“Please don’t sing,” we politely say every time the lyrics are late.

I was rehearsing the team and we were deciding how to arrange a song.

I had made it to eighth grade. My basketball career grew in spite of my culture shock from our transition from Costa Rica to San Antonio, Texas, about two years earlier.

One of your lids as a worship leader may be leading the same room over and over.

Twenty-four hours ago, I was leading worship. How did it go? 

How do I know the answer?

Crema and Milo, my two street mutts, are lovely creatures. Except when they dig holes. Their habit makes me consider astroturfing the yard. I’m not even kidding.

We were 100% designed for freedom. Sadly, we don’t often live like it. What limits us?

Any stage amplifies what’s already there. Any spotlight highlights what was hidden. If I want to be freer on stage, I need to know what freedom is offstage.

Being who you are isn’t only important. It’s vital.

Some churches don’t seem to mind breaks in between songs. You know, the team finishes. There are five seconds of (awkward) silence.

Worship ministry is personal. It’s a beautiful weaving of the human and the Divine. It’s logical and unexplainable. It’s predictable and mysterious. But…

I was leading Sunday morning worship at this church. I greeted the assembled worshipers and… got back a very wimpy response. I felt like I was looking at a room of corpses.

So I had this experience where I realized that I had been lulled to sleep. Maybe you can relate to this, because I had forgotten that God is actually steadfast. He’s actually good. He’s actually all-powerful. He’s actually able to do what He said He would do.

The other night, I was tucking my son into bed and noticed some trash on his bunk bed shelf. It was the remains of an old, burned-up plastic Coke bottle.

Praising by only singing is like golfing with only a putter, baking using only a ¼ cup measuring cup, drawing a rainbow with only a blue crayon, or fixing a car with only a ½” wrench.

• “I guess we’ll go ahead and get started.”

• “Please rise to your feet.”

• “Good morning…um, good MORNing! ...That’s better.”

Every week, when we make music together as worship teams, we have essential musical decisions to make. So here’s a humorous yet insightful story of what it takes to make music together.

Today, I’m giving you an outline rather than paragraphs. That’s obvious.

But what’s not obvious is how much what you do impacts congregational engagement. I want to challenge us, as leaders, to grow in BEING:

How modest is modest enough? The most common internal answer is “the same as me or more modest than me.”

“So let me see by a show of hands,” I once asked when leading worship, “how many of you have never raised your hands in worship before?”

(now that wasn’t so bad, was it?)