YOUTH WORSHIP TEAM
MENTORING & TRAINING YOUR TEAM | Vance & Michelle Shepherd
The time you spend with your team and mentoring them outside of Sundays and worship team rehearsals is so important in having a healthy, vibrant youth worship team. Getting the entire team together for Bible studies, movie nights, or game nights bond them together, creates synergy and excitement, plugs them into a tighter community, and can bring about lifelong friendships.
I remember one of our game nights with our youth worship team very well. We were playing a Pictionary type game where I would draw on the white board various musical symbols for them to identify, and the students with the most points would win a prize at the end. As I drew the musical sharp symbol(#), one of my sevenyear-old students yelled out with complete conviction, knowing she had the answer right“ it’ s a hashtag”! We all about fell over laughing. This was such a fun way to train them in musical terminology, notes and symbols, outside of formal music lessons.
Remember, you’ re not just their youth pastor or their music teacher, you’ re their mentor, their friend, someone outside of their immediate family that they can trust and look up to. We have seen time and time again that God brought us a student not only to share the gift of music with, but to speak into their lives on a deep level. We’ ve had several students having a crisis of faith, grieving over the death of a loved one, seeing their parents go through divorce and their family being torn apart, bullying at school, etc. You can be the person that God uses to help them through these times, and there is nothing more rewarding than seeing them overcome these life storms with their faith intact, and some even coming to a deeper faith in Christ through it.
We also like to find ways to celebrate each student, especially with birthdays. On game nights or group classes, we celebrate that month’ s birthdays with gifts, cake and have all of the band members sign a card for them. It makes them feel very special. Many of the students in our youth worship bands have met in our school of music, become best friends, jam at each other’ s houses, then form duos and trios and lead worship around the valley.
One area that’ s also fun with working with our students is training them in the technical aspects of sound and production. On our group class nights, we train our worship teams in those areas, in addition to working through the musical details. Knowing that they understand how to set up their entire instrument rig, as well as play their parts, is truly a sound tech’ s dream. They know what an XLR cable is, a line cable, a DI box, etc. We’ ve taught them how to troubleshoot( like if their instrument isn’ t working, to think: is it going out of the instrument into a DI box, out of the DI into the amp, and out of the DI XLR output into the snake)? Is it buzzing? Check the ground lift on the DI. Is it sending too much signal? Does the instrument sound thin in the PA system? Is the high pass filter on that channel? We get a chuckle, because most of our students can help trouble shoot problems for the sound tech without the sound tech running back and forth from the board to the stage.
In one of our group class training sessions, we asked the vocalists to each sing on their microphone. They were being quite shy and didn’ t want to sing in front of everyone. They would just say“ check, check, check” in a quiet voice. We instructed the entire group of vocalists to go and sit in the audience. I told Michelle to go and sing on their mics, and I swept out all of the low and mid frequencies and cranked the high end up on the EQ as she was singing. The students started plugging their ears, making pained faces as she sang: it was super harsh sounding, verging on high feedback. Then I started slowly adding back in the frequencies that her vocal needed to sound present, warm, and rich. We explained that when we ask them to sing on their mics, it’ s so that the sound tech can make them sound amazing with the right EQ, gain, reverb, delay, etc. They got the picture, and they have now sung on que at every sound check since. A little“ out of the box” auditory and visual training can definitely go a long way!
May you be blessed as you pour into or become the next generation of worship leaders!
Vance & Michelle Shepherd Founders of The Shepherd School of Music in Las Vegas, NV, where they work with youth to raise up the next generation of worship leaders and musicians. facebook. com / shepherdschoolofmusiclasvegas www. ShepherdStudiosLV. com
46 September 2025 Subscribe for Free...