Most people who know me well know
that I always lack in confidence when I do things upfront. When I first told my
mum that I would be in the worship team at church, she asked me if I was going
to play my guitar unplugged, so that no one would hear my mistakes that I made.
Truthfully, I would have loved to have done that, but I knew that the rest of
the band would not have allowed this to happen because they have the same
liability of making mistakes as myself.
On my very first day of being in
the church worship team, our worship pastor Matt made a mistake with lyrics
during two consecutive songs. As a band, we just kept going, and he did too,
after trying to find the humour in it. He was easily able to carry on with the song
and move on from the mistake.
At the end of worship, we all had
a gathering of prayer, where Matt thanked Jesus that he “Loves our worship,
mistakes and all”. He then admitted to it being embarrassing when everyone sees
your mistake at the front and that “It wasn’t the first time, and it won’t be
the last time” that something like this happens. Somehow, it was really
encouraging to hear that even the professionals have their flaws; they just know
how to recover easily.
Two days later during our worship
at the Christian Union, we had a completely disastrous situation. Twice during
our worship, my friend Simon’s keyboard decided to cut the power unexpectedly. We
had no idea how or why this happened, but it was very difficult as a band to
recover from. Simon, not knowing what to do, got to work on trying to turn the
keyboard back on, whilst myself, on guitar, and my friend Carolyn, on the
ukulele, tried to carry on, completely embarrassed that all eyes were on us as
we tried to recover from this situation. During the second incident, Simon’s
head was covering the only set of chords that we had between us. This happened
to occur as we approached the bridge, the most difficult chords of the song,
which meant that freestyling was impossible and we both had to stop completely
and attempt to sing unaccompanied until the keyboard power returned.
Fortunately, we were covered by Andrew Bailey on the cajon, who kept going for
us, and we were truly thankful for this.
The next day, I explained to Matt
of our disastrous situation at CU. He reminded me that mistakes are such a
common thing to make and his advice was to learn how to carry on as normal by
singing until the situation is solved because the audience still need to be led,
and they will always look to you, the worship leader, to do this.
I feel like the possibility of
making a mistake upfront is always the main thing that holds me from wanting to
lead worship in church at all. I have been given lots of support from Matt
recently about making mistakes as he seems to know exactly what to do in such
situations. His main advice to me this week was to always play “Wrong and
strong” and that if you just move on with the mistake, people rarely ever
notice. He confessed to me some of recent mistakes that he has made recently,
to reassure me that it is a common thing, that it happens to every worship
leader, and that if making a mistake during worship is the worst thing that can
happen, I really have nothing to worry about when leading worship.
There are still so many things
that I need to learn and experience now, before being left on my own to lead
worship at church. Although the idea still does completely terrify me, I am
almost certain that it will happen one day; I now need to learn how to come to
terms with this reality and let Matt guide me in every way!
Lois
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