WorshipTeamCoach

WorshipTeamCoach.com started with an ugly, homemade website and a couple guitar workshops. Jon soon discovered blogging and began using that platform to teach, encourage and even entertain (though not always intentionally) worship pastors, volunteer leaders and musicians.

There are four development areas that WorshipTeamCoach focuses on:

Spiritual Growth
Let's face it, our musician egos like to climb back on the throne more often than we care to admit. So with Spiritual Growth, the main focus is the heart of the worshiper - there not only needs to be a knowledge of true Biblical worship, but an initimacy with Jesus Christ that fuels our ministry.

Relational Health
Team development is hard enough, but we're dealing with musicians and techs (Mars & Venus? More like Tatooine & Hoth - sorry, Star Wars reference). Mix them together and we quickly see group dynamics. And probably more than a little group dysfunctions. When it comes to relational health and team building, WorshipTeamCoach not about trust-falls and touchy-feely stuff. But instead we focus on how each person is wired - his/her personality type and strengths. Then we tackle how all those different personalities and strengths fit together. In the midst of this, we stress the Biblical concepts of mutual submission and love one another as Christ has love you.

Musical Depth
Depth is an intentional word. Worship and music ministries need to get musically deep in three ways.

1. First, through each individual musician's growth and maturity as a musician
2. Second, it's one thing for people to play their instrument well, but playing and singing together is another matter. Group musicianship needs to be developed.
3. And finally, the size of the team should be growing. Leaders need to develop their bench (building for the future), and prepare to release and send out their players to plant churches and even help other churches that need musicians.This is about building and advancing the Kingdom of God, not the kingdom of our worship team.

Leadership & Systems
Every team, big or small, needs leaders. And those leaders need systems to help manage and grow the organization known as the worship team. WorshipTeamCoach helps a church - small, medium or large - grow their leadership, and helps the leader(s) to develop systems to grow the team. Most of this is done through coaching and writing (articles/ebooks), but also through workshops like Small Church/Big Worship.

Worship service planning and leading is also part of this. While every church is different, several systems and principles apply across the board. For example: no church wants clumsy hand-offs from one worship element to the next. Segues are a practice that differ in style and approach, but the principle of good transitions is universal.

Another example: congregations and worship teams have a finite ability to learn and retain songs. So every church needs system of managing their catalog of congregational worship songs, especially with the out-pour of great (and not-so-great) worship songs in the past few years. Every church is different when it comes to number of songs, styles of songs, etc., but the principle of a limited repertoire is crucial for every church. We need a system to manage everything from the brand new song your church writes to the classic Tomlin chorus/Crosby hymn your church loves, to the "I never want to hear that song again!" song. We need system to create intentional use (and disuse) of your songs.

So those are just a couple examples. But WorshipTeamCoach offers, and continues to develop, systems that free you to do the part of the ministry you really love, and leadership training to help you help others to do the ministry they love.