Questions To Ask At Rehearsal

I love questions. My friend Adam Saenz taught me to be a connoisseur of questions. Questions are so important because they tell us where to look and where to focus. They shape our future.

I recently have been asking teams I lead, the following questions at rehearsal:

• Who will be there on Sunday?

• Why are we doing this?

• How is our musicality increasing?

I’ll explain why these questions are important and teach you a few questions to ask to help your teams make better music.

Who will be there on Sunday?

Talk about who is going to be in the room. Brent, who lost his job. Newlyweds Melissa and Joe. Sam, a 10th grader, having a rough time. Amanda, who just got dumped. Again. Eric, whose business is booming. Edward and Mitzy, afraid they may lose their unborn child. Frederic, a happy-go-lucky college student. You know, people with real lives.

It’s elementary to ask this because you are going to create a space where those specific individuals can meet with God. Not the crowd of Australians or Texans in the congregation when the latest CD was recorded. Your congregation. Shape the experience to fit them, to meet them, as you meet the LORD together.

Oh, and Jesus too. He’ll be in the room. Don’t sing to Him like He’s far off. He is Emmanuel, God with us.

Why are we doing this?

Serving well requires sacrifice. There are fifty-two Sundays every year. Five-hundred-twenty of them each decade. Each person who is serving has a different life with different circumstances, stresses, hopes, and days. We need to rehearse our purpose almost every time we gather. (Remember it from adlibmusic.com/023) Otherwise, we forget. We must envision a celebration. It should inspire us. It should breathe life back into us. The opposite of “without a vision, the people perish”? (Proverbs 29:18) With a vision, the people thrive!

How is our musicality increasing?

Are we merely playing the notes on the page? Making the chord changes at the same time? Beginning and ending at the same time? As musical servants, we aim for a moving target called excellence. What was great last year should only be good this year. We need to keep managing our talents for an increase, rather than burying them. (Matthew 25) 

Artistry

That brings me to a final set of questions. At a restaurant, when you’re paying the bill, they ask you, “Was everything okay?” What if instead, they’d ask, “On a scale of 1-10, how satisfying was your meal?” Or at a grocery store, instead of the usual “Is that everything for you?” the cashier would ask, “If there was one thing you wished we carried, what would it be?”

Those are helpful questions, not just filler.

You know the question you ask after a song at rehearsal: “Any questions? Is everybody all right with that?” What does this question do? I think it sets a pretty low bar, musically. If instead, you asked, “Is there anything we could do to make it more musical, dynamic, emotional, artistic, or just better?” That’s a whole different direction.

Here are several questions I ask teams as they evaluate how the musical part of gathered worship went:

• Where was the band in the scale of “making it through the music” to “actually making music?”

• Did we play musically what we sang lyrically?

• Did the music breathe? Did it have space, or did all the band play on almost every part of every song?

• Was it alive? Did it have wide dynamics, or did it never get sacredly quiet or thunderously loud?

• Was each part important? Was it produced well, or did the band routinely play through the chords?

• Did the music get the groove right? Did it actively support singing? Did it cause our bodies to move?

• Would the music have stood on its own, outside of a church service? Was it that beautiful and moving?

• Did each player use their instrument as their worshiping voice, a very personal, emotional expression offered in the creation of a space for a community to worship?

• Did the music itself give words to our hearts, expressing the inexpressible?

• Was the music so “center stage” and constantly full that it tragically made us, as a congregation, feel like we weren’t even needed to sing?

What questions do you ask your team?

-Dave Helmuth
(purchase my book, "Worship Fertilizer: (the first hundred)" HERE)

Questions To Ask At Rehearsal (Nº 27)