Medics on the Battlefield

Leading Worship When The Church Is Shrinking

Last week I got to spend a few days in Dallas with my friends at The Worship Initiative, a place devoted to resourcing the local church worship leader. It’s run by Shane and Shane, who used to often tour alongside my bands Caedmon’s Call and The Normals back in the day.

They do a cool thing at The Worship Initiative in the Summers now, where worship leaders from around the world come for a 6-week intensive to study the Bible, write songs together from the Psalms, and get trained and equipped to better serve their churches and communities in various ways, musical and otherwise, when they return home. 

I was asked to come and join in some of their group discussions and write a few songs with them. It was a sweet time and I was honored by the invitation. It’s an incredibly bright and engaging crew of young people. 

With all the dour headlines we read about the church these days, it was so encouraging to spend time with these powerful future leaders.

My friends Luke and Paula live in Dallas. I texted them that I wished I had time to hang, but I was just there for like 28 hours. “Can we take you to the airport?” they replied. And they did. It was awesome.

In our discussion time, we talked music business for a bit before our conversation pivoted to what I had hoped we might talk about, which is this: how do you approach leading worship for the most rapidly dwindling demographic in church history?

Now I’ve never worked in a church. I’ve been in bands or I’ve worked at christian record labels. But in that context I’ve worked in and around the making and marketing of all sorts of church resources for over twenty-five years now and this is one of the bigger elephants in the room, a thing we almost never talk about. 

The church in America is getting smaller and smaller, particularly among people in their 20’s and 30’s. We all know it, yet in all of our marketing meetings and product brainstorms we talk about trying to grow our audience like it’s business as usual.

It’s like fisherman using bigger nets to catch more fish, ignoring the fact that the lake around them is quickly drying up.

The group of people we are serving is rapidly shrinking.

(The good news is that, of course, the Church is the Lord’s and He is not in any way giving up on us. All over the world, the Church is growing like crazy. Only in America and Europe are we seeing this decline, and even within, there are still pockets of exciting and radical growth.)

Dallas, seen here taking off it’s glasses and having a “She’s All That” moment. (I took this picture out on my morning run like six minutes behind a freeway, a Holiday Inn Express and seventeen strip malls.)

As a business, one would think this would be something we’re discussing. But as every company I’ve worked for can tell you, business has never been my main priority. I’ve chosen to work in music because I love music, and particularly Christian music, because… well… (that’s another series of posts, I suppose…) I believe deeply in Jesus and I do this work because I believe it matters beyond just making a living.

Far beyond business, when it comes to the Church itself, as people who believe in the kingdom of God, the dwindling of the Church is of immense importance! Yet, I find it’s often easier to just talk about worship trends or engagement strategies or church politics or building campaigns or new monitoring systems… to talk about whatever keeps the ball rolling right in front of us rather than lifting our eyes and looking around to engage what can sometimes feel so overwhelming. 

It’s kind of like climate change. You walk outside and you know it’s not good, but the problems are on such a colossal scale that what can you even do? At some point, you just have to live your life. And I get that. I do.

But it does change small things for us, right? We recycle. We try to buy cars with better gas mileage. We carry around water bottles rather than using plastic disposable ones. We know it’s not much, but it’s something, and we hope it helps.

This conversation with these worship leaders was on Wednesday of last week - before Saturday’s latest moment of political violence. We talked about what I had touched on in a post a few weeks ago, about the violent language that is showing up in our worship songs at times - this notion of “taking back our nation for God” or “fighting our enemies for God” - while seeming to ignore that God himself came down to Earth, as Philippians 5 tells us, taking the very nature of a servant, making himself nothing, and giving up his life for his enemies. 

In fact, the Bible tells us, at that point WE were his enemies. And while we were his enemies, while we were yet sinners, Christ loved us, and gave himself up for us. (Romans 5:8, Ephesians 5:2)

This was the posture of Jesus towards his enemies! This is the posture he tells us to take in Matthew 5 in the sermon on the mount. This is the posture we get to be singing about Sunday after Sunday

And so, on Wednesday morning last week, I told my new friends that what we need from our worship leaders is not warriors running out for battle to take our nation back for God, but medics running on to the battlefield to care for the wounded - those who have been hurt by the power-hungry pastor, or the parents who let politics influence their religion rather than the other way around, or those who have gotten so addicted to the dopamine hits of porn and instagram that they no longer feel they have any worth or value to their friends or their family or God. 

There are countless wounds walking through our church doors each Sunday, carried by people who are there looking for healing, looking for hope, looking for friends, and yes, looking for a connection with a God who is bigger and wider and wilder than the world that, with all its beauty, has still caused all this pain.

These people are our friends and our neighbors. They are who is in our church pews and on our church staffs. They need to be cared for and shown that they are loved. 

We don’t need to think of our Sunday setlists as weapons for battle, but medic kits, full of songs that remind us again and again of the goodness of God and the overwhelmingly beautiful truth of the death and resurrection of Jesus who loves us.

Let us sing songs that give us courage because of who God is and what He’s done for us, songs that guide us through brutal suffering and deep doubt, songs that root our joy in the rich and fertile soil of deliverance and gratitude, songs that give us eyes to love and serve those around us.

What if the culture we live in, where the church is shrinking so quickly, could see this love, this peace, this hope and healing emanating from us and ultimately beyond and beneath us?

The church is not called to be a citadel, after all, but a city on a hill, shining its light to reflect the glory of God to all.

This world has enough violence. It does not need more of it, and it surely does not need more of it from the people of God.

Ultimately, the job of a worship leader is to be more than a medic, I know. I realize that a lot of this thinking is my own reaction to the pain of watching so many of my friends and my generation walk away from their faith.

The role is many things: a medic, yes, but also a guide, an encourager, a uniter, one who welcomes, who focuses, and who reminds. At the heart of it, the role is to serve with intentionality.

Maybe we can’t fix all of our culture’s perceptions of hypocrisy and politics within the church, just like we can’t fix climate change with our Stanleys and used hybrid cars, but we can take small steps that can help, right? Within our own churches, our own neighborhoods and cities…

I’d LOVE to hear from you.

If you’re in leadership, in worship, as a pastor, or otherwise, how do you approach this in the way you lead songs or other worship activities in the life of your church? If you know that you have a lot of people in that age group in the room, how does that affect the songs you pick, the language you use, the way you talk and present, the order of service, whatever else…? Does it affect it? What part does liturgy play in that?

If you attend or have attended church, what have you seen or experienced that has been helpful or kind to you or to your friends and family? If you’ve been hurting or had questions, has the church been a welcome space for you? 

Please let me know in the comments, so we can learn from and lean on each other. We are not alone.

Thank you, my friends.