Songs and Spontaneous

LEADING WITH SONGS AND SPONTANEOUS

Brian Johnson

Sometimes working in a team/co-leading can be complicated. Two different sets of ideas, different interpretations of the Holy Spirit, etc.

• Get on the same page as your leadership, honor them, and the goal is that you’re trusted by leadership to the point where you can go off that cliff in worship together.
• It’s better to go through the “learning to trust” process with a small setting, rather than be thrust out in front of 80,000 people and have it fall flat.

God gives us what we can handle. We need to be peaceful in that healthy tension. He can turn your life on a dime.

• Honor the point - to get to the position. Serve where your leadership trusts you. Then they will know they can trust you and honor the times you break into what the Spirit is doing.
• Passion - sometimes passion can be mistaken for God. Young people are naturally attracted to passion, older people are more attracted to whether or not you are rooted in God. We need to live in the tension of both.

Worship leaders need to position themselves like pastors and prophets.

• Excellence will last for a lifetime. God respects cool, but he doesn’t care about the coming and going of fads as we do.
• Worship comes in waves, ups, and downs, there are Selah moments.
• Make every week of worship a time to celebrate God. Many artists are feelers - naturally more melancholy. But the heart needs to be about celebrating God. When you talk about how great God is it can never be a bad idea. Sing yourselves into freedom.

Out of real revelation, real worship comes. When you’re impacting the person in the back who almost didn’t make it - that’s when worship is real. When these people can get a fresh revelation of Jesus we will not need to cheerlead worship anymore.

• We are not just leading songs before a message. We need to pay attention to the poignant moments between songs.
• Use baby steps to create freedom in your church.
• You can have a powerful 17-minute set - you don’t have to have 3 hours to have the Spirit come or have it be more anointed. It’s about quality.

We have to honor and respect some of the things we don’t like or understand to be able to impact a generation. God is so much bigger than a timeframe.

• Sing a song that’s packed with theology and truth when you need something to fill a short amount of time - they are breakout songs. E.g. 10,000 reasons, Cornerstone, In Christ Alone.
• Write a setlist but be prepared to let God change it up. The right amount of preparation but also the right amount of spontaneity.

Respect both the rehearsed and the spontaneous songs. Even in the bible there were lyrics that were supposed to be rehearsed, practiced and passed down the generations.

• Songs are the runway into the prophetic. Just because a song has already been written doesn’t mean it isn’t prophetic.
• Pay attention to those spontaneous moments - sometimes they are supposed to be turned into songs.