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On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses how worship leaders can deepen congregational engagement by intentionally leading worship, evaluating participation, and involving more members in the worship experience.
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Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, continuing our ongoing conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. That's what we do on this podcast. We talk about the ins and outs and ups and downs, the daily work of ministry leadership. Now in order to build out topics for the podcast, I use a lot of different sources.
Jeff Iorg:But recently, I sent an email out to about a dozen pastor friends of mine. Big churches, small churches, rural churches, urban churches, churches of different ethnicities and backgrounds. And I asked them two questions. First, what issues are really pressing you right now in pastoral leadership? And because all these guys are leaders, I ask him a second question.
Jeff Iorg:When other pastors come to you for help, what are the questions are the issues they're raising? Well, I expected to get back a couple of responses, but every single person I emailed sent me back some input. And I'm building some podcasts right now around the issues and ideas and questions that emerged from that survey. One of
Jeff Iorg:the issues that was raised was this, apathy in participation in public worship. It was
Jeff Iorg:raised in several ways, but the bottom line is how to to answer this question, how do we enhance or raise the level of participation of people who are attending our worship experiences? Now this podcast is not about getting more people to come. This podcast is about engaging people who are already in the room and enhancing their participation so that the worship experience is more robust, has a higher level of involvement, that there is a sense that people have come together to do something in worship. So let's talk about that today, enhancing or engaging participation in worship experiences. The first thing I think is important to underscore on this topic is that worship leaders are supposed to lead people into worship experiences.
Jeff Iorg:Now that might seem obvious, but it's really not. In fact, it contradicts a common theme I hear voiced today. A common theme I hear voiced is, I'm here to model worship for you or I'm here to show you what worship looks like and invite you to join in however you choose or if you choose. I've even heard it pressed so far as for people to say, stand if you wanna stand, sit if you wanna sit, kneel if you wanna kneel, pray if you wanna pray. Well, I understand that what's driving this is is usually a positive motive of wanting people to be free and to feel free to participate in different ways in a worship service.
Jeff Iorg:But what you're really communicating when you say something like this all too often is, you do what you want, I'll do what I want. Rather than, I've come here as a worship leader to help you to do something that you will not do on your own and something that you can only do with others giving you direction to accomplish. Now think about this. Worship leadership is about leading people into a worship experience, not just giving them the freedom to do whatever they want in the moment and hope that somehow by osmosis or observation, they pick up on whatever it is you're doing at the front of the room and somehow spontaneously
Jeff Iorg:find themselves participating in worship. Now, this
Jeff Iorg:is particularly important for people like me who are not intuitive in knowing what to do or how to do it in a worship service and frankly, don't show up for a worship service always focused as I should be on the moment. Instead, I need someone to help me to go from where I am spiritually, emotionally,
Jeff Iorg:psychologically, to help me to
Jeff Iorg:go from where I am to a full moment of engagement with God in the context of a worship experience. I need someone to lead me there. You're also making, if you make that kind of statement, an assumption about your worshipers that's really simply not true. You're making the assumption that they know how to worship and can do it without coaching or guidance. That's just simply not true.
Jeff Iorg:People come to corporate worship experiences to participate in something they cannot do on their own and to share something that they can't do by themselves. And so I wanna first say that as a worship leader, you have the responsibility to actually lead people into a worship experience. It's not just a matter of you showing up and doing your thing and hoping they follow along. Are you modeling something in the front of the room and hoping they will get it somehow? It's about you understanding that you have a responsibility to step into a room and to lead people to do what they cannot do on their own and to lead people to do what they cannot do by themselves or without participating in a group environment.
Jeff Iorg:Now to make this as practical as possible, a number of years ago, I started identifying, one or more couples in our church and using them as a barometer, I guess, say, to analyze a paradigm of worship or a possibility of worship and decide if it was something we could or should do in our worship services. Now this couple is long in heaven, but this was years ago, so I'll tell you their names. I liked using a couple named Sunny and Mary Jo. Sunny was a mid fifties guy on the small construction company. He had had a bigger company, but frankly, he got tired of the hassle and scaled it down where he said he can make just as much money practically working just by himself.
Jeff Iorg:So he spent most of his days driving an excavator. He dug out foundations for homebuilders. And again, he had at one point been a pretty substantial homebuilder, but he said, you know, I just don't need the hassle. So he contracted out and dug foundations for other home builders, and he really liked it. But that meant he spent most of his workday by himself in an excavator, moving dirt, and enjoying it.
Jeff Iorg:His wife, she was a realtor. She loved people, and she liked being out with people, and, she did that on a daily basis as well. They were comfortably prosperous. I would not describe them as overly wealthy people, but they had enough. They were also very committed to our church.
Jeff Iorg:They had been Christians since they were young adults, and by this time, they were in middle age and never missed a worship service, participated in everything that we did, loved the Lord, and loved being a part of our church. And so I would ask our worship leaders as we would work together to plan worship services and different things would be proposed for the service. I would just simply ask the question, will Sunny and Mary Jo do this?
Jeff Iorg:Will Sunny and Mary Jo participate? Will they join in? Will they feel connected to God by this experience? And when you get it down to that kind of planning where you're looking into the eyes of real people that are a part of your church on a regular basis and asking that kind of question, you're starting to ask the real the the really essential question of, do I actually believe that I'm leading these people into worship? It's not just
Jeff Iorg:a matter of, can we put together some stuff and show up on a Sunday and do it together? It's no. What what about Sonny and Mary Jo? Will they sing these songs? Will they feel comfortable doing these exercises?
Jeff Iorg:Will they participate in this prayer moment? Will they do these things, and are these activities of worship that we're designing designed for them and to facilitate their engagement? Now I'm just giving you one one couple, and a good worship planner would do this with several different groups or people or individuals to ask the question about engagement and participation during the planning phase. So the first thing I would say to enhance worship participation is to underscore that you are a worship leader and that your responsibility is to do more than just model or demonstrate. Your your responsibility is to lead people to somehow, in some way, enhance their experience so that they come together to do what they cannot do on their own and do only what they can do corporately and together.
Jeff Iorg:And then you take it even more to a level of saying, what about these individuals? And you analyze your leadership and what you're doing in worship through the eyes or through the lens of some individual people or couples or or even groups that you're having engaged as part of your service. That's number one. Number two,
Jeff Iorg:another way to enhance participation is to observe carefully the worship participants and to make adjustments accordingly. To observe carefully the worship participants
Jeff Iorg:and to make adjustments accordingly. Now, I did this when I was a pastor, and it works like this. You video your worship service and then you watch that video carefully and you make adjustments accordingly. So here's how it worked. I explained to our worship leaders that I wanted to do this periodically on Sundays in our church, and they agreed that it was a good idea and that we should do this.
Jeff Iorg:And so the first Sunday, they set up the video camera and they positioned it so that they could video the service. I arrived and saw what
Jeff Iorg:they had done and asked this simple question. Why do we have the camera pointed at the stage? And they said, well, we're we're going to video the worship service. I said, no, we're not. We're videoing the stage, which
Jeff Iorg:is the worship leaders. I already know that they know what to do. I already know that they're fully engaged. I already know that they're willing participants. I I already know what they're doing.
Jeff Iorg:I said, let's put that video camera in the corner of the stage where it has a panorama shot of the audience, the congregation, the worshipers. Let's video them. Well, the worship leaders were a little bit shocked at this. They they were like, well, well, well, well, okay. So we repositioned the camera and set it up and got a pretty good view of our church, only a couple of 100 people.
Jeff Iorg:It wasn't like we were trying to video thousands. And so we had a nice video of the audience or the congregation, and we turned it on and forgot the camera and went on with our service as normal. So day or two later, it was time to do the evaluation. I told the worship team, I said, let's sit down together, put in the video, and let's watch the service. We only made it about five, seven minutes into the service when one of them said, could we just could we
Jeff Iorg:just stop for a second? And I stopped and I turned to him and he he had tears in his eyes. And he said, no one's singing. They're just all standing there. Kids are looking around.
Jeff Iorg:People are distracted. I said, yeah. I know. He said that that this isn't this isn't what we want. I said, no, it's not.
Jeff Iorg:But I said, let's don't be overly critical. Let's just learn from it. And as we go through this, let's talk about what we need to change so that the people that are here to worship come fully into the experience and engage with it and are enhanced by our leadership so that we do something together collectively that we could not do on our own. We watched that tape together, and it was painful. But as a result of that, our little worship team said we have to do things differently.
Jeff Iorg:Now what do we need to change? And they started talking about song selection and service order and about engaging people and how to do that verbally and with the spoken instruction and using transitions more effectively and different aspects of the service like that. And I said, now look, we're not gonna video this every week. That's too much. But let's come back in three months and let's video again the same way, not the stage.
Jeff Iorg:We know what's happening on the stage. Let's video the congregation and see what's happening out there. Now, lest you think you're only talking about the the singing. No. No.
Jeff Iorg:No. No. I watched the whole thing through including the praying and the offering and, of course, also the preaching and watched to see how people are responding and how they're engaging and what's happening during those other elements of the worship service as well. So I wanna challenge you to think about doing what I've just described. Without making any announcements, without letting people know what's happening or anything like that so you get a true picture, Set up a video camera where you can get a panorama of the most of the people in your worship service, and then have a normal service.
Jeff Iorg:And then sit down with the people who lead and plan worship in your church and watch it together, And ask yourself some hard questions. Are people engaging with what we're doing? Is there broad and robust participation? Do people seem to understand what they're being asked to do, and are they entering into this willingly and and
Jeff Iorg:enthusiastically? And don't just watch the singing, the praying, the offering, testimonies, video segments, the preaching, asking hard questions about what you're seeing and how people can participate more and enhanced participation can be achieved. So I want you to
Jeff Iorg:focus on being a worship leader, and I want you to be an worship evaluator, but I want you to turn the camera in the right direction to enhance worship in that way. Now let me give you a third suggestion about enhancing worship, and that is involve more people in leading the worship experience. I'm talking about involving more people than just one person doing the singing and one person doing the praying or a small group of people standing on a stage and doing the singing. I'm talking about enlarging participation by using many more people as a part of the worship experience, and I wanna talk to you now about how to do that and why it's important to do. Now there are several reasons why it's important to use many worship participants in a service.
Jeff Iorg:First is theology. We believe in the priesthood of believers. We need believe that every believer has equal access to God, and every believer has equal opportunity to represent God to others. And so there is no hierarchy of participation spiritually in worship leadership or worship participation. Now there may be skill issues or there may be aptitude issues, and I I get that.
Jeff Iorg:But in terms of involving a lot more people in worship leadership, worship participation, the priesthood of the believer is the theological foundation for that decision.
Jeff Iorg:A second reason though is discipleship. Discipleship.
Jeff Iorg:Inviting people to participate in worship and to provide some leadership in worship is a means of training them and challenging them to grow in their relationship with God. I'm gonna give you a specific example about that in just a moment. Another reason to use many people is leadership. It introduces new leaders to the congregation, and it introduces new people to the possibility of standing up in front of a church family and being recognized as being a person of influence or a person who's expected to give spiritual leadership. And then finally, another reason is symbolism.
Jeff Iorg:It it communicates inclusion and openness. It communicates that we're all in this together and that the entire church family is an important part of what we're trying to do in a particular church or location. So there are many reasons to use many people as worship leaders or worship participants, theology, discipleship, leadership, symbolism. Now when I challenge you to think about doing this using many more people in your worship services, I hear some reasons why people don't wanna do this. First of all, some people say, well, we need to guarantee the quality.
Jeff Iorg:The quality. Man, the arrogance of that, that you are the only one who can do it well or a small cadre of people that you have hand selected are the only ones who can do something well, the quality.
Jeff Iorg:We need to be sure that only the mature people lead in worship. Well,
Jeff Iorg:I agree that there needs to be some level of consideration about who's going to lead in worship participation and who's going to be a part of worship leadership, but let's be really careful here that we don't set up artificial standards of what holiness is supposed to be like before we let people participate. Here's another one. Well, we need to control the style. You know, we have a certain style or or that we're trying to accomplish at our church. Well, okay.
Jeff Iorg:Alright. But, you know, maybe there's some people out there who might do it stylistically just a little bit different than you would, and you might find that they connect with a significant number of people in your church or community. This style issue came home to me when I
Jeff Iorg:was a church planter. When we
Jeff Iorg:were planting our church, we put together this small little group of worship leaders. We had just half a dozen of us in the beginning, and we were fortunate to have that many. Couple of instrumentalists, a person to lead in singing, and then we put together some other people to help us with the praying and the scripture reading and some other aspects of the worship service. And as we were putting that little group together, one of the fellows said, hey, does it matter what we wear on Sunday? And I said, well, we wanna we wanna try to look, you know, sharp.
Jeff Iorg:He said, okay. Okay.
Jeff Iorg:I get that. I get that.
Jeff Iorg:He said, you know, we're gonna have people coming to our church here in the Northwest that that are gonna come in
Jeff Iorg:shorts, jeans, jackets, slacks. Not likely, but a suit might even wander in every now and then. I said, okay. He said, wouldn't it be great if the style of dress
Jeff Iorg:that we had was as varied as the people who were walking in our room so that when someone comes in, can look up on the stage and say, well, there's a
Jeff Iorg:guy like me. Maybe I could belong here. And I thought, wow. That is so powerfully important that people who walk into our service look up on
Jeff Iorg:the stage and say, man, maybe maybe I could fit in here. Now I realize that that's an issue that has a lot to do with where you are in the country and, the expectations of your community and a lot of other issues. But remember, I was planning a church in the Pacific Northwest, and people there are naturally more casual in terms of appearance and dress and other things. And they also really are looking for people who look like them, especially when they're investigating something as risky as becoming a part of an evangelical church. And so this whole issue of style became very important to me even in that context.
Jeff Iorg:So reasons to use many worship leaders or participants, we've covered some of those and some reasons we resisted. We sort of resisted or debunked, if you will, some of those. But now let's talk about some practical ways to increase worship participation or worship leadership. And I promised you a moment ago that I was gonna talk to you about an example of how involving people in worship leadership or worship participation is a step of discipleship. So again, many years ago, this was going back to my first pastorate, I became convinced about the things I'm talking to you about today on the podcast, and I really wanted to do them.
Jeff Iorg:And so I thought, how can I use worship participation as a point of discipleship or to help people grow? And so at that time, we had a Sunday morning worship service and a Sunday night worship service, and it was a fairly traditional pattern of service. And so on the Sunday morning service, we had a morning prayer I mean, an opening prayer and a mid service prayer, usually for the offering, and then a closing prayer at the end. And in the evening, we had similar thing. We had some some kind of opening prayer.
Jeff Iorg:We had a service and a prayer in the middle with an offering or something like that, and then a prayer at the end. Now, there were some variations of this, but typically speaking on a typical Sunday, there were six prayers. Three in the morning service, three in
Jeff Iorg:the night service. Now this was a number of years ago in a context where the men led the
Jeff Iorg:prayers and the worship services, and I'm not going down that path today. That's not an issue for me these days, but in that context, it was. And so I said to my worship leader who was helping me plan the services, hey. I wanna start using a lot more men in the service to lead in prayer. And we got out our church directory, and the men that we could identify that were active participants in our church in some capacity, meaning they came once a month or whatever, was about 200.
Jeff Iorg:And I said to him, look, you got six you got six prayers every Sunday. You got fifty weeks a year. That's about 300 slots. You got about 200 guys here. I want you to start down the list, and I want you to just start calling guys and ask them to lead one
Jeff Iorg:of these prayers. And, every time one says yes, you put him on
Jeff Iorg:the schedule, and you put a check mark, and you move on. And you try
Jeff Iorg:to schedule about two to three weeks in advance. Okay, he said. He started doing this. Well, what happened next
Jeff Iorg:I was not prepared for?
Jeff Iorg:I start getting phone calls.
Jeff Iorg:And I got two particular kind of phone calls that became a pattern. First phone call was this, pastor, Mike called me and asked me to lead in prayer on Sunday morning in the worship service. And I said, okay.
Jeff Iorg:And the person would say, pastor, I've never said a prayer out loud in front of anyone except maybe my family, and that's not very often. I I I'm willing to try it. I I wanna I wanna do it, but I I don't I don't even know how to start. And then I would say, hey. You got time for coffee?
Jeff Iorg:You got time for lunch? You got a few minutes you can
Jeff Iorg:come by the office when you get off work one day this week? Let's get together for a few minutes and let me help you to write out some ideas and think about what you wanna pray and maybe even practice with me how you might say that in front of people, and let's see if we can't help you to grow to the point where you can lead this public prayer. Now the other thing that happened frequently that I wasn't prepared for was guys who normally showed up
Jeff Iorg:at
Jeff Iorg:church in a
Jeff Iorg:golf shirt or a pullover would show up
Jeff Iorg:on a Sunday they were gonna pray, oftentimes rocking a full suit. And at first, I kind of made a joke out of it like, wow, I've never seen you in a suit before. Or, well, did somebody die or something? I mean, you
Jeff Iorg:know but after I did a couple of jokes about that, I realized that they they weren't they weren't laughing. And I realized that for these men, this
Jeff Iorg:was a high and holy moment that they had had to spiritually grow by working on learning to pray, practicing prayer, and themselves praying privately to even get ready to stand up and lead a prayer in front of just a few 100 people. That was one kind of phone call I got. The other kind was this. Pastor, Mike called and asked me if
Jeff Iorg:I'd lead a prayer on Sunday in
Jeff Iorg:one of the services. I said, sure. We'd love for you to do that. Pastor,
Jeff Iorg:I can't do that, and I need to come talk to you.
Jeff Iorg:And that simple ask of asking a person to take responsibility for leading a public prayer on multiple occasions produced a sense of conviction of shortcoming in their life, sin in their life, broken relationships in their life, something that caused them to say, there is no way I can stand up in front of people and pray and lead people to pray with what I've got going on
Jeff Iorg:in my life, pastor. We need to talk.
Jeff Iorg:This was a side benefit that I never anticipated when we started into the process. I just wanted people to get more involved in worship leadership. I wanted to use more people in worship participation. I believed in the theology of the priests of the believers. I wanted to introduce more people into leadership in our church.
Jeff Iorg:I wanted to communicate openness and inclusion. I I wanted all of that, but I was unprepared for the discipleship impact of this simple act of asking people to pray in services. So one way to enhance the participation in your services is to start asking many more people to pray and to make leading a prayer in one of your services a high and holy moment of leadership in your church. You could go on to another thing that's very similar, that scripture reading or some kind of responsive reading. Lots of different ways to do these, but this is another way to get many more people involved in worship leadership and participation.
Jeff Iorg:Another way is by using testimonies. These can be used as stand alone moments. They can be used to introduce baptisms. They can also be used as illustrations and sermons. But where you have someone with a written or a video or even an interview style testimony that they are able to share in a worship service as a part of what you're working on or accomplishing together.
Jeff Iorg:Now, of course, in some churches, there's also the opportunity for participating in the offertory in some way. Now not every church has a formal offering and offertory, but many still do. I hit upon this idea again when I was a pastor in this church that had morning and evening services. We had our morning offering, and typically our best instrumentalists played those as a part of our service. But I thought, you know, there's a lot of children in our church who are learning to play musical instruments.
Jeff Iorg:And so I again said I asked one of our children's leaders, I want you to do a survey and find out everybody who's a teenager or a child in our church who's taking music lessons who's learning to play an instrument. Why? Well, humor me. See if you can come up with a list, and she did. And it wasn't a large church.
Jeff Iorg:We probably had 300 people in our church at that time, and she comes back with a list of 12 to 15 of our kids. So these kids are all in some kind of music program taking some kind of instrument. I said, great. Start asking every one of them to
Jeff Iorg:play an operatory on Sunday night. Excuse me, pastor?
Jeff Iorg:Yeah. Every one of them. The tuba? The tuba too. Well, I'll take them all.
Jeff Iorg:And so for a series over a summer, we had children play their instrument for our operatory on a Sunday night service. And quite frankly, some of them pretty shaky, some of them pretty good. That wasn't the point.
Jeff Iorg:The point was we're saying, you're a member of
Jeff Iorg:our church. You have a talent or a skill to offer. We're gonna make a place for you to start to demonstrate it here and to start growing into leadership using this gift God has given you or the skill that you're developing. Another way to enhance participation in worship. And then, of course, lots of different ways to involve people in doing this, in singing with ensembles and small groups and choirs.
Jeff Iorg:I'm so sad that so many churches today don't see the value of choir. You say, well, choir is kind of old timey. Well, it's not really. There's lots of community choirs all over The United States that still seem to enjoy getting together and singing corporately together. And a church choir is a tremendous way for ten, fifteen, 50, a 100 people to come together and participate in worship leadership in a collective effort.
Jeff Iorg:Man, that's another opportunity to do this very thing. And then finally, the ordinances, Lord's Supper and baptism. Now depending on your church and how you observe the Lord's Supper, some churches restrict the distribution of elements to pastors or to deacons, and that's not that's not wrong. There's nothing about that that's wrong, but some churches allow other people to participate. I know as a pastor, I certainly did.
Jeff Iorg:And that's allowing many people to participate in sharing the elements of the Lord's Supper and passing out the the the bread or passing out the juice and participating in scripture reading and in other ways to bring many more people into the leadership of that experience. Same thing with baptism. Now in many cases, pastors do most of the baptizing. That's fine. But you could have the person in the water with you who led the candidate to faith in Jesus or who may be the parents there of the child who's being baptized.
Jeff Iorg:Just lots more ways to get people involved and to allow them to speak or to pray or to in some way be a part of the baptismal experience. Well, here's what I've said today on the podcast. We can enhance worship participation by first taking on our leadership role. We're not just there to model, we're there to lead people to do something they cannot do on their own that they will not do without help, but they can do if we guide them into the experience. We're also there to enhance worship participation by evaluating our worship and making incremental adjustments accordingly.
Jeff Iorg:Don't put the camera in view of the stage, put the camera in view of the worship person, see how they're doing, and make the adjustments as needed. And then we can enhance worship participation also by involving a lot more people in the worship service and in the worship service planning and in the worship service participation of leadership. Now, of course, that requires intentionality, requires thinking ahead, requires good planning, but it's worth it when you see people engaging in fresh ways in worship. So today, we've talked about enhancing worship participation in local churches. Not talking about getting more people in the doors, but talking about getting more people who've come through the doors to more fully engage in what we're doing as we worship God together.
Jeff Iorg:Take these ideas and put them into practice as you lead on.