A brief theology of worship leadership

Worship is the debt being paid back to God for the atonement of our sin (His sacrifice of sending his Son to redeem us once and for all on the cross). This is not just a song sung in a worship service, instead, Romans 12 paints a picture far bigger than that and states that we are to “give [y]our entire bodies to God, letting them be a living and holy sacrifice“ (1) It is our response both personal and corporate to God for who He is, and for what He has done, expressed in and by the things we say, and the way we live. (2)

We worship a God who is Creator. In Genesis He creates man in the imago Dei (image of God) and makes mankind the chosen creation to mirror himself. (3) God is the creator, and He made us sub-creators. We take what He has created first, and we manipulate it to create our own expressions of creativity. We create from a palette placed into our hands by God first. (4) Music is an expression and outworking of this creativity. A worship song is a story-telling document which is put expressively to music in an effort to gather people together in a shared way of creatively learning and expressing that story.

The Kingdom is established by having the king ruling there (Kingdom literally means, ”King’s“ ”Domain“). (5) Worship draws our attention to God, and to who He is as the Creator, King, Saviour and Trinity. It also draws us to his agenda of justice, spirituality, relationship and beauty. (6) Worship teaches us and creates in us a lifestyle that is continually permeating with these echoes of God, making us Kingdom extenders as we go about our lives as living sacrifices to God and mirroring who He is to this broken world.

The first hurdle to overcome as a worship leader is tapping into the bigger picture. One can easily get trapped into thinking that our worship set of five songs on a Sunday is the ”worship time“, dividing the rest of the week into a time that isn’t. Worship is a lifestyle, so we should be encouraging those we lead into that lifestyle - one that is rich in understanding of who God is, what He has done, what He is doing and what He will do. We can not lead this if we have not gone there ourselves. (7)

We worship a God who has created us as his image bearers, as creative people. Artistic creativity should be used to show people glimpses of what this lifestyle of sacrifice should look like, but the music itself should not take over our focus and become the main thing we aim at. Our worship (lifestyle) should richly and continually be centred (aligned) on God, and our leading should be mirroring that weither - weither it is with artistic creativity or through normal day-to-day tasks.

(1) Romans 12:1 NLT

(2) Louie Giglio, Worship - That thing we do DVD, Session 4

(3) Genesis 1:26-27

(4) Dan Wilt, The nature of the human being, p4

(5) Bill Johnson, When Heaven Invades Earth

(6) N.T. Wright,  Simply Christian

(7) Dr. Peter Davids, The importance of scripture study for modern worship leaders