In our Worship Quest Academy Zoom session today with students in our 2024–25 Ukrainian cohort, we heard teaching from Dr. Brooks about the responsibility that Worship Pastors have to their congregations. We are called not simply to be “lead worshipers,” as appealing as many have found that phrase, but actually to be consciously attentive to our congregation in-the-moment. Are they following and responding to our leadership? This is the mindset of “worship leading” over against simply standing up front having a private worship experience as “lead worshiper” irrespective of the congregation’s participation.
The question arose: “Yes, it is clear we have this responsibility to the congregation, as you say. But what responsibility does the congregation have? Don’t they have a responsibility to pay attention and to follow our leadership?”
In response to this, there was presented an analogy about hosting a holiday meal. Perhaps your dear friend is a professional chef. She would love to prepare a delicious Christmas Day dinner, however, her own small apartment is not suitable to host an event like this. She makes the request of you, “Your home is so lovely, and your dining table can seat twelve comfortably. Could not the dinner for these guests be held in your own home? I will handle cooking all the food in the kitchen. All I ask is that you do the work of a hostess. Prepare the table and make it nice. And help with the plating and serving. Set out the food for the guests at the right time, and in a way that makes it all visually appealing and welcoming.”
This analogy applies to our worship leading because it speaks to our job of making a setting that is inviting, and in which our guests are ready to receive the delicious meal.
As always, the Lord himself is the chef. In all our worship to the Lord God, all we offer to him is only what He already has given to us. “We give Thee but thine own,” as the 19th century English hymn famously put it. We sing back to God only what he has already initiated, prepared, and accomplished entirely on his own. We sing of God’s mighty acts of salvation, of his glory revealed, of his beauty, and of his wondrous deeds among us and in us. God is always the subject and object of our worship, as Marva Dawn so powerfully highlighted for us. Our worship to the Lord God is both TO him and ABOUT him. So what we give to God in worship isn’t ultimately from us. It’s all by him, from him, through him, and to him.
So in our analogy, the nutrients the chef prepares for the guests are always delicious and perfect.
In worship leadership, however, our role—“hostess” in our analogy”—is to prepare the table, and to lay out each dish in the way that we know will be most inviting for the particular guests invited to this feast.
The way we would lay out the food for children is not the same as the way we would arrange it for teenagers, or for middle-aged adults, or for senior adults. There is a craft or skill to laying out the delicious food items in a way that will appear most appetizing to the various dinner guests. And to a real degree, each one’s willingness to partake in each delicious food might hinge in some way on our execution of the task of laying it out appetizingly.
Did we take a big glob of the food and slop it across a not-very-clean plate, dripping and sliding off the edge? Did we bring out a dish with an odd-colored plastic lid over it, plop it down in front of a guest, and not bother even to take the lid off? Did we bring everyone an enormous helping of dessert right at the beginning, so that they’re too full after for the rest of the meal? Did we sit down with the food ourselves, ravenously start shoveling it in, and vaguely nod in the direction of where the diners can grab their own?
Or did we bring out each course of the meal in the right way and the right time? Are lighted candles surrounding a rich floral centerpiece? Did we put in care to make it inviting?
Notice – nothing changed with the nutrients in the meal. The chef’s delicious cooking still is what it is, in either case. The question is whether we facilitated our guests’ enjoyment of the meal by hosting the dinner in a way that displays the wonderful food appropriately. To make it inviting to our specific guests is to do justice to the work of the chef’s meal preparation. And yes, this is a very pastoral task.
So let us lead God’s people with care and thoughtfulness in congregational worship. Take freely of all the delicious nutrients our Master Chef has prepared for us, and be intentional to think through how the various unique members of our own congregation can best comprehend, receive, and interact with them. Through skillful preparation, let us design congregational worship that will be both robustly accessible and profoundly meaningful to all members of our congregation—to the end that they will see the Lord more clearly, be captured afresh by Christ’s glorious salvation, and respond with heartfelt adoration in the power of the Holy Spirit, to the glory of our Eternal Father.
— Andrew Braine