Stephen Jeong
From New Hope Los Angeles
Hello everyone
I'm not really sure if this is the right place to post this or not but here goes anyways. My church has a pretty small youth group of about 15-20 and their praise team isn't really in a healthy state right now. Furthermore, they do not have enough musical players to fill up the band. They basically have two guitarists and a keyboardist. I'm a teacher for the youth and so I want to help the praise team out, especially because I am on the praise team for the young adult group. But I am having difficulty in deciding what should be done. I've considered the option of having just an older group come in and lead praise for the youth. But the concern I have over that is that I do not want to take the privilege of leading praise away from the youth kids that want to help out. Any suggestions?
you have 15-20 people and you are suggesting a 5 piece band?
wow.
that sounds a little OTT for my ears.
Hi Stephen
I'd take Martin's suggestion on board... having a full band for a group of 15-20 people will remove a quarter of that little congregation and involve them in leading worship when it might be best for them to worship. Just something to think about...
Also that youth does tend to change a bit, so if you can engineer a more fluid situation where you've set a precedent for bringing in older guys, it makes doing so in future a bit easier if you need someone to help. eg. drum.
Anyway, in terms of your more specific question, if you definitely want a full band, then you might want to get some of the older guys to dep in.
The way we used to do it at my old church was to have one person from the age group that was one up leading worship for those guys. Eg. A 15- year old leading for 11-14s, a student leading for 15-18s, and one of the younger worship leaders (who might not get a chance in main church) leading for the students, or another older student.
This basically gives you a bit of continuity and maturity within the group - the guys have someone to look up to - and more to the point, none of the group's pastoral issues get worked out on stage as they might do if you picked someone from within the group!
It still allows the worshippers to develop as you get the up & coming worship musicians within the group supporting the older worship leader, and then when those musos get older, they can take on some of the responsibility for leading themselves.
Now this is perhaps an ideal situation. More pragmatically, if you're struggling on numbers, just go with whatever you have. And pray. Most times it works out. I used to lead worship in my old church youth group despite being (a) newly Christian and (b) newly musical. It worked out ok, but it helped inspire me to continue leading and helping support others in worship because I was trusted to do so.
Hi Guys. This is an interesting thread for us. We have spent the last 12 months building relationship up with our extremely small group of youth. Over the 12 months 4 have been added which is fantastic, so we now have 8... whoop whoop. I actually did worship with them for the first time last time we met.
I asked the youth for songs they felt were 'real' for them and spent an evening with my son singing them and playing them through with him... I then asked him to play for me (cunning plan here but mainly because I'd done a funeral, nativity and carol service that day to so was shattered... and it encouraged Mike to play for a small group of people - he usually play bass plays in main worship but manages to 'hide away' and not be noticed - however he prefers 6 string acoustic to be honest. But he's quite shy about his ability to even play let alone lead)
Before each song was sung I asked the group to read the lyrics and dicussed what the song was saying to us about God. I desperately want to get away form the common mindset that worship is just singing nice songs/tunes without any understanding.
So I 'lead' and he played 2 of the 3 songs... he bottled one and handed the guitar over to me which worked well in the small group situation. Noone judged him for asking me to play instead, it was just accepted that we swapped musician for that song which is great, cos our small group is where we learn to 'do the things we do' in a safe secure environment.
If you're interested have a listen to Mike's playing when it is just him playing for fun... he writes his own stuff (only tunes though) in the style of Andy McKee (link below)
http://tiny.cc/bni5x
Anyhow all in all our first ever attempt at 'doing sung worship' was a success... Phew!
The other thing I was going to mention was that we've got a main congregation approaching 150 now (started with 30 of us 2 years ago), and we're still not using full drum kits & electric guitars, and only sometimes have bass.
We've got guys who play both, but it's also a case of it all being sustainable and fit for purpose. Our bands would have to practice for a fair while first before they'd be approaching the cohesiveness we've got in our more acoustic setup, and also setting drumkits up and down is a major pain in the arse for your musicians and setup team in terms of physical effort and time involved. We don't want to do it one week, but not the next, as then people might start to think that the week when the drums & electric are there is 'good' worship (or vice versa...) and not fuss so much about coming the other week.
Stephen,
We had just an acoustic guitar or two, or acoustic + keys or djembe leading worship until we were getting maybe 70-80 people in church. What's wrong with keeping it simple? Worship led with a stripped down group - if done well - is very effective in that sort of setting.
I'd agree with Joe... we are currently doing very stripped down worship in our main meeting and it works well.
I am leading a small youth group of around 10 kids aged 9-15 we are part of dornoch christian fellowship in scotland We are just starting out and are looking for a good forum to find worship songs and lyrics to try we don't have any musicians yet so would be great if music could be downloaded? any ideas would be gratefully appreciated I am not sure how to introduce worship and what sort to start with? Barry Train Youth leader
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Assuming that you have the authority to do so, lead the worship yourself, use the youth musicians and supplement them with others. In your situation you need a bassist and drummer. Then encourage members of the youth group to learn instruments.
In my experience, only a few people from any group become musicians. For example our youth band in the 90's didn't have a bassist so I helped out. Of that group one is still a musician. Our current youth band has just lost two people to University and two more later next year.
The biggest problem is that youth is not a permanent state of affairs and you have a limited and changing group. Some people can be encouraged to play for a while.