Wisdom From All Directions
One of the most well-known ancient proverbs from scripture is a push to humility: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.”
So, in that spirit, I’d love to share wisdom from nearly 25 years of worship leadership—not because I’m incredibly wise, but because God has granted me wise mentors, diverse experiences, brilliant peers, complex contexts, and plenty of failure along the path God laid out in front of me.
I hope this series will serve as an invitation to think well about our gathered worship. Perhaps you can share with your fellow worship planners and leaders, adjusting them for your context or arguing with them altogether. No doubt you’ll have your own nuggets of wisdom to add as well. Please share them with us at Reformed Worship, contact@ReformedWorship.org.
YOU MUST BE REALLY BUSY…
I’m turning in this blog post late. Like, way late.
I’ve just been super busy. Maybe you know what I’m talking about?
I mean, I’m grateful that my editor has been incredibly patient with me. But the Google Calendar bursts with a colorful array of demands from family, school, sports, and work, to church, volunteering, friendships, and more.
But even more than having a busy schedule, it seems there’s a major drain on my mental and emotional bandwidth. The spaces in my calendar that are open are still full of questions, complicated conversations, and deeply emotional processing of these experiences.
And—I don’t know if you have noticed—but people have opinions about worship. So the joy of being a worship leader includes the push-and-pull of service logistics and, on some weeks, people generously sharing the ways they wished you did your job differently.
I’ve only met a few worship leaders in my time in ministry who legitimately experience Sunday morning as part of their Sabbath. Instead, Sunday morning can be exhausting on a soul level, and it’s rarely restful.
YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU PRODUCE
For those Jesus followers who are wise enough to practice Sabbath rest in some form, Sunday is typically the day to be still, to simply worship and rest, which can be a problem for the preachers, pastors, worship leaders, and others who need to “produce” on Sundays.
Blessed is the worship leader who learns to delight in Sabbath rest, for they will remember they are more than just what they produce for the church.
God graciously calls us (commands us?) to rest. What’s even better is that God—who never slumbers nor sleeps, who has no need for rest—models Sabbath rest for us after the great work of creation. However, for us the goodness of work has been twisted in the curse, and now we need liberation from the cycle of demands that says, “you are what you produce, so prove yourself.” The practice of Sabbath breaks us free of the cycle of production.
But when does the worker rest in the arms of God when their work is a major part of helping everyone else rest in the arms of God?
THE SABBATH WAY
Dr. Travis West, Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, MI, recently released a book called The Sabbath Way. Admittedly, I’m only partially through reading it, but it contains a beautiful—and challenging!—vision for a life lived in rest first, rather than rest last. It’s a vision for a life with very appealing priorities:
Sabbath elevates being over doing, people over profit, presence over productivity, attention over distraction, abundance over scarcity, gratitude over greed, contentment over consumption, delight over division, connection over competition, and both/and over either/or.
—Travis West, The Sabbath Way, 2025, p. 7
Whew! That sounds amazing. Why wouldn’t we want that? Well, we do want that, and it’s a life to be found in the grace of God. But it is also a life that pushes against everything we have caught and been taught about our self-worth being in what we earn and through what we do.
To intentionally disengage from our learned realities and to receive our new reality in Christ is scary! Wrap this up within the unique stress of ministry life too, and it makes things even more complicated and pressure packed. I mean, worship is important! So you’d better work extra hard to make it all “right” (whatever that means). Certainly no rest for the weary, if worship demands are staring you in the face.
But what if…?
What if we need to learn to say to ourselves, “I’ve given it my all, and now it’s okay to stop”? What if worship leading isn’t necessarily restful, but should pour out of a rested and full heart? What if we can carve out spaces with the people we hold dear and who claim us as their own, to simply be? To delight in God and God’s creation while being delighted in? Wouldn’t that help us in the call to plan and lead worship, too?
SO…WHO HELPS THE HELPERS?
Mr. Rogers—he of the long-running PBS show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, complete with changes of shoes and change of sweaters—used to famously tell children to “look for the helpers” in a time of crisis. He was a compassionate man, a minister of the gospel in addition to a TV personality, and he regularly thought about the needs people had in times of chaos.
What we often can’t see, though, is that the helpers need help too. Those carrying other people’s burdens, will need help carrying their own.
The beauty of planning and leading worship is not hard to find. To shepherd the worshiping life of the church—cultivating space for adoration, confession, healing, and healthy formation—is to be open to God’s presence and work by his Spirit, through the risen Christ, in the midst of a people that’s been redeemed. We have a front row seat to witness glory and restoration and resurrection, particularly happening first and foremost within ourselves!
What we also need, though, is a protected space, and protective people, to guard some form of Sabbath with and for us. We need to turn off the phone, ignore the clocks, and disconnect from the cacophony of sheet music, scheduling volunteers, and writing liturgies. We need to rest, pray, laugh, and even to worship without the threat that someone will hold up a scorecard on how good you did.
When does that happen for you?
What habits and practices does that involve for you?
Who is in your corner to help you push for that?
You need to rest in God. You get to rest in God! And our work as worship leaders can be fruitful in new ways when God is guiding us out of the trap of simply “producing,” and into the reality that we are dearly loved simply as we are.
Where do other worship leaders find rest and spiritual nourishment?
A few answers from an informal survey.
- Taking a half day off on Mondays
- Going to the gym
- Walking in the woods
- No kidding or tongue-in-cheek, I find rest and nourishment on December 26 and 27.
- Quiet times of personal Bible study and prayer
- In the Preaching of God's Word
- My small group
- Saying, “no” and maintaining my boundaries
- Reading for fun
- Spending time alone
- Spending time with friends and family
- Listening to music
