Does Your Opening Song Captivate Your Congregation?

By Jon Nicol

I ran across an article that intrigued me on Disc Makers' site. It was written by Tom Jackson. He's a live music producer. And a Jesus-follower. And is successfully working within both the Christian and mainstream music markets. He knows his stuff.

The article's called Seven Ways to Captivate a Live Music Audience with Your First Song. Tom specifically gears it for the indie artist/band, specifically those who have yet to have a massive loyal following.

I'd like to spend several posts over the next few weeks looking at each of Tom's points as they relate to the opening song in worship. I think almost every one of his 7 ways is transferrable in some way to corporate worship setting.

Go ahead and read his article and enter into the conversation here as we look at each one. When it comes to expression and presence on the platform, we're bound to have some interesting discussions.

One thing Tom brings up before he gives the first way to captivate is the question of what's your relationship to your audience. Are you dating or married. He says this: "unless your name is Sting, Adele, or Pink…" you're what he calls "dating your audience." That is, the audience doesn't know you or your music. Thus the need to work hard to captivate with that first song.

In most of our church settings, we're thoroughly married. We see the same people sit in the same spot week after week. And as long as you have a manageable catalog of songs, they know most of the songs you're singing.

But here's the deal, in a lot of our churches we do a horrible job of engaging and captivating our people.* We're a little too much like the husband that tells his wife 10 years ago, "I love you. If that should change, well, I'll let you know."

So we could probably use a little re-wooing in that department.

I really believe most our people want to be invited in, engaged and captivated during worship - regardless of the style of music. Unfortunately, it could take some time to re-engage them. We've lulled them into worship comas through our fear of doing anything that would seem "performancey."

Will it be easy to reawaken them? No. And will it involve risk? Yep. Oh, and plan on being criticized. But I invite you to read this article and get in on this ongoing conversation with me others about captivating our congregations.

In our next post, we'll actually start diving into Tom's first point. Till then, let me know what you think. How do you purposely engage your congregation with the opening song? Or maybe you've got a worship-coma congregation. What do you think you need to do to wake them?

*You can make the argument that they need to be engaged with God presence and that's not our job. But as priests (and we ALL are priests...1 Peter 2:9), one of our jobs is to provide a meeting place between God and man - we create an environment that encourages worship. I believe that job requires us to have relational engagement with our congregation as we lead them to the throne.

Post graphic - Stock.xchng

January 16, 2013