Remove The K And Finish The Word
When we start something, we’re never amazing at it. This Fertilizer is dedicated to worship leaders, teams, and techs in their first five years of serving. (and if you’ve been serving for decades, this may just be what’s been keeping you from getting to the next level of effectiveness!)
First, I’m so glad you’re joining this fantastic company of worshipers. I hope you thrive in worship ministry until you’re in your seventies. Seriously!
My skills were pretty terrible when I started playing acoustic guitar (a black Ibanez). My rhythm was inconsistent. My barre chords buzz-thumped (most of the strings didn’t ring). I knew absolutely no theory, so I had to memorize everything because I didn’t see any patterns. And I was grossly immature, even for a sixteen-year-old.
“Suck*” described my playing.
But relax. On our way toward success, everyone starts at suck.
And now, you might be beginning to understand what I mean when I say, “I want you to remove the K and finish the word.” Take the k out of “suck” and finish the word “success.”
Sure, it’s cheeky, but it reveals what’s standing in your way from becoming the kind of leader God had in mind when He called you. Successful. Success is “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.” Jesus is clear in John 15:8 what His definition of success is: “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” Fruitfulness is success.
From a skills perspective, what’s keeping you from it? What is your K? What is your Kryptonite?
If you work on this ONE thing, it will put you on the path toward success, toward fruitfulness.
It’s the WAY you practice.
LISTEN!! How you practice (on your own), how you develop your skill, and how you hone your craft WILL determine if, in ten years, having 10,000 hours under your belt, you will be fruitful or just that poster child 42-year-old bass player that hasn’t improved much since he started.
(For those older folks reading this, the thing that Malcolm Gladwell tragically left out of his book Outliers when he was making a case for needing to work on your craft for 10,000 hours was HOW you practice during those hours. The 10,000-hour idea wasn’t his. It was Anders Ericsson’s. And to have any significant impact, he described a CORE idea to the 10,000-hour idea, which Gladwell inexplicably omitted. Here’s the rest of the story.)
There are three ways to practice: Naïve Practice, Purposeful Practice, and Deliberate Practice.
ONLY, ONLY, ONLY Deliberate Practice helps you to become a great fruit-bearer.
We better define them because it’s so important.
Naïve Practice is simply repeating an action with no clear goal or strategy. I propose to you that 90% of what we do in worship ministry fits into this category. Have you ever been at a rehearsal where you repeated the whole song from beginning to end four or five times rather than tackling the problem spots? Sigh. Let’s move on.
Purposeful Practice is when you work on a specific skill, and your goal pushes you beyond your comfort zone, beyond what you’re good at. And ok, I’m willing to say that 30% of us do this. If you just did the math, you can already see that we’re at 120%, which is statistically impossible, but I’m making a point.
Deliberate Practice is Purposeful Practice you don’t do alone. This is the only way (according to research) for your skills to go from suck to success, to become fruitful: by not trying it alone. If you don’t find a mentor, a guide, a teacher, a coach, someone who will give you constant feedback, encouraging support, and appropriate challenges, you’ll never experience Deliberate Practice and God-sized fruitfulness.
Naïve Practice and Purposeful Practice are your kryptonite.
The only way to take the K out of suck on your road to success is to engage in Deliberate Practice. And Deliberate Practice is what you do WITH someone walking alongside you. It doesn’t matter to me if Ad Lib Music becomes the person on your team who walks alongside you, or if it’s another organization, or someone from your (or a neighboring) church, but the point is FIND SOMEONE!
*I know that the word “suck” is not the nicest word. So please forgive my use of it. I often encourage my kids to replace it with “stink,” but “stinccess” isn’t a word, so for our purposes here, we stuck with suck.
-Dave Helmuth
(purchase my book, "Worship Fertilizer: (the first hundred)" HERE)
Remove The K And Finish The Word (Nº 411)
