WorshipCentral

We have the same problem every week. It's made worse by our church having rubbish acoustics (It's an L shape and has wooden paneling around the sides which reflects sound back with a really tinny sound) so it can sometimes be nightmare for the techies if i start playing slightly too loudly by accident halfway through a service.

One thing you could try is advising people who don't like it being too loud to sit out of the direct path of a speaker (This my not be possible though if your church is small)

I personally have a small crowd of youth who I lead for. They are more open to new ideas, and less demanding, I think. But it really is a juggling act to try to hear everyone out! I think there must be some point at which the congregation recognizes that you, as an appointed leader, are trying to seek God to lead them into worship in the most effective and appropriate way that you can.

Leading worship with music is such a subjective practice, musically, that anyone could be right; because of that it is quite hard to satisfy everyone. I don’t think there is an easy way around it. The more you poll for opinions the more difficulty you seem to create; but you also must be sensitive to where people are at! If everyone in your church are uncomfortable with the sound and the song selection maybe there are ways to address it? Sounds like you’re already trying some things. It seems to me that the Sunday service is more often the place where more traditional tastes rule and alternate, weekday/Saturday services tend to be the converse.

However, it truly is a balancing act that is not helped by the wide range of musical tastes that you often find in a typical church body. I haven’t found an easy “fix-it” solution.

Thanks for the comments guys,
I agree that the acoustics make a real difference. Ours is a large church with a big balcony all around 3 sides (similar to HTB but a bit smaller), the sound desk is upstairs which means that the balance downstairs is never very good. However the people who always complain it's too loud are generally the people who always sit right in front of the speakers and who won't move because that's "their pew"!
(rant over!)

Rich

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www.allsaintslive.com

Perhaps not what you're looking for, but looking at it from the tech side of things where are the speakers? If it's a large church and you've just got 2 stacks at the front pointing downstairs then you're probably going to have to drive them very hard to get a decent level at the back upstairs where the sound desk is. Have you considered using extra ones or moving the ones you have around to get a more even volume all around the church?

Just a thought - sorry if it's not at all relevant! :)

Michael

I take it you've all come across this before :

http://asbojesus.wordpress.com/2008/03/20/415...

Makes me smile, just before I ball my eyes out...

If you mic the kick drum, God will come.

Richard

At an old church I led worship at (not HTMB!) we had this one woman who sat right by the right hand speaker stack and then pulled faces at whoever was leading worship whilst sticking her fingers in her ears EVERY WEEK! SOmeone suggested she moved, but she said that if the music was too loud in that seat it shoudl be turned down. Ho hum .... much grace needed .....

Hmm,
I tend to make sure that there are plenty of older songs / hymns included in sets where I'm introducing a new song. This morning I introduced a Simon Brading song and ran it straight into the old hymn 'Abide with me'. It's a routine I use a bit.

One thing i've found about complaints is that if older people don't like something they will complain but if it's a younger person then they won't tell you about it, they will just leave the service / church. I know that older people will complain but still likely to turn up the next week. I'm normally more interested in finding out what members of the youth or families think because they aren't so forthcoming.

Balance is certainly important in all of this, and it is important to have accountability around you so you're not going around changing everything without clear vision. However, I think there is a danger in feeding into the consumer culture when we allow people to complain so much. Volume, style, and song choices are age-old arguments that will never be solved or satisfied. We are all unique have different preferences. I would invest more time teaching on worship as sacrifice, and sometimes that means we sacrifice our preferences.

For our church we have values that guide why we have it loud, and often introduce new songs. So if someone complains, I can't point to that value and be sure of why we do what we do.

Introducing new songs is, and always will be, a very tricky subject to broach and get right. No one will hit the nail every time. But the most important thing to remember is that we, as worship leaders and musicians, are there to serve our congregations. Chances are we're listening to worship music all the time, especially the latest releases by someone and that gets us all fired up to want to worship with our favorite tunes.. I know this is the case for our music group. We tend to spend our weekly practices knocking out new tunes we all like knowing that the chances of playing them in church is next to zero, but it makes our practice sessions in to worship sessions, which is great. This time spent isn't wasted either as we all hone our skills and play tighter as a group. If you're just replaying the same songs all the time in practice, you'll never grow.
What we have begun to do is to expand on "traditional" songs in that we will vary the style or rhythm the song is played in, whilst keeping the same overall structure. It tends to be a very spontanious thing, but the congregation love it which stirs them to worship more.

Complaints are always hard to recieve but them may also have truth in them. If people are complaining about volume, check out whether you can hear the congragation singing over the level of the music, if not then you probably are too loud.
I know I've had to drop songs which I know intimatly but the congregation just can't get their heads around the timing of the vocals as it's not their style. It has to be all about leading people to greater praise rather than performing songs, no matter how great we believe them to be.
Service and, as caleb stated, sacrifice are the order of the day.
In my humble opinion anyway, feel free to disagree.

We have had some complaints about the songs sometimes as the 'teenagers' would like things from soul survivor etc but that's the problem there, we hardly have any teenagers and they are hadly ever in as they run the youth work. I am the only teenager in the church now that doesn't go out to it to help. But we have complaints about my clarinet and sax some weeks and then i refuse to play a week later