Our job is to engage with all the people in the room as best as we can. Sometimes it’ s weird, but sometimes you see people’ s walls come down, and they feel like they can be a part of this. If they were sitting there unengaged, now you might see them swaying side to side. That could be the step that they took today towards engaging in worship. If they’ ve got their hands lifted, we’ ve taken a huge step today. Like you said, he would leave the ninety-nine behind for the one. To the best of our human ability, we just have to see where people are and take them on that journey.
[ WM ] What are five things that you think are key to building a great youth worship team?
[ One ] The number one thing is to pray together. My favorite thing about our youth ministry is that when we pray, we cram into this little stairwell near the stage and pray together. We squeeze in real tight, talk about the night, have a young person pray, and rotate between who’ s sharing a thought.
[ Two ] I’ m no longer a youth creative pastor but I still work closely with the guys. I can’ t stress how important it is to make sure that the people are being mentored and discipled. Even now, I still crave that big brother or sister mentorship. I crave to go get a coffee and say,“ Here’ s what
I’ m thinking, this is what God’ s been talking to me about, and these are my challenges.”
If we think that young people don’ t need that, maybe we need to recalibrate. Whether you have the time and ability to mentor everyone on your team or not, make time for five people that you can catch up with once a month. Then, have those five people look after five other people. Pretty soon, every person on your team can be mentored and have that relationship to look back on. It’ s going to be the person they showed their songs to, who they asked for advice, and they made their life decisions based upon. I can’ t stress enough
how important this is.
[ Three ] Maintain a teaching culture. Similar to mentorship and looking out for people, teach your best drummer to mentor and care for the other drummers. There was a time that we had two youth programs running simultaneously, and only one drummer on a Friday night that could play. I told him,“ I need you to look after the drummers and find drummers.” The only other drummers we had were like thirteenyears-old. He just picked the three or four drummers that were around who were thirteen at the time. Now, they are some of the best drummers on our team – all because one guy
24 August 2018 WorshipMusician. com
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