Have you ever been to a baseball game or carnival and bought cotton candy? Go ahead and picture it in your head. A giant, delicious, pink cloud just waiting to be consumed by you. After you pay $10 for the delicious treat you tear off a huge piece and your mouth dances with joy at the sugary goodness! But then it happens... That giant piece of fluff dissolves into a small amount of sugar leaving you with nothing but a sugar rush and an empty stomach. What a disappointment!
So often worship sets are built like this: big band sound, little theological doctrine. The music sounds wonderful, the musicians are very skilled in their music, but there's no substance to the lyrics of the songs. It starts out big and glorious, but leaves you wanting. It hypes you up, but leaves you empty. That sounds a lot like an experience with cotton candy.
The responsibility of your position as the worship leader isn't to lead people from the "Top 10" Christian radio hits. That's just laziness. The responsibility of your position is to find or write songs that are packed with sound doctrine that glorify God. It takes time and effort to find and learn these songs. Don't forget to weed the cotton candy songs out of your music folder.
Leading worship isn't about making an experience for people to marvel at. Leading worship is about making it easy for people to commune with God and marvel Him. Recognition of yourself and your band shouldn't be on the list. In fact, if it's on your list, erase it. Otherwise you are continually being a hypocrite (Gasp! How dare he say that!). Think about it, you are standing up in front of everybody saying "Let's worship God together and look at how well I do it!" This cheats the people, yourself, and it steals glory from God.
Lyrics are very important when it comes to worship songs. You may find a song with a great chorus but the verses are of low quality, or you may find a song with a great bridge but the rest of the song is left on the side of the bridge where the grass isn't so green (or even worse, under the bridge with the troll). This is not a matter of "What songs (or parts of songs) we can use to get a momentary reaction out of the people", but rather "what songs can we can use to worship God in a greater way."
Lead people in songs that leave them satisfied in God, in who He is, and what He's done. Compose your list with songs that give God all the glorification and affection due to His name. Don't try to use the fillers of guitar leads or drum solos to make worship more entertaining to the people. Don't use the fillers of crazy lights and fog machines to replace the beauty of God in the lyrics. Don't use the fillers of poor, barely-Scriptural lyrics to raise emotion and response out of people. Isn't God able to draw His people into worship without our help?
Again, worship is based off of knowledge. Don't feed the people of God cotton candy theology and songs to get a momentary "spiritual sugar rush" response. Feed them songs that agree with the meat and milk of Scripture so they can grow up strong in the faith and worship all the day long.
"God’s glory is a wondrous thing,
Most strange in all its ways;
And, of all things on earth, least like
What men agree to praise."
-Frederick W. Faber
Blessings,
Nick
