“Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Worship Band Builder podcast, where we are working with you to lay the foundation for skillful worship! I’m Eric Roberts. I’m joined by my co-host, Emily Roberts.”
PROMO:
You hear us say every week that we are working with you to lay the foundations for excellence in worship. Of course, we are here every week discussing the common concerns of worship leaders and teams, but we also offer educational resources. Worshipbandbuilder.com has online courses with streaming video, lessons, charts, ebooks, and webinars. This straightforward, no nonsense curriculum is designed to help anyone become proficient in Guitar Voice Piano Drums Bass Music Theory and even Sound and Audio Tech.
No previous experience is necessary. All you need to begin is just the desire to play or serve your church. To find more information, go to worshipbandbuilder.com.
Use CODE PODCAST to save 10% on your first order at http://www.worshipbandbuilder.com
SUBTITLE: How training from within can help your church, regardless of size.
How to implement in a small church
Start with ONE
Invite people to come together for ministry
How training can help a medium sized church (150-500)
Scale
Rotate Teams
Train More People
Why training is necessary, even in a large church
Multi-campus
Stage gets larger, need audition process
Setting and keeping standards
Lower stress on staff
Full Episode Transcript:
Eric :
Hello and welcome to episode number four of the worship band podcast where we are working with you to lay the foundation for skillful worship. I'm Eric Roberts and I'm here with my lovely cohost, Emily Rob.
Emily:
Oh, thank you Eric. That was very nice. You hear us say every week that we are working with you to lay the foundations for excellence in worship. Of course, we're here every week discussing the common concerns of worship leaders and teams, but we also offer educational resources.
Eric :
Yeah, it's at worshipbandbuilder.com And there we have online courses with streaming video lessons, charts, eBooks and webinars. It's straightforward. It's no nonsense curriculum and it's designed to help anyone become proficient in, what is it, Emily?
Emily:
Guitar voice, piano, drums, bass music theory, and even sound and audio tech. You don't have to have any experience. All you need is just the desire to play or even just to serve your church, to find more information. Go to worshipbandbuilder.com
Eric :
And today we're talking about that topic, how to train from within and how that can help your church. Regardless.
Emily:
Our title today is help. Wanted. So let's establish first, what does it mean to train from within?
Eric :
Yeah, training from within is really the heart of the worship band builder product line and it is, it is not, Hey, we need some musicians. Let's put out a Craigslist ad or go out on Facebook and try to get a bunch of people that aren't from our church to come in and basically take over our worship team.
Emily:
Well that seems like the obvious solution though. If you look out in your congregation and say, Nope, no musicians
Eric :
Right now, I guess if you have no musicians and you know that nobody out there plays me music and if you follow all of our steps and then you're just like, we've got nothing, we don't have anybody here at all, then you could probably go find some people. I mean evangelize. Some people get some people saved and get them up there, you know? But what I think is that the, the next worship leader is in your church Pew. The next a drummer is already in your church or maybe as a family member of somebody in your church. We spent a lot of years touring different small churches, filling in for people and becoming like little semi parts of their church, but it wasn't our church and what we're trying to help small churches do is train people from their congregation to express their ministry and their worship and their gifting. I need you to go up in front of the church and say, Hey, we don't have a worship leader, but we have training materials, we have training programs and anybody out there who feels God calling or pulling your heart to do worship ministry, come forward and talk to us and then you can put them through a foundations program. They can become your next worship leader.
Emily:
I think almost everybody has gotten music within them somewhere. I can't tell you how many times I have heard people say to me, Oh, I just wish that I knew how to play guitar, or I wish I wouldn't have quit piano lessons when my parents tried to take me. Or even I've heard celebrity actors and actresses when they are asked if you couldn't act, what would you do? If there was anything else in the world, what would your choice be? And more than one of them, I have heard say they would be a musician. So there is music within people that are not musicians. There is a desire there and it's not that hard to learn, especially the way that we have designed the foundations. It's geared to make playing, to make learning to play efficient and effective. You'll be able to play a song quickly and sound good doing it.
Eric :
Yeah, I mean it's really literally just learning for chords and then popping open a songbook and saying, I can do this. There's a lot of people in your church right now. Even a small church that have guitars under the bed who had played the guitar when they were kids who know there are a lot of people. In fact I was, I was with a guy the other day and he was like, Oh, I know this chord that Courtney started showing in the air. What chords? He knew he doesn't, he's not a musician, but he, he played guitar in like high school and somebody showed him some chords. Those are the kinds of people who are just waiting for you to say, Hey, would you like to come through our training program? Would you like to go through our foundations for guitar because we really need, we have a need.
Eric :
You know when you voice a need in a church, a lot of people want to help. They want to help. They're looking for a place to help. They're looking for a place to belong and, and that's what you have to do. You have to invite people from your church to come into ministry and then you have to be able to have training. We have provided training, we have training that works so well. We have training that has been proven over and over again to get people from just a basically playing a few chords to leading worship. So to implement this in a small church, it's as simple as saying, we have a need and we need you to come up and start training through the foundations training.
Emily:
The foundations programs that we have online are fairly new. And one of the things that I'm really excited about is that they are available to everyone in your entire church.
Eric :
That's right. And it's, that's, that's key to this whole thing working. Because let's say you have a church of a hundred people or 75 people, you, you buy one bundle and everyone in your church that has any small desire can go ahead and sign up and take, they can just log in the and have a, have a, have an account right there. They can start learning at home and then they can come in a couple months later and say, Hey, I learned a couple chords. I'm, I think I could probably lead worship for the youth group or for these things. So it's really easy to get going. It's really affordable. Even a small church to provide music lessons. It's kind of unheard of. Mostly how we kind of created this. And then people are like the whole church. Yeah. Everybody in your church can login. So let's say you're a church of a medium sized church.
Eric :
I want to, we're going to talk through medium and then large how it really works. How you could use it in a medium sized church. You have a cool worship band already. You kinda got some people, you're, you know, you're noticing that you are playing a lot of the same people on stage every week, but you're, you're doing it. You've kinda got to a certain point. And one thing that we want to let you know is those guys can be burned out. Those girls can be burned out. And we want you to take that step to say, Hey, we're going to get even more people trained so that we can start rotating bands. So we have a whole idea of rotating bands and having multiple people. It's really dangerous as a medium sized church to have the same four or five guys on stage all year. There's a lot of danger in that and you've got to move past that and scale to training and rotating teams.
Emily:
If you're a paid or even volunteer worship leader, you know how difficult the requirement to be at your church every weekend can be not because you don't want to be there, but because sometimes a weekend requires you to be away from your church. You've got family out of town, or maybe you want to go on a vacation with your kids. It's hard to be there every single week. So when you're relying on your soul guitar player to be there every single week, you can relate to that kind of pressure, but educating more people and bringing in more musicians will alleviate that,
Eric :
Right? Yeah. You also, you create all kinds of psychological problems in musicians. I've seen it happen when you're basically the only electric guitar player and you play every single week and then you leave your stuff there every week and pretty soon you think in your mind that you're, that you're it. You're the guy, you're, everybody needs you and you're just some amazing thing and you sorta take this weird, unhealthy ownership over the band and this is not a great thing for volunteers and a medium growing church. You need more people. You need those people have a break. They got a family. Every time they play, they show up early, they leave their kids at home, their wife sits alone. There's all these things and that's ministry, but if you're going to burn these guys out, it's not going to last. So a foundations training and a medium sized church is perfect for scaling, perfect for training, enough people to rotate and just more people involved in ministry.
Eric :
It's key to growing your church as well because when you get somebody involved in the worship team, they start buying into the church more. They start, I want, I need to be there every week. I'm a part of this. So you have to open that up for those people. Hey, what if you're in a really, really big church, like over 1,002, three, 4,000 and you're getting ready to launch three campuses and this year you have a dream of doing even more campuses, you got a much deeper problem. It's just the same similar problem that everybody has. It's just on a bigger scale.
Emily:
So multiple campuses means you need more people.
Eric :
Yeah. So now every Sunday you need four drummers because you have four campuses and every stage has a drummer. And that's how foundations can help you by training all these people. The other thing that we are working on and that we do is audition assistance. So in a big church, as the stage gets bigger, the stakes get higher in the musician level usually gets higher. So it's like you gotta be, now we're playing the tracks, we're playing to click tracks. You've got to be up here at this level. It's much higher than maybe a small church or youth band or just a small little church. It's not using tracks and doing basic acoustic worship, so things start to move in a different direction and the worship leaders I've talked to, and this is why we created our audition assistants, you can offer training to everyone in your church, all the campuses, and you can offer them to basically pre audition with our team before they even get to you so they know I'm good enough to do this.
Eric :
I'm at a level now where I can go into the multi-campus and I can play and I can be in ministry. The whole purpose of this is to, is to widen this out for you to where people can get on the worship team. There's a way for them to do it. It's not super scary. They don't have to go to American idol style auditions. They can actually go to an audition, they can do an online test. They can be like, yeah, I'm pretty good. I'm ready. And you can use this as a recruiting tool for all of your campuses.
Emily:
This is one of our newest products. And it is an exciting one to me because it is a kinder, gentler way to audition. It helps a person who has a heart to serve, to prepare for that audition. And we even customize these auditions to fit your church. So if you've got specific songs that you expect them to play we designed the audition to accommodate that so your volunteer can go through our program and practice and get feedback. And then when we tell them that they're ready, then they come to you. So it spares you as the worship leader, those awkward moments where you have to say, I'm sorry, but you're not prepared to be on our stage just yet.
Eric :
Yeah. A lot of the guys I talked to will say like, they have people audition and they're like nowhere, even near ready. Like they're not even sure what they were thinking, but they just have to go through these awkward auditions. And then there's a volume issue and it takes up a lot of staff time. So there's a lot of things that you know, just just having them go through our program and go through a pre audition and to where we go, yes, you've reached a certain level, we'll save you time. It also will save you from those, those, those, it's really hard because they're people and they're in your church, so it's just not a great, great thing when you, when you're, when you start these auditions, but we can make it a really great experience for everybody through the worship band builder audition,
Emily:
So small church, medium church, large church. The training has to be constant and continual. Yes. Intentional. Intentional. That's what, that's what it was. You said?
Eric :
Yes, intentional and consistent because I don't even know what I said anymore. Consistently and intentionally. That's what it is. It's consistently, you're consistently training people and you're doing it intentionally all the time. If you don't do that, you're going to end up with not enough musicians on your church stage and we don't want that to happen. It doesn't have to happen. The tools are there and so that's going to be all for today's podcast. If you have any questions, you know you can get one on one help from us right there@worshipbandbuilder.com click on get help because you're not alone. You don't have to be alone. You don't have to do this alone. Even though sometimes, especially you guys full time guys, they're the church kind of empty all week and you're sitting there, you feeling kind of lonely. Just give me a call, give me a chat. We'll talk about how we can help you get to the next level to kind of raise that level of your band, get more people, or just talk about what the biggest problem is you're having right now in building excellence in your worship team. So thank you for listening. This is Eric and Emily for the worship band leader podcast. We'll see on the next episode.