bit about how wonderful it is to serve God through praise. Maybe we can lure him into our regular Praise Choir...
How'd the guys do? It was amazing! We rehearsed for an hour and a half on Wednesday night, and about thirty minutes on Sunday morning. We didn't worry about parts. We let them sing melody or whatever part they could find. We just wanted them to sing their hearts. We kept the focus on the praise that we were doing ... not on the technical details of the music. The sound was awesome and the impact was powerful.
How could it be anything else? A men's chorus, passionately opening our services singing "Lord, Reign in Me." By the time we got to the closing chorus of "A Few Good Men" (three of our Praise Team guys sang the lead parts), our congregation couldn't stay in their seats! The choir was blessed. The congregation was blessed. I think God was blessed. And the director didn't even have to get mad.
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