Hello everyone. Welcome to the Worship Q&A podcast. My name is Dwayne Moore. Each week we try to answer questions that worship leaders are asking.
Today our topic is how to challenge our worship team to grow spiritually during rehearsals. We have a special guest back with us today. His name is Herb Armentrout. Herb is the worship pastor at Broadmoor Baptist Church in Shreveport, Louisiana. He has become one of our dear friends and wonderful supporters of Next Level Worship. He, in fact, is one of our team members, and he uses our materials with his team, with his people that he mentors, so we invited Herb to come on as a guest with our coaching program with our coaching students just a few weeks ago. What you’re going to hear today is an excerpt from that coaching session. You’re going to love what Herb says. He’s so full of wonderful ideas, practical suggestions you don’t want to miss.
Before we start that excerpt, I want to put in a plug for our upcoming Worship Leader Coaching. You can join us for the next opportunity for coaching, which begins in September. Sign up at nextlevelworship.com, then click on the training tab and you can find out more information. Also, you’re going to want to come to our Worship Leader Intensive in October in Louisville. It’s going to be awesome, and we are so excited about the many people that are coming from different states to experience a powerful week together of growing and evaluating where we are and where God wants us to go in our ministries. So please go to our website, nextlevelworship.com. Click on the training tab, and you can see these different opportunities for growth.
And of course, there’s also our ReFOCUS Conference, which is in February in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. This year we have Laura Story, Tim Timmons, Dr. Vernon Whaley. I’ll be there speaking. It’s going to be incredible time. Don’t miss it. You can go to our website, find out about all of these opportunities.
With no further ado, here is Herb Armentrout talking about challenging our worship team and choir to grow spiritually through rehearsals.
Continual Worship
Herb: We remind folks regularly that Sunday worship is to be a celebration of God’s mighty works during the entire week. It’s not a once a week fix. And that continual repetition of just this idea…
Dwayne: Wow. Say that again. So you encourage your folks to understand the continual, that it’s continual in the praise.
Herb: Right. This is not … Sundays, or whenever your worship service, is not a one week fix, and so that is critical for us, and we … I will say too that we regularly talk about dangerous text, dangerous text, and I’ll often stop in the middle of the song that declares our allegiance to the Father, or desire to walk in His will, and just stop in the middle of the song and say, “Do you really know what you just …”
Dwayne: I love it. Yeah.
Herb: “This is what you just said.” And the Father’s here, and he heard everything you just said. So take a step back. And if you don’t mean it, don’t sing it. Just sit there till we get to the next anthem. If you do mean it, sing it like crazy or play it like crazy. So, we’re focused big time on the text of the songs, and we encourage that also in Praise band rehearsal and orchestra rehearsal, because a lot of times, as you’re going through chord charts or whatever, maybe you’re not as connected to the text, so we take time to talk through those texts and encourage a...