This was not what the disciples expected. 1 Corinthians 4: 9 - 16 Matthew 17: 14 - 23

Mark 9:17-31 And the Lord will lift you up too.

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This is the first of a three-part series on team building. The ideas are simple, but the why behind the what is the secret sauce to growing a solid team. Like most people reading this, I’ve made mistakes. And those disasters have forged the conviction that we can’t be in ministry without being radically committed to loving Jesus and his church more, and on a daily basis.

Keep Jesus close, make sure that your family always takes the right priority (more on that in the future) and be willing to make your church better.  Notice I said better, not different. 

Better, Not Different

One of the biggest complaints I hear from worship pastors/leaders is that somehow, they have found themselves in a church that they really don’t like. 

They don’t feel appreciated by their lead pastors. 

They don’t like the weekend worship experience. 

They don’t like the people. 

At the end of the day, there is so much complaining that I am left scratching my head wondering if they even love Jesus.  If this is you, take some time to pray if you can make your lead pastors vision for your church come alive. If you aren’t in agreement, you may be in the wrong place.  Do yourself, your family and your people a favor and get connected with someone or something that is complimenting to your convictions and your philosophy.  God created you to be you, but we are servants before leading anything. Some of us carry the responsibility to make things different.  Most of us don’t.  Know your place.  Is it your burden to change things? …or is it your job to make things better.  Talk to your teams about this.  This is a fantastic “clarity” question that will free up your bandwidth.

Is it your burden to change things? …or is it your job to make things better.

OK, that is my soap box! ☺  As I give you these three helpful tips, it’s important for you to know that these are just tools.  You can’t fake or replace strong spiritual foundations of ministry leadership.  Love Jesus and use tools and resources to LOVE His PEOPLE better.  We try to change people or churches.  But what I’ve found is that when you develop people, things change. 

But what I’ve found is that when you develop people, things change. 

So, if it’s our job to make things better, what are some ideas that we can do to commit to improving? 

1. Develop a leadership pipeline

Developing a leadership pipeline is a helpful tool to bring clarity to “who’s responsible for who and who’s responsible for what”.  It’s really difficult for a worship pastor to carry the burden of a ministry on their shoulders alone…and they shouldn’t. I don’t have to tell you that the apostle Paul makes it clear that we are called to empower people to do the work of the Kingdom, not do it all on our own! (Ephesians 4:11-13) We also get a peek into Moses' anxiety in Numbers chapter 11, where he's at his wit’s end and well over his capacity. The Lord tells him to gather 70 of his most trusted and responsible people. Moses brings them to the "tent of meetings" and the Spirit of the Lord pours over them.

God helped Moses build his team. He will help you build yours.

A leadership pipeline helps you identify your 70 (or even 7 figuratively speaking). This is the pipeline our church utilizes.  

How this works:

In this chart, we document how responsibility falls within a team.

• An assistant is the first place in which we invite someone to be developed as a leader.
• A leader is the first level in which a person is responsible for a team.
• A coach is the first level in which a leader is overseeing other leaders.
• A director is responsible for directing a particular team.
• A pastor is responsible for care, culture and vision.

My favorite area to develop is our coaches. In worship ministry, I am so lucky to have some of the best coaches.

Here's how this role works:

Jordan Hicks is my guitar coach. He is responsible for developing all guitar leaders, recruitment and assimilating guitarists for all of our campuses, adult, youth and kids’ teams. He's responsible for all communication and administration for this group as well. Because Jordan is the leader I've poured into, he completely understands my values, our church’s values and culture, and our end goal. He's a volunteer, but he brings a priceless value of leadership and excellence to our church. Our worship leaders never should worry about who they are leading with. We are spoiled because of warriors like Jordan. He's just one example of Ephesians 4 coming to life in our ministry.

I grew up as a jazz musician—tenor sax. I loved John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk. C’mon somebody!  I was in high school when I first played in combos with some older pro musicians in our city. We started playing a blues tune when one of the guys stopped me and said, “In the words of Miles Davis, man…you can’t play blues because you haven’t hurt enough yet.”  Apparently, I lacked any sense of emotive playing ability as a teenager. And I hadn’t hurt enough yet. 

If playing jazz and blues is an expression of pain and hurt that we’ve experienced, then singing worship music is an expression of the HOPE we know. We can’t and shouldn’t do this alone. Lean on your team. Empower them. 

I am excited to share with you the next two tips over the next few months. You’ll be able to find them right here at allaboutworship.com.  If you have questions about developing your leadership pipeline, you can email me at mike@worship.coach.

For free development resources, check out www.worship.coach.

Over the last few months we’ve tackled the topic of TEAM BUILDING.  As much as I would love to feel as if we have this one nailed, we don’t.  TEAM BUILDING is a muscle that every leader needs to continue to develop.  It’s easy to let this one slip away from us! Just when we start to feel like we are getting on top of this, something changes.  A vital team member leaves.  A leader needs to take on the responsibility of a different area.  Your best guitar player gets hired as the worship pastor at another church.  These are all real-life situations that happen in even the best teams.  They will happen to yours as well.

In our “Month One” blog on team building we presented the IDEA of developing a Leadership Pipeline within your worship ministry.  This IDEA helped support that idea that building an EMPOWERED TEAM is a powerful Kingdom tool.  “Who’s responsible for who?” and “Who’s responsible for what?” are two of the most important questions that needs to be answered in any team environment.  When you lead a team with clarity and spread out the responsibility for others to own your team, you ignite growth opportunities that might have went unnoticed. 

In “Month Two” we presented the idea of “Making Recruitment and Assimilation a Normal for Everyone”.  So many times, I bump into Worship Leaders and Pastors that feel the very unfair burden of building ALONE.  With this IDEA, we present the notion that every team can build better and faster when the team members who are on the teams are your best recruiters.  Make this a normal practice.  At my church, we practice asking new team members to “bring one” with you.  We have found that by making this a standard practice at ground level, we never have to ask for participation from the 10,000-foot level.  Whatever is visible is what replicates.  Empower your best leaders to build.

So here we are. Month Three.

Idea #3. Clearly Identify and Communicate Simple On-Ramps.

I love my city.  I live in Lincoln, Ne.  Home of the Nebraska Cornhuskers.  I love the youthful spirit and progressive nature of our city.  I have even grown to love and cherish the special college football atmosphere that engulfs our city on game day.  It’s addictive to say the least.  But one thing that I am not a big fan of is traffic on game day.  There is one primary road that leads into Lincoln and over 90,000 fans make the trek to our city on game day.  There are probable more if you include tailgaters.  THIS IS A BIG PROBLEM: The roads infrastructure needs to be able to support the traffic flow to the desired destination.  If there are too many confusing pieces of communication, it would put our city into emergency mode and have catastrophic effects.  I mean, the world might come to an end if people missed a Cornhusker Football Game! (No, but seriously) ;)

Having clear and simple communication about “what to DO next” can make or break your teams culture. 

Every month I host a worship leaders round table in Omaha Ne.  At this round table, Worship leaders from multiple different denominations gather for friendship and peer coaching.  These leaders have become family and they are amazing.  We discuss a wide range of worship ministry issues.  One topic that comes up regularly is “attracting the right volunteers”.  If a leader starts to pour their heart out to me about how they can’t get enough volunteers, I always ask one question to start the conversation.  “Can you tell me about your on-ramp?” This might sound overly simplistic, but what I have found is that sometimes we make it more complicated than it needs to be or we haven’t identified the answer to the most important question at all.  Every leader on your team, in unity, needs to be able to answer this question with clarity and simplicity.

 THIS IS THE QUESTION

“Where do I go and What do I do?”

 Having clear and simple communication about “what to DO next” can make or break your teams culture. 

 Here are a few suggestions when it comes to identifying your onramp into your ministry:

       1.     KEEP IT SIMPLE-

Keep it simple in language and communication.  Your “on-ramp” shouldn’t be riddled with complex forms, interviews and assessments.  Not yet anyways.  Create an “on-ramp’ that just answers the question, “where do I go and what do I do?”.  Worry about next steps later.  But for now, getting a “willing one” to show up is your biggest win. Make it simple for them.

For example, I person asks about playing guitar on the worship team.  Any leader in your department should be able to have the same simple answer. ”I am so glad you are interested!  We host all our new volunteers on Monday Nights at 6:30pm!  Would you be my guest?!”

       2.     USE WHATS ALREADY WORKING AS YOUR BEST FOOT FORWARD-

­What is already working in your church?  Do you have a rehearsal process that is spot on?  USE IT!  Is God’s presence so thick in your weekend worship services that lives are being transformed?  USE IT! I’ve made the mistake of overthinking and over programming.  I’ve launched the “extra” visitor’s night or the quarterly worship night with the intentions of attracting new people.  Sometimes those things work.  But the problem is that even though they may be effective, it takes a long time for those events to represent the culture and team that we want people to be attracted to. 

Identify what’s already working and utilize those moments to “on-ramp” your team.

        3.     KEEP IT CONSISTENT-

Nothing can steal the wind out of the sails of progress like a good dose of inconsistency.  If you “welcome” new team members on Monday nights, keep that consistent for a season.  If you “welcome” new people to your choir rehearsal and you celebrate leaders that brought them, don’t change that unless you are communicating change.  Consistency, on this point, allows us the opportunity to get buy in from our team! Consistency builds reliability. Consistency gives our leaders tools to build with.  (Side note:  We will be talking about “embracing change” and reinvention in the upcoming months.)

Consistency tells our teams that we aren’t building a kingdom that only serves us, but we are leading an army that can fight battles when we share the burden.

Identifying your “on-ramps” could be a simple strategy that could help you engage people better.  Below is a sample of an “on-ramps” document that I created for our kid’s ministry at our church.  This idea isn’t just for worship/creative teams, but for everyone.

It is essential that you clearly communicate the “WHERE/HOW” to START whenever you are building teams.  Keep your communication clear and simple.  Try utilizing opportunities that your church is already doing well to interact with potential volunteers.  Lastly, be consistent.  Everyone should know the answer to this question: “Where do I go and What do I do?”.

 Having clear and simple communication about “what to DO next” can make or break your teams culture. 

Jesus, I pray today for the burden and stress that our worship leaders and pastors feel daily. We pray that you would continue to grow our capacity to shepherd well.  Thank you for entrusting us with big things.  We are honored to pastor your people.

Please feel free to use this resource or any that you find at worship.coach. Feel free to send me an email if you have any questions about these three helpful tips.  I am always glad to help. 

Michael King @michaelkingjr
free resources available at www.worship.coach

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The aim of this lesson is to show that our only safeguard against Satan’s last-day delusions is a personal relationship with Christ and a solid grounding in the teachings of the Bible. This includes its teaching about death, regardless of what our eyes and ears and hearts might try to tell us. *Study this week’s lesson, based on chapters 31–34 of The Great Controversy.

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Although often confused with guilt and shame, remorse is actually a much higher calibrating "emotion." It's the 21st Century alternative to feeling bad about yourself, and making others around you feel bad too.

It not only feels better and helps you move forward in your life, but it is healing for the Earth... and as we ride the 2012 Transition, Mother Earth needs all the help we can give her!

This article explains how it works, and why you are worthy of forgiveness.

Remorse is a method to heal yourself, and others, after making a mistake.

After all, anything that brings a feeling of remorse is a mistake -- just a mistake. Did you know that's the origin of the word "sin"? "Sin" was an archery term; it means missing the mark. That leaves a lot more possibility for positive growth, doesn't it!

So you don't need to berate yourself for eternity. There is nothing to berate yourself for if you didn't know any better, or if you did the best you could.

And I believe we always do the best we can, with what we have in the moment.

We're not perfect. Sometimes we do things we're not proud of. But, in the moment, that was undoubtedly the best that we could do.

Maybe you gave in to your meaner impulses. If you could have held yourself to a higher ideal in that moment, you would have done so. What would you have to gain, by not?

Maybe you didn't know how to do better. You can only work with what you know.

God does not expect you to know what you do not yet know!

For whatever reason -- fatigue, stress, anxiety, confusion, distraction, etc -- maybe you didn't do the best you hoped for. Maybe it wasn't as good as you could have done another day.

But you obviously did the best you could in that moment.

Why would anyone do less than that?

God doesn't need you to burn in hell for it, not even the hell of your own harsh thoughts. She only wants you to learn from the process, and to use it to grow. That's what remorse is all about.

There are four parts to the process of remorse.

The first part is a pang in your Heart. There is an energy there, call it an emotion if you like, that signals you are not happy with your actions.

From here, many people get derailed into guilt, instead of continuing the process of remorse.

The second part is the most important, the core of remorse...

You accept that you made a mistake. And you make an unemotional, practical assessment of your actions.

When your actions and choices don't live up to your ideals or ethics... you figure out how you could do better, discover what was moving in you (probably subconsciously) that caused that action, and -- here's the critical bit -- resolve to do better next time.

Remorse is calm and determined. Rather than destroying your self-respect, remorse enhances it. It provides you with the opportunity to grow, to live up to your ideals.

It recognises that within you there is a perfect being, capable of the best.

And that there is always another opportunity to try.

Contrast that with shame, which says that you are worthless and hopeless. There's just nowhere good to go, from there!

Remorse doesn't take the mistake personally. It sees an action as wrong, but not you as a person.

Remorse knows that people can't accurately, honestly be judged in terms of "wrong" and "bad."

The next step is always making amends. You must undo the error, to the best of your ability. And apologise, if it won't make things worse.

We must be clear -- this step has nothing to do with being forgiven by another person. Whether they forgive you or not is about them and their process, and is not about you.

To seek someone's forgiveness when they aren't ready to give it can be a further harm.

You fix the mistake if you can. That is the only purpose of this step.

Inherent in this process is self-forgiveness. You see a mistake, you acknowledge it, you figure out what went wrong, you fix it if you can, and you determine to not make that mistake again.

When you've done all that, forgiveness is a lot easier.

You can forgive yourself, because you know you aren't a bad person who intentionally did wrong... and because you are doing your best not to slip up that way in the future.

No one is perfect. No one is expected, by the Divine, not to make mistakes. On the contrary, that's often how we learn and grow.

That's all the Divine wants of you. Not perfection. But learning and growing from your slip-ups.

So you can accept that you did the best you were able to, at the time. And forgive yourself, for being human and humanly fallible.

If you get stuck in guilt, look for the underlying shame. Shame is like Velcro to guilt. It tells you that you deserve to feel terrible guilt, that you are not worthy of forgiveness or compassion or kindness.

But shame LIES.

You are worthy of forgiveness, because you are not a flawed person.You are Divinity tasting life as a mortal individual -- nothing else.

It doesn't matter what your family or coworkers or boss thinks of you. It doesn't matter how you've been treated by others -- that's nothing to do with YOU, that's all about the (human) blindness of others.

You are infinitely worthy and loveable!

And when others can't see that it's only because they haven't realised that they are infinitely worthy and loveable. When people get tied down, in their minds, into one little frail animal body and one small human life, all kinds of such misconceptions arise!

But it's not the truth.

The truth is that you are eternal -- learning and growing and polishing yourself on challenge after challenge, life after life.

The soul that is truly you is infinitely worthy and Divine. The body and mind you think of as you are only a costume that put on for a while, and then point aside, to go home for dinner and a bath, a good rest, to get up and come play again.

So how do you as a mere mortal forgive yourself?

The same way you forgive anyone... With compassion for your human frailty: you really are doing our best with what you have. With perspective: understanding that this life is a playground and schoolroom, and not the life-or-death struggle it seems. With determination to not make the same mistake again.

With Bright Blessings,

Do you have all of your SUPPLIES?

In most Pagan traditions it is very important to purify or cleanse a space prior to beginning any sort of ritual. Although there are a different ways of doing this, how you do it will depend on the tradition you follow as well as what you feel comfortable with.

Usually, when ritually purifying an area, most do it deosil and spiraling inwards to the center. There are times when moving in a widdershins direction is appropriate, most notably for Banishing Ritual.


These methods are some examples of common ways to cleanse a space for ritual.

Smudging

Smudging uses smoke, which will carry negative energy away from the area. Traditionally White Sage is used, however, other dried herbs can be added, such as Cilantro, Cedar, Lavender and Mugwort. The herbs are bound with string into a bundle, which is commonly referred to as a “stick”.

When lighting the bundle, try to make it flame for a moment if possible, then blow the flame out. This will leave you with a smoldering, smoking herb bundle. Once you have achieved the smoldering bundle stage it is time to smudge the house.

Now you don’t take the bundle and rub it on the walls and other things in the room, which would make a mess and probably ruin a few things and maybe even start a nice fire. What you do is this. Hold the smoldering bundle in one hand or in a heatproof object, like a shell. With either a fan or your free hand you waft the smoke to the edges of the room, making sure to get it into the corners.

When you have finished smudging you can either snuff out the smoldering end of the bundle by setting it into some sand or by crushing the end. An alternative method is to douse it under a bit of water, making sure to let it dry completely before attempting to use it again.

Sweeping
By long tradition, the broom is associated with cleaning and purification. The broom can be either a special one used solely for ritual cleansing or even your household broom. Use a broom or besom going around the edges of the space, with your intent being to sweep negativity away as you go. Here's a good idea. Start and finish near a door--that way, negative energy is swept outside, rather quite literally.

Asperging
Asperging is the sprinkling with a liquid in order to effect spiritual and magical cleansing. Most people will associate Asperging with the Catholic Church, however the practice is also widely used by pagans for cleansing prior to rituals.

It can be accomplished in many ways. The simplest of these is to have a premixed liquid of your choice and bundle of fresh herbs that you can dip into the water. Then you take the herbs, dip them in the liquid and with a quick flick you throw the liquid off the herb and into area or onto the object to be cleansed. You don’t want or need to have a lot of liquid being thrown though. Just small droplets are perfect. Herbs that are prefect to use are Sage, Lavender, Vervain, Hyssop, Pine, Rue and Rosemary.

Another option that can be used quite effectively to cleanse a space is the use of incense. This can be either in cone form, stick, or powder and charcoal. The incense should be for working with cleaning, purification and even protection if you want to add that bit into the cleansing.

During your cleansing and purification of your space you can also include a little chant to augment the process. There are many to be found on the Internet as well as in books. You might even have one in mind already, in that case write it down so you will remember it for the next time you want to cleanse a room.

In addition to the above, I also ensure that the space is physically cleaned as well. I try to use a non-toxic homemade cleanser to do this. How you physically clean is of course up to you.

I would be remiss if I didn’t do a shameless plug for our online store where we carry many items that are perfect for what I have just talked about. Stop by Grove of the Ancients Pagan Marketplace today and order cleansing supplies.

Blessed Be!

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Want to learn witchcraft? Try this!

We've all had it happen. Someone has dribbled candle wax into the ceremonial cakes, or a sleeve has caught on fire because we got too close to a sacred flame. Fortunately, the universe has a sense of humor, so when ritual goes wrong, it's often just a small blip on the cosmic radar. However, every once in a while you encounter a situation in which things just don't go wrong, they go REALLY WRONG. As in, the sort of ritual where all you can focus on is which way you'll run if something explodes. Laura Patsouris over at Pantheon describes this very thing in her essay, When Ritual Goes Wrong, and touches on some really important points.

Of note, she points out that if you're leading the ritual, there is a certain degree of responsibility that comes with that role. If your ritual procedure is sloppy or half-baked, you're going to pass those bad habits on to the other people in attendance. Often, if you have people in the group who are new to Paganism in general, or who typically practice as solitaries, there's a good chance that they're going to think that what you're doing is par for the course. As a leader/HP/HPS you owe it to those in your circle to do your absolute best as the individual in charge of executing ritual.

Does this mean everything has to be perfect? No, of course not. But it does mean that there are certain standards you should try to adhere to. We owe it to the gods of our various traditions to be respectful of them, and of the sacred space, but we also owe it to ourselves.

OK, readers, I know you've got some doozies out there. Share your Worst Ritual Experience Ever in the Comments section!