We Should See Other Blogs

Right now I’m part of the worship team at Churchill Meadows Christian Church in Mississauga, and I was part of the Freshwater Christian Church worship team before the two churches merged into on combined identity. For the most part, working with the CMCC team has been absolutely wonderful, and I’m really glad to have the chance to use what skills I have as part of the team.

Being part of the whole thing, though, has led me to some observations about our team in particular (observations that would probably be pretty boring to most people, on the whole) and observations about worship teams in general. The general observations are what I’m most interested in, and I think you might be too.

Most worship teams are awful. Just completely awful. They’re awful for several reasons. First, they don’t have the skill as musicians. Second, they have no concept of what it takes to make a good worship team. Third, they don’t have any concept of good music.

My personal opinion is that if you aren’t any good, you shouldn’t play. You’re going to distract from worship, not aid it. After all, isn’t that what worship bands are there for? It’s an aid, to lead in worship, to help the church as a whole worship God. What form that takes is largely irrelevant (though of course there are excesses I won’t even touch on here). The fact is, if you’re distracting people from worshipping, you’re being counter-productive and should remove yourself from the team, or be removed from the team.

This doesn’t happen often enough because team leaders don’t understand what makes a good team and what makes good music, two things I think are closely related. A lot of bands simply throw as many people as they can must up on stage and get everyone to play their hearts out. Though this might seem like a great idea (what’s better than people playing their hearts out?), it usually isn’t. It takes a lot of practice and a good deal of synergy to work as a team, to understand what each other is doing, and especially if you don’t have a lot of time to practice, to know each other well enough that you can predict the direction of the music.

That becomes more difficult the more people you have in the team. Fewer in this instance is almost certainly better. If you have a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer who are really tight, you don’t need to throw in a percussionist, a pianist, a vocalist, and some interpretive dance. Not only will this make playing together, really together, harder, it’s going to make everything harder. The more instruments you have, the more setup is involved, the harder it is to mix well, and the worse the band is going to sound as whole. It’s just really hard to have seven people making great music.

Not only that, every song has a different feel and a different way it can be played. Some songs are guitar-driven and should stay that way. Other songs are keyboard driven, hymns in particular, and no matter how you try and spice them up, they should stay keyboard driven. When you have six, seven, eight people, everyone has the tendency to play at once. Not only does this generally make an awful din, it does disservice to the songs you’re playing.

I say this as a keyboardist who finds himself almost always superfluous. We have a lead guitarist/vocalist, a backup guitarist/vocalist, another vocalist, a bassist, a drummer, a percussionist, and a keyboardists. Personally, I think that number of people is absurdly hard to make good music with. The leader of a band of that many people is going to have to be good at arranging music and the players themselves will have to practice a lot. Barring that, people are just going to have to sit out a bunch of songs. The leader is going to have to tell his band that they can’t all play at once, that some people are just going to have to sit out some songs, and that if they want a pleasing sound instead of a jumbled cacophony, they’re going to have to put some limits of who’s playing what when.

Of course, this doesn’t happen for a variety of reasons. It goes back to leaders not knowing what good music is, or leaders simply not wanting to hurt feelings or cause conflict. I mean, sure, it’s possible that you’ll find eight people in your church who can play together naturally and not sound like a bunch of monkeys beating on tin cans, but how likely is that?

Some worship teams aren’t awful, of course. If you do it right, you can make really, really good music and aid in worship at the same time. You can be innovative and fresh without being obtrusive and annoying. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen, mostly at churches who have an artistic vision for their worship teams, who have a large talent pool, and who have leaders who aren’t afraid to tell some people to stop playing or dial it back.

If I could say one thing to worship teams around the world it would be this: Bigger isn’t better. Bigger is almost always worse. Think about what you’re trying to do and do that. Put some thought into it. Make a structure and build around it. Figure out what style of music you want to play and then do what you have to in order to play that music with skill and restraint. Don’t just throw people at a stage and hope that they’ll work well together. Figure out what works and go with that. If something isn’t working, don’t do it. If you don’t know what good music is, don’t be in a band. If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t be in a band. If you don’t know how to co-operate, don’t be in a band. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t lead a band, for goodness sake!

In the end I ask this: Is the tendency toward bigger bands really better than a solitary pianist or a three-piece acoustic band? If it isn’t, why are you doing it?