Dr. David W. Manner is the Director of Worship and Administration at the Kansas-Nebraska Convention of Southern Baptists. He blogs at http://kncsb.org/blogs/dmanner. You can follow him on Twitter: @dwmanner. Thank you for sharing this with us, Dr. Manner.
Most worship pastors crave the leadership investment from and healthy ministry communication with their senior pastor but don’t often realize the freedom or job security to initiate that relationship. Consequently, a trial and error process of determining ministry direction often discourages the worship pastor and causes frustration for the senior pastor.
Implementing a culture of healthy communication requires a level of sacrifice and trust that cannot be guarded, territorial, defensive, or competitive. It publicly and privately acknowledges the calling and competence of others and is not afraid of transparent dialogue. It also embraces and shares unified goals. But healthy ministry communication will probably never occur unless and until the senior pastor initiates it.
What Your Worship Pastor Needs From You
- A collaborative spirit that supports worship and preaching as complementary, not competitive.
- For you to accept the role as primary worship leader in order to encourage the deeper biblical and theological credibility of worship beyond just music.
- An open line of communication that gives permission to disagree in private without fear of retribution.
- Mutual approachability, availability, and accountability.
- For you to acknowledge, value, and leverage his/her calling, gifts, and leadership style even when they are radically different from your own.
- Affirmation in public; correction, instruction, coaching, and mentoring in private; and pastoring at all times.
- For you to believe that a partnership of shared ministry will not threaten but instead strengthen your leadership.
- For you to initiate intentional significant conversations that include vision, hopes, dreams, goals, expectations, plans, concerns, and evaluations.
- For you to invest in his/her personal spiritual development with no ulterior motive.
- Loyalty, trust, respect, and friendship.
- For you to have enough self-confidence to acknowledge that the sermon may not always be the most important element in the service.
- A resolve to work toward a common philosophy of worship and ministry.
- The willingness to pray together, share personal and ministry goals together, and read books together.
- For you to agree that the implementation of musical changes alone will not heal internal ministry and relational deficiencies in your church.
- Your help communicating to the congregation that the word of God can be proclaimed not only through the sermon but also through singing, Scripture, testimonies, prayer, drama, dance, video, and the ordinances.
- Authentic transparency.
This is good. This point stood out to me. “An open line of communication that gives permission to disagree in private without fear of retribution.” I was asked to lead the worship service by the pastor. I sat down with him and told him what I believed about the sovereignty of God in salvation before accepting. I asked him if he had a problem with it. He said he didn’t agree but had no problem with it. I took the position without pay. I found out later that he told members in the church about it and it affected how… Read more »
Just a small number of questions (though I find the advice good as far as it goes). How many Southern Baptist Churches in the Kansas/Nebraska Convention are large enough to support or even have a “worship pastor”? How many in the Southern Baptist Convention? All of this is well and good, but let us get practical. I am not calling out Dr. Manner specifically – just the notion of both economics and stewardship. If this is the advice that a person on staff of a state convention gives to a number of churches in his service area that probably number… Read more »
I think it is great advice.
Rob, Thanks for asking some clarifying questions. In our convention the size of the congregation or a full-time, bivocational, or volunteer status doesn’t determine the designation of a position title such as “worship pastor” “worship leader” etc. Each church determines those designations. Some of our congregations with volunteer worship leaders actually refer to them as worship pastors. The point of the post, however, had little to do with titles or church size and much more to do with leadership and relationship deficiencies. The focus is more on how we should relate to those we lead. Much of church conflict, especially… Read more »
I guess David the title turned me off, “Senior Pastor” – most of our churches have only one pastor (if at all) and so looking at the title they would never read the article – “not for us” – to get to the meat of some good advice. I know as a single staff church I have trained most of my volunteers for the worship service – all had some musical background to fill comfortable to fill the position of leader. I have had some who were comfortable enough to fill out the worship service after we had talked about… Read more »
Great advice! Knowing that it’s needed because some senior pastors have a problem with some of these things, why would a senior pastor have problems with any of these points?