#520. The Worship Leader Mini Sermon
Apr 13th by Jon“Is it weird to hear a pink bunny rabbit sing these depressing songs?”
As I’ve mentioned before, that’s what Adam Duritz, lead singer of the Counting Crows, asked me and 10,000 other people one night at a concert.
The show was held on Halloween night in Boston. The entire band was dressed up in costumes and Duritz had a full bunny outfit on. Pink fur, white belly, two long ears.
Just imagine a delightful little bunny singing these lyrics from the song, “Perfect Blue Buildings”"
Asleep in perfect blue buildings,
Beside the green apple sea,
Gonna get me a little oblivion, baby,
And try to keep myself away from me.
It was weird to hear a bunny sing that and at the time, I thought the lyrics were actually, “Gonna get me a little Bolivian baby.” I honestly assumed Duritz was making a wry comment on celebrity adoption habits and was saying that if he adopted a Bolivian baby, all his problems would go away. (If you’re a Bolivian baby and you’re reading this, first of all, congrats on being bilingual and reading at such a young age and second of all please know I have nothing against Bolivian babies. You are easily one of my favorite types of South American infants. Top 3. Seriously. Nothing but love from SCL.)
Duritz is a master of the mid song chit chat, but unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing for all worship leaders. Sometimes the prospect of an open mic and a captive audience proves too tempting to resist. Sometimes it’s hard to resist the urge to deliver a worship leader mini sermon. Although I’ve written about this phenomenon before, I failed to give you any real pointers on how to perfectly execute a worship leader mini sermon. (And clearly, as someone that’s never been a worship leader and whose one claim to musical fame is dressing up as Britney Spears for a youth group song parody, I am extremely qualified to impart this wisdom.)
Here are the three best techniques for worship leader mini sermons:
1. The Examples Method
I don’t know Steve Fee personally, but I know he’s a really talented worship leader and he can flow with examples like few people in the game. In this technique, you wait until you get to a slow part of the song and then elaborate on the message by listing out numerous examples of how it can be applied to our lives. I think it started with that song “In my life Lord be glorified.” Our church used to sing 37 verses of that. “In my church Lord. In my home Lord. In my school Lord. In my Arby’s Lord even though they’re suddenly trying to call their sandwiches burgers, be glorified.” Fortunately, folks like Fee have rescued the Examples Method and applied it in some cool ways. Here is a snippet of what Fee says on the Live Catalyst Reverb CD, which I can’t stop listening to:
“If we’re going to say glory to God it doesn’t mean just glory to God when I’m in front of people or glory to God when people are watching. It means glory to God with every word and every thought and every motive, every meditation. .. It’s as if we’re saying in every part of my life, in every corner, in every shadow of my life, glory to God, with every relationship, glory to God, with every motive, glory to God, with every word and thought, glory to God.”
There are 13 examples in that blurb and although that seems like a lot when read on a blog, in the context of a live song, with a worship leader that’s in the zone, this works.
2. The Dictionary Method
A lot of people will tell you that if you’re a worship leader and you want to dabble in the art of the mini sermon, you’re going to need to have at least three words you can break down into Hebrew. For my money though you only need one: Hallelujah. “It’s a Hebrew contraction Halleh and Yahweh, Halleh meaning to celebrate, to rave, to shine, to praise, to praise Yahweh.” At least that’s what a worship leader told me recently in a song. And best of all, he did what every great dictionary master does, he told me how many times the word appears in the Bible.
3. The Bible Method
Knowing the Bible as a worship leader isn’t a contest, but if it was, please know that Aaron Keyes would crush you. You might know a lot of Bible, you might be able to quote long passages and complex verses, but it doesn’t matter, Aaron Keyes knows more Bible than you do. I promise. At the Off the Blogs event, I was sitting in the crowd in awe at his ability to seamlessly wrap scripture into the worship experience. I was sitting next to Billy Graham and even he said, “Oh snap, that Aaron Keyes is a player.” And Aaron heard him from the stage and replied, “I’m not a player I just crush a lot.” I leaned over to my wife and said, “Did Aaron Keyes just quote Big Pun to Billy Graham?” The whole thing was insane. OK, it didn’t happen that exact way, but I swear if Billy Graham had come to Off the Blogs, even he would have been impressed with Aaron’s Bible knowledge.
Those are my three favorite methods for the worship leader mini sermon.
Did I miss any?
Has your worship leader ever given a mini sermon?
Are you a worship leader that can flow with a mini sermon?
Comments
I probably shouldn’t mention the erm… mini blog sermon, should I? ha ha
wv: nogratio
Pretty simple concept. No tip. Patrons labelled this should expect spit in their soup and very watery fizzy drinks.
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Ruth
http://fendisite.com
I’ve had to do this, but usually because we’re playing a mainstream song (I will never use the term “secular” again) that can be tied into the message for that day. For instance, we did the Matchbox 20 song “Push” during a series where our pastor was talking about addiction and recovery, and I kind of had to sell it. You can’t just go into a song like that without some explanation.
But yeah, we’ve done that with a ton of other songs, where the meaning wasn’t so obvious, like “Kicks” by Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Hero of the Day” by Metallica, “You Get What You Give” by New Radicals, “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd (note the spelling, people), “One Thing Leads to Another” by The Fixx, “Ridin’ the Storm Out” by REO Speedwagon, and a whole lot of others. Sometimes you have to connect the dots for people because they just don’t see the correlation otherwise.
I love Aaron Keyes!! He really does know the entire Bible backwards and forwards. It’s pretty sick. One time when we were singing the song “Days of Elijah”, our music leader stopped midsong and pulled out a chair, giving shocking everyone. He proceeded to tell us that he had received a huge amount of emails concerning the verse which said, “These are the days of Ezekiel,
The dry bones becoming as flesh;
And these are the days of Your servant David,
Rebuilding the temple of praise.” So he pulled out his bible and gave a mini sermon on the song and what it meant. Then as soon as he was done, he put the chair back and resumed worship.
I’m a worship leader, and when the preacher gives me the slip and ends in a completely different mood than what I expected, the mini-sermon comes out… and it would be #4, the roundabout tie-in. I have to find some way to reconcile a message ending in the faces of starving children from Africa and the song “Happy Day” by Fee.
If done well, people are inspired to “spread God’s love, so that this entire world will soon be able to sing this with us.”
If done poorly, you are in for the longest, loneliest three minutes of your worship leader existence.
Part of our difficulty here may be that when we say “worship leader” we actually just mean “song leader.” That’s what we want a lot of times, since many people who can play an acoustic guitar aren’t necessarily that great at actually leading a group in worship.
So yes, many times these mini-sermons DO interrupt the worship. But sometimes they can move us to worship in a different way. Hopefully the WL is actually attentive to what’s going on and can recognize when it’s the right time to engage in a little extemporizing.
I’m all for the occasional mini-sermon if result brings glory to God.
less is more in this arena, for sure.
You are so right about Aaron Keyes. Went to a seminar once of his, he is a great talker. but his bible knowledge. WOW!
Why do I get the feeling you wrote this post in your head when you should have been listening to a sermon?
great call, i thought immediately of Aaron Keyes and my buddy Matt Vaughan who are really gifted in this area. If they didn’t do music, they would be pastors. I welcome it. There’s something about God’s word being spoken over you- super empowering.
So, I’m the singer of a Baby band right now. My Opinion on the matter of mini sermons has always been somewhat blank. I’ve been peticularly curious about it lately. Thanks for some insite into the matter!
You're so right about Aaron Keyes! He led worship at Catalyst 2008, and I was amazed at how he spouted off Scriptures. Man, it was impressive and really led me further to worship.
Interesting post! I am passing it on to our worship leader.
I play drums for our worship team. Yes, the obligatory 'break the song down and do the ambient keys' thing.
And let's not forget the 'middle of the song congregation Scripture read' in which the congregation lines up to read some Scripture while the keys play underneath. Then you get the 'one more' cue from the leader. I love watching the looks on the faces of the people who didn't get to read their verse. It's like 'what? that's it? how you gonna play me like that?'
I actually did a 'badump bump' thing ala the comedy club rimshot. One of our pastor's was doing announcements and made a horrible joke. I did the rimshot. Got lots of laughs and a few 'dude that was funny' comments later. That didn't offset the very stern and direct email I got from our Worship Pastor on Tuesday – and yes, it's Tuesday, cuz Worship Pastor's aint workin' on Monday!
"SNIPE THE PASTOR" — Obtain inside info regarding what the pastor will preach on. Select a song with content regarding that topic. After the 2nd verse, preach the song's message for about 90 seconds, then go to the bridge (which, if you've played your cards right, will wrap up your mini sermon). Repeat the bridge four times — the fourth time should be acappella, during which you stare down the pastor, making sure he knows what just happened to him.