Spotlight On Music Ministry

As I mentioned last week, I was educated for music ministry, in a way, through a very unusual occupation. I was a D.J. for a company that provided music for wedding receptions, parties, and fashion shows. I even did a bar mitzvah once.
Here I learned how to work with sound systems, how to lead a crowd, and most importantly, how to involve and motivate all age groups.
My boss taught me that you have to use songs from ALL eras in order to bring the families together on the dance floor. So it was typical for me to segue from Glenn Miller into one of the current songs of the day. You'd usually need to get things from the 50's, 60's and 70's as well. This usually resulted in everyone from the kids to the grandparents staying involved in the celebration.
I was convicted by what I saw at many of these wedding receptions. There was more rejoicing, celebrating and unity there than is usually found in many of our churches. This lead to my Thanksgiving philosophy.
At Thanksgiving, the ideal seating arrangement is not to have the older folks in one room, the kids in another room, the young people in another room, and the middle-aged in yet another room. The whole idea is to be TOGETHER!
This being said, you also need to bloom where you're planted. You probably wouldn't want to lead a lot of wordy Vineyard songs in a house church in China. If your church is made up mostly of young people, you're probably not going to be singing a lot of Gaither songs. For Faith Christian Assembly's 10:30 service, drawing mostly from Leisure World, we won't be doing any David Crowder songs.
However, for our 8:30 service, and wherever you have a fairly good mixture of age groups, you're going to need to learn how to navigate around to different styles of music. Variety is the spice of life. The young need the old and the old need the young. There is something we can learn from each other's expressions of worship.
Once I heard a speaker give a great talk on worship. He ended it by saying, "Now I'd like us to worship." He put on an old tape -and along came some very old songs. The sound quality was terrible and the songs weren't much better. However, I felt God whisper into my spirit, "Focus on what the words are saying." So I started to do just that. It made all the difference and I was able to put my heart into it. We're ripping ourselves -and God -off when we refuse to worship Him because of the style of the music. More on this next week.