This week I am having a guest blogger - Forefront's worship leader: Joe Heilman. He is fantastic at what he does and you can learn a lot from him. So here he is:
I hope this takes no one by surprise, but excellence is really important in reaching our culture. I think that’s why places like Willow Creek, love 'em or hate 'em, have been so effective. Our culture is used to excellence; they expect and demand it, especially in music.
So how do we compete when we don’t have professional musicians coming out our ears, and we have volunteers running the soundboard. My advice is: Do excellence like you can, not like you can’t. For example, if you only have a keyboard player and a vocalist who are truly gifted, and every one else you could put on stage isn’t there yet, just put out the keyboardist and vocalist.
Don’t worry about all the parts that are missing. Forefront started with me. Just me. I was the worship team for 6 months. We built a musical core slowly. Now we have a couple bands. We strive for excellence musically, to a fault at times. If we can’t do a song with excellence we don’t do it or change so it does come off as excellent. You don’t need a stage show like Kiss or a backup band like Dave Matthews to be excellent. What you need is restraint and the ability to say “no” to people or things that bring the excellence level down.
I’ve heard many Christians say that the church ought to lead the world in the arts. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that we at least better not lag behind.
- Featured on newchurches.com
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Be Excellent (4 of 6)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
What do you do with the musicians that aren't good enough? Do you tell them to practice and come back when they get better? Do you allow them to practice with you? Do you have something set up to help teach them?
Joe should probably answer that question but ... I think some people are so not good enough the best thing to do is direct them to a different ministry where they can have more impact. There are others who can get good enough with practice, I think with those you have them practice more, and even sit in on band practices. I know we've done that. Not only will that help them to improve, but it also reveals their character. If they're willing to come to band practices, but don't get the "glory" of being on stage on Sundays, that shows that they're probably doing it for the right reasons ...
Another take on Excellence which I found really useful ...
http://www.flowerdust.net/?p=603
Post a Comment