WORSHIP LEADERS
HOW TO AVOID BECOMING THE SUNDAY JUKEBOX | Jon Nicol
" I LOVE getting new song requests from team members , the congregation , and my senior pastor ."
Said no worship leader . Ever .
A song recommendation from a trusted source is one thing . But the constant barrage of " Have you heard [ latest-greatest song climbing the CCLI charts ]? We should do that one !" can get overwhelming .
And when those song requests come from the senior pastor , it sometimes felt less like a suggestion and more like a request-veiled mandate . After enough of these requests , worship leaders can feel like a ' Sunday morning jukebox .'
For those of you under the age of 40 , let me explain . Before Spotify , we had this contraption that played music on demand . It was called a jukebox . However , instead of scrolling and pushing play on a screen , one would insert a quarter and punch in an alpha-numeric code to play the desired tune . It was a sad day when you hit the wrong numbers . What you thought was Livin ' On a Prayer turned into six minutes of a Kenny G B-side . ( For those of you under 40 , a B-side is ... ah , never mind . Ask your Mom .)
During my 20 years of leading worship vocationally , I found myself forcing a smile and saying , " Thanks for the suggestion ," all while repressing an eye roll . To be fair , some great songs on our rotation came through unsolicited suggestions . But for every one of those , there were scores of songs people " should " on me . I wanted to shut off the jukebox .
Eventually the still small voice of the Holy Spirit ( via my wife ) convicted me of my song suggestion jadedness . " Jon , people are bringing these requests to you out of good intentions . They love to sing and worship , and they have a connection to these songs ."
Dang , she was right . But I still couldn ' t let the floodgates open to any and all requests . I needed to protect the integrity of our song rotation . Let me explain .
Early in my ministry at that church , I had purposefully chosen to rotate fewer songs more often . As a result of the familiarity with our repertoire , the church was singing “ more from the heart than from the screen ."
And my team knew the songs and led more confidently . They were leading " from the heart instead of the chart ." If you want to know more about this approach , you can pick up my book , The SongCycle : Simplify Worship and Re- Engage Your Church , on Amazon .
I couldn ' t take the church back to the place of singing hundreds of different songs each year , with new songs being rolled out almost weekly . That was a sure-fire recipe for a semi-engaged , screen-gazing congregation .
So what did I do ? Yep , I created a system . The system I implemented allowed me to ...
• Honor people ' s song requests …
• Promise to listen and consider everyone ' s request ( and mean it )...
• Review those song suggestions efficiently ... ... all while limiting the overall number of suggestions .
Before you learn how the Song Suggestion System works , you need to know I had two other critical guidelines at work .
GUIDELINE # 1 : NEW SONG LIMIT I only introduced about one new song a month into our regular rotation . If we tried to learn more than that , it was challenging to make those new songs ' stick .' Our process to introduce new songs included two to three months of