I get asked about volume more than almost anything else, and it shows up in two shapes. Either it is too loud and somebody wants it turned down, or somebody upstream wants it louder and the person asking me does not know how to feel about that.

The one I got recently was the second kind, and it came with one extra detail. The pastor likes it loud so he does not have to hear the bad singers. And then this, from the person asking: it’s amazing when we do one hymn per service, that’s when you hear everyone singing.

Both halves of that are worth taking seriously, and the second half turns out to be the answer to the first.

Start where I always start. What works for my church may not work for your church. People could say just make sure it’s 92 decibels, but that could feel crazy loud and harsh, or way too quiet, and it totally depends on so many factors. Again, no black and white.

But there are a couple of things worth knowing before you go have that conversation. One of them will keep you from walking in with something that falls apart the second he checks it.

The number you are about to find is not real

If you go looking for ammunition, within four clicks you will find a claim that research shows the optimum level for congregational singing is 81 decibels, and that above 90 participation drops off dramatically. It gets attributed to a music professor at Moody. It is in worship magazines. It is on dozens of blogs.

I could not find the study. No paper, no dissertation, no dataset. And nobody who repeats the number ever says whether it is A-weighted or C-weighted or averaged over what, which is the part that decides whether a number means anything at all.

If you can find some data for it and not just blogs repeating themselves. Please send it my way.

Do not walk into your pastor’s office with that. If he looks it up while you are sitting there, you have lost the room for a year. Same goes for OSHA, which specifically exempts participation in religious services and does not cover volunteers at all.

What is real is smaller and more useful. The thing you are describing has a name. Self-to-other ratio, the difference between how loud you hear your own voice and how loud you hear everybody else’s. In working choirs it sits around four decibels, and the spread between what different people find comfortable covers about sixteen, which is why no single house volume ever makes a whole room happy.

And past that, any given room will have a widely different “sweet spot.” One church might run 92 decibels but the mix is way top heavy so it hurts and another might be at 110 and it feels and sounds great.

That changes the question, and the new question is better. “It’s too loud” is a preference, and your pastor gets to have a different one. “Can somebody in the fourth row hear their own voice” is a thing you can actually go find out.

You already know which song they sing

Go back to that second half. It’s amazing when we do one hymn per service, that’s when you hear everyone singing.

That is not the fader. That is the song.

Let me put the professor hat on for a second. I’m going to write on this too, every so often an argument gets kicked up on social media that “there’s no such thing as a congregational key”….there is and here’s a brief touch:

There is a word called tessitura, which is just a vocal range. Everybody has one. There is a low note for you and a high note for you and you live in between. There is a communal version too, a congregational tessitura, and it runs roughly from middle C to the C above it. A little lower or higher and you are still mostly fine. Inside that range about 95 percent of any group of people can sing every note. So, is there a “congregational range?”

Again, if you have any data to send my way that pushes back, I want to read it! Drop it in the comments below!

Yep.

Moving on.

Now look at what happened to the songs. A music theory professor named Nathan Burggraff ran the numbers on 474 congregational songs off the CCLI charts. Before 1990, about 90 percent of melodies sat inside that overlap. After 2000, more than half go outside it, and roughly a third cannot be transposed back in at all, because the melodies themselves got wider than the range. There is no key that fixes that. Rhythm went the same direction. Before 1970 fewer than 7 percent of songs had any syncopation in them. Post-2000 songs average at least 25 syncopated moments each.

Hymns sit right around G above middle C to the A above that, with almost nothing syncopated in them.

So your church is not singing the hymn because the hymn is holy and the new song is not. They are singing the hymn because it is the one song in the service that is inside their range, on the beat, and already in their mouth. Which matters more than it sounds like, because the songs they can actually sing are the ones that end up doing the teaching. I’ve certainly been guilty of introducing a brand new song to my church and right before we ever sing a word I say “sing it out!” We would do wll to be mindful of how much our church knows the songs we’re choosing.

Which means the strongest move you have does not require winning anything. You can just pick a different song, or the same song a step and a half lower. I have never felt like there was any one song so important that I would sacrifice congregational accessibility just because I wanted the song. I will pick something else. That is the whole argument I made in You’re Not Choosing Songs. You’re Choosing What Will Hold People in the Dark.

I just finished being a part of the Cultivate Conference and we spent some time going after the usual modern song suspects. Is God’s love Reckless? Sloppy Wet? Unforseen? Did he want heaven without us?

I didn’t give an answer for what was right or wrong but I highlighted that it might just be better to grab another song if it means heartier participation.

By the way, I made a mug and shirt about Jesus leaving the 99 if you happen to want it.

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Loud singing is not the scoreboard

We connect worship with singing, but worship is more than singing. So I am okay if there are people in the room not singing, because singing is not the only way we know somebody is worshiping. If we start judging by very loud singing equals room is very into worship, you can manipulate the heck out of that, and then you spend your life chasing it.

I have done the chasing. I used to walk out of worship conferences thinking, oh my gosh, what an amazing manifestation of the Holy Spirit in there. And it was like, no. I just got together with hundreds of people who are trained on how to sing. So they actually sang. And now I am all up in the emotion of that.

So when a pastor says he wants it loud so he does not have to hear the bad singers, the part I would notice is not the volume. It is that somebody has decided the room is a problem to be covered up.

Because the Bible says minister to one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. We are going to sing, and we are going to hear each other sing, and we are going to be encouraged by that. I have watched somebody raise their hands for the first time because the person next to them did. Cover that up and you have not changed the mix, you have removed the mechanism.

You pop your ear out on those quiet moments during a song and you want to hear the room sing. There is a spiritual element to that, and I think we short circuit it sometimes.

How to actually have the conversation

The volume fight is not about the volume, the same way the hymns fight is not about hymns. Pick whatever your church is fighting about. A fog machine. How long the services are. There is a heart issue underneath it, and if you try to win on the surface you end up losing your church, your job, or your team.

This is also mostly a question of whether you and your pastor are working off the same page in the first place, which is its own conversation and usually the one underneath this one.

So, practically.

Do not defend the mix. I have gotten myself into that too many times, where somebody comes at me and I start explaining why my choices were right. Name what is going on underneath instead. When people came after me about hymns, the line that worked was, “It sounds like you’re worried that the church you helped build is becoming something you don’t recognize. Tell me about that.” Then watch how they respond. Everybody wants to be seen. They want to know they belong and that they matter.

Your version might be, “It sounds like you’re worried the room sounds thin and people will notice.” Then let him talk.

Do not go in citing me. Please. Do not tell him the Church Collective guy said your volume is wrong. Borrowing somebody else’s authority in a room where you already have your own is the fastest way to lose.

Do not survey the whole church either. You will get every opinion all over the place, and there are people who will always think it is too loud. I keep little slips I give to people I know and trust, and I still do that. How loud was it. What was the mix like. A handful of people whose judgment you respect will tell you more than a congregational poll ever will.

And check your capital before you spend it. A track record of not fumbling is what buys you room to push back on your leadership. If the set was silly and the lyrics were messed up and the lighting never got programmed, “reconsider the volume” lands differently. It is a long game and you cannot solve it this week.

Most of the time when you have a rational conversation with your pastor, they want to hear that from you. Again, no black and white. But most of the time.

Why I am not worried about you

I have been on your side of this and I have been on his.

When I started I did not have the authority to set the volume. My senior pastor was an older guy, part of the seniors ministry, and he was tired of his friends telling him it was too loud. So he just kept turning us down. Every week. Down and down and down, until we got to an absurdly low level. That is one worth drawing some lines over early, because it can go way too far.

But this is the one I think about more.

When I started I had long hair and an electric guitar, and I stood for everything the older people did not like. There was a woman named Betty who would stand up in the middle of the room during the service and announce, after a song ended, that it was too loud. Making a point. She was a hater.

I won her over. Not on volume. We never saw eye to eye on the volume. I built a relationship with her, because I took to heart that as far as it depends on me I would live at peace with everybody. We had a cancer scare with my oldest when he was three. He is fine, he is 19 now. Betty was the strongest prayer warrior we had.

There was another guy who hated our sound and stayed out of the service until the music was over. I had a great relationship with him. He would find me afterward and say, man, I just can’t do it. I did not win him over on that topic, but I won him over as a person.

Anybody I ended up in conflict with over my years of ministry has ended up being a great ministry friend….well, most anybody. The ones I really put the effort into getting to know as people. It does not solve every problem, and there is stuff you cannot get around, but forging a real relationship is huge.

Twenty-five years in, the fights about the volume at the church do not really matter that much. That is not me telling you your ears are wrong. Your ears are probably right. It is me telling you that the version where you win the argument and he complies is worse for you than the version where you put one singable song in the set and sit down with him about what he is actually worried about.

So go find out what he is protecting. And in the meantime, give them one song they can actually sing, and let him hear what that sounds like.

If you want to go further on the song half of this, What Your Setlist Is Teaching Your Church walks through it properly and has the setlist audit worksheet attached.

In your corner,

Dr. Ryan

Twenty years at one church. Intern to executive pastor. And if you asked me for my testimony during most of it, I would have gotten quiet, because I did not have a story. Nothing happened to me. Nobody sold me. Nothing burned down. I just kept showing up.

The hymn with no story in it

This week I put out a documentary about “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” and I want to tell you why it is the one I could not put down.

Every other hymn story I have told has a catastrophe in it. Four daughters at the bottom of the Atlantic. A slave ship. A famine and a war and a man scratching a verse onto scrap paper in a doorway. That is the shape we expect. Something devastates you, God meets you in it, a song comes out.

This one has nothing.

Thomas Chisholm was a farm kid from a Kentucky log cabin who never went to high school. He got ordained at thirty-six, which was late, and he lasted exactly one year in ministry before his health gave out. The door closed. It did not reopen. He spent the next fifty years selling life insurance at a desk in Vineland, New Jersey, and he wrote something like twelve hundred poems in the margins of that. Most of them nobody read. Most were never set to a tune. He mailed a batch of them to a musician friend in Kansas the way you would mail anything you did not expect much from.

And when people asked him what happened, what the story behind the song was, he told them nothing did. There was no rescue. There was no wreck. He said it was just the faithfulness of God, morning by morning, over a long and unremarkable life.

The most famous line about God’s faithfulness in the English language was written by a man who, by our scoring, had no testimony at all.

The part that stopped me

Here is where it gets strange, and this is the thing that made me want to build the whole project.

The hymn has no tragedy in it. The verse it is built on has one of the worst tragedies in the Bible.

“Great is thy faithfulness” is not Chisholm’s phrase. He lifted it, almost word for word, out of Lamentations. That book is a funeral. It is written in the smoke of a burned city, by someone standing in the rubble of everything he thought God had promised to protect. Bodies in the street. The temple gone. And in the middle of it, in the exact center of the most devastated book in your Bible, the man writes that God’s mercies are new every morning and great is his faithfulness.

Sit with what that means. The line was not born out of a rescue. Nobody got rescued. The city stayed burned. The line was born out of a man in the ashes noticing that the sun came up anyway.

So the calmest song in your hymnal is quoting the most devastated book you own. And a life insurance salesman with no story to tell picked it up and said, yes, that. That is my life too.

Both men were saying the same thing. Not “look what God did for me.” Something quieter and much harder. “Look what God does every single morning, whether or not anything else is going right.”

What we accidentally taught the room

I think we have done something to our people, and I do not think any of us meant it.

We built worship out of the dramatic testimony. The addict who got free. The marriage that came back from the dead. The diagnosis that reversed. We hold those up, and we should, they are true and they are wonderful. But we hold up only those. And week after week, the person in the fourth row is doing arithmetic. Job is fine. Marriage is fine. Faith has never been spectacularly tested. Nothing has ever burned down.

And they conclude, quietly, without ever saying it to anyone, that their life is not evidence of anything. They have no story. They are a spectator at everyone else’s rescue.

That is us. We taught them that. We taught them that God’s faithfulness is only visible in wreckage, and so they cannot see it, because there is no wreckage, and so they assume it is not there.

Chisholm is the correction, and he is the correction precisely because his life was boring. He scored God’s faithfulness by the sunrise instead of the rescue. He counted the ordinary morning as evidence. And by that scoring, the most unremarkable person in your congregation is standing on a stack of evidence a mile high. So are you.

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Twelve hundred poems nobody read

I do a thing that is going to sound unrelated, and it is not.

I am fully addicted to my phone, I will say that up front. So I journal, on paper, without it. And I will write something down and it will feel silly. Small. Not worth the ink. Then two weeks later I will be thumbing back through and stop, because I wrote down exactly what I needed that day and did not know it at the time.

That is the whole method. That is what twelve hundred poems in the margin of an insurance desk actually is. It is a man keeping a record of ordinary mornings, most of which meant nothing on the day he wrote them, and one of which turned out to be the thing the whole church needed. He could not tell which was which. He was not supposed to be able to. He just kept noticing and writing it down.

You cannot feel your ordinary Tuesday. You can only read it back later.

Which is what I missed for twenty years. Somewhere in there, I stopped chasing the pastor title. I quit trying to get licensed and started just trying to care for people, and about six months later the church licensed me. And what I understand now, that I could not have told you then, is that by the time I became a pastor I already was one. It happened in the hallway. The hallway was not the hallway. The waiting was the thing. I was living the answer while I was still asking the question, and I could not see it because I was looking up the ladder for a story to happen to me.

There were five or six moments in those twenty years where I would have felt entirely justified walking out. The door never opened. I used to read that as God being slow. I think now it was closer to what happened to Chisholm. One year in ministry and then a door that shut, and fifty years at a desk, and the ordinary faithfulness of God morning by morning, which turned out to be the only thing he had and the only thing any of us actually needs.

Sunday

So this Sunday you are going to stand in front of a room mostly full of people who do not have a story.

They have a job and a commute and a kid who will not sleep and a faith that has never been on fire and has also never gone out. They are going to sing about faithfulness and privately assume the song is about somebody else, somebody with a real testimony, and they are going to go home and feel like a spectator again.

You could hand them Chisholm instead. Not as a fact from a documentary. As a scoring change. Tell them the man who wrote the biggest faithfulness song in the hymnal had nothing happen to him for fifty years and considered himself surrounded by evidence. Tell them the verse underneath it was written by a man in a burned city who was not rescued either and who still watched the sun come up and called it mercy. Tell them the sunrise counts.

And then let yourself off the same hook, in the car, when the building is empty.

Nothing ever happened to me either. Twenty years, one church, no wreck. I thought that meant I did not have a story. It turns out I just had a long one, made out of mornings, and I was too busy waiting for it to start to notice it was already most of the way over.

New mercies. Every one of them. Most of them small enough to miss.

— Dr. Ryan

I remember standing there thinking, this is what it’s supposed to feel like.

I was wrong about that, and it took me years to figure out how.

The buses come home this week

The buses come home this week. Maybe yours already did. Somewhere in your church right now there is a fifteen-year-old who met God at camp on Thursday night, and by this Sunday she is going to stand in your service and feel the gap. Same God. Same songs, maybe. And it will not feel like Thursday night.

Here is the question she is going to ask, out loud or not: what’s wrong with this church?

And here is the question you are going to ask, because I asked it for years: what’s wrong with me?

Neither question is fair, because both of them assume the camp version was the real one and Sunday is the diluted copy. I want to push on that assumption, because I think it quietly runs more worship ministries than we admit.

Camp is not a higher dose of God

Camp is not a higher dose of God.

Camp is a week with the interference removed. No alarm clocks, no group chats, no jobs, no scrolling at midnight. Take an ordinary teenager, take away every competing voice for four days, surround them with six hundred peers singing the same songs, and of course the presence of God feels louder. Not because God showed up to camp more than He shows up on Hickory Boulevard. Because for one week, nothing else did.

That’s not revival. That’s subtraction.

And subtraction is a gift. I am not throwing rocks at camp. Some of the most important moments of my life and probably yours happened at a camp, a retreat, a conference. God uses concentrated seasons. He built a few into Israel’s calendar Himself.

The problem is not the mountain. The problem is what we decide the mountain means.

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Peter wanted to build shelters too

Peter had this exact problem. Jesus takes him up a mountain, and for one moment the veil pulls back. Moses and Elijah. Glory you can see. And Peter’s immediate instinct is the most human sentence in the Gospels: it is good for us to be here, let us build three shelters.

Let’s stay. Let’s make this permanent. Let’s build infrastructure for the high.

And Jesus just walks him back down the mountain. The very next scene is a father begging help for his son while the rest of the disciples argue with a crowd. From glory straight back into ordinary, difficult, unglamorous ministry. Because the mountain was never the assignment. The mountain was fuel for the assignment.

Every July, worship leaders across the country get handed a bus full of Peters, all of them wanting to build shelters. And too many of us respond by trying to become the shelter. More haze, bigger moments, one more key change, chasing Thursday night on a Sunday morning budget with a volunteer team that got four hours of sleep because life exists.

That’s not shepherding. That’s trying to out-produce a week God never asked you to compete with.

The decision takes a night. The becoming takes fifty-one weeks.

Here is what I have come to believe instead.

Camp is where a fifteen-year-old decides to follow Jesus. Sunday is where she becomes someone who still follows Him at forty-five. The decision takes a night. The becoming takes the other fifty-one weeks a year, most of which will feel like nothing is happening at all.

Formation has always worked this way. We come to believe what we sing, and not because any single Sunday of singing it felt powerful. Because we sang it three hundred times, in seasons when we meant it and seasons when we were just moving our mouths, until the truth wore a groove. Your church’s real theology lives in the bridges they repeat, not the statements they signed. Repetition is not the enemy of encounter. Repetition is how encounter becomes character.

Which means the unspectacular Sunday is not a failed camp night.

The unspectacular Sunday is the actual instrument of formation. It is the ordinary meal, and nobody gets strong on feast days alone.

Pastor the descent

So no, you are not supposed to recreate camp, and the pressure you feel to do it is a comparison that was rigged from the start. You are comparing your congregation’s Tuesday-hearted Sunday to someone else’s peak, the same trap as measuring your room against a worship influencer’s reel. I wrote a whole piece after the Fourth of July about the Sunday that follows the spectacle, and camp season is the same drop with a longer fall.

What you can do is pastor the descent.

Tell your camp kids the truth before Sunday disappoints them. Something like: what you felt on Thursday was real, and it was a gift, and it is not the normal Christian life any more than a wedding day is a normal Tuesday of marriage. Nobody stays on the mountain. The point of the mountain is who you are in the valley afterward. So come Sunday, and come the Sunday after that, and let the slow thing happen that the fast thing started.

That one conversation will do more formation than any amount of production ever will.

And then release yourself from the job you were never given. You did not write the worship you lead, and you did not manufacture what happened at camp either. The same Spirit was responsible for both. He does not need you to be Thursday night. He needs you to be faithful with the ordinary, fifty-one times a year, while He does the becoming.

Sunday is where the fruit grows

This is the exact ground we are walking through on the podcast right now. The whole Romans 8 season is about the difference between what you produce and what is fulfilled in you, not by you, and the season opener is a fifteen-minute version of everything this letter is trying to say. New episode every weekday morning.

If you have a volunteer or a student pastor picking camp kids up from the parking lot this week, this might be worth forwarding to them.

I still love the camp version. I still get to lead in rooms like that sometimes, and I hope you do too. But I stopped grieving that Sunday isn’t camp, because Sunday was never supposed to be.

Sunday is where the fruit grows.

In your corner,

Dr. Ryan

This was before streaming, before YouTube, before you could hear anything you wanted the second you thought of it. So every few months I would mail-order a batch of worship CDs, and a box would show up at my house, and I would sit on the floor and pull them out one at a time and find the ones. That was my whole process. A box of other people’s songs, and me deciding which of them my church would get to sing that month.

I used to think that made me the worship leader. The picking. The curating. Standing up front with the in-ears in and the set I had built. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice the obvious thing about that box on my floor. I did not make one thing in it. Everything I handed my church on a Sunday, I had first been handed by somebody else.

Nobody wrote it

This week I put out a documentary about “How Great Thou Art.” I am not going to retell the whole thing here. The video has the room for that, and it earns it. But the fact that made me want to build the entire project is this. Nobody wrote it.

Not really. Not the way we mean when we put a name on a song. It started with a Swedish preacher who heard funeral bells across a bay, and it got carried across a hundred years and four languages by strangers who never met each other. A hunted little church in Sweden. A German nobleman. A Russian preacher who would die in exile. A missionary couple scratching verses onto a scrap of paper in a mountain doorway. Refugees in a camp after the war. Each one added a line out of the hardest season of their own life, then handed it down the line to someone they would never meet. By the time the whole world was singing it in a stadium in 1957, there was no single author left to credit. Just a long procession of people who received it, added their part, and passed it on.

That is not a fluke of one strange hymn. That is the job. It has always been the job.

But I wrote some of them

Now, maybe you are further along than box-of-CDs me. Maybe you actually write. Maybe the church you lead sings things that came out of you, in your own words, with your name on the file.

I got there too, eventually. And I have to tell you something about the songs I wrote. For years I thought every one of them was terrible, and I beat myself up over all of it, because I was measuring my little songs against Hillsong, against rooms with a budget and a choir and a machine behind them. That is its own problem, and I have written before about the arithmetic we run on ourselves in private. But that is not the part I want you to see here.

The part I want you to see is where those songs actually came from.

Every line I ever wrote came out of a decade of other people’s songs playing in my car. The chord moves were somebody else’s. The way I reached for a bridge was some worship leader I watched when I was nineteen and never saw again. The songs that lock in when your faith is young quietly become the shape of everything you make later. My “original” song was a confluence. It had a hundred tributaries running into it, and I had not dug a single one of them. I just happened to be the low place they all ran to that week.

So even if you wrote it, you did not write it alone. There is no such thing as a song that is only yours. There is only the particular way the whole river happened to pass through you on its way to somebody else.

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What that does to the room

Two things change when this actually lands on you, and the first one is about the people in front of you.

When you stop believing you are the source, you stop performing like one. You are not standing up there to generate something out of nothing. You are handing a room something that was handed to you, and your job is to hand it on cleanly. That takes a particular weight off of a Sunday. You are not the spring. You are a place in the river.

And this is the whole team, not just the person holding the acoustic. The volunteer pushing the lyrics up onto the screen is handing the room the same inherited gift, one slide at a time. The person at the soundboard is carrying it too. They were there before the room filled and they will be there after it empties, and they are as much a part of the handing-on as anyone with a microphone. None of you made the water. All of you are carrying it to people who are thirsty.

What that does to you

But there is a second thing, and it is the one I care about more, because I lived on the wrong side of it for a long time.

You are in the line too. Not above it, running it. In it. You received your whole understanding of what worship even is from people you will mostly never be able to thank. The pastor who let a long-haired kid bring loud songs into a room full of people who did not want them. The friend who put a CD in your hand. The saint three rows back who kept showing up. You did not author yourself any more than you authored the songs. You were formed by a crowd, most of whom have no idea they did it.

That means the pressure you have been carrying, to be original, to be the reason the room moved, to have it all originate in you, was never yours to carry in the first place. It is not humility to admit you are a link in a chain. It is just an accurate job description. The chain was always the point. You are one more hand on something very old that is still moving.

Hand it on

So here is the small thing I would ask you to try this week, and it costs you nothing.

When you lead, lead like someone handing a thing down, not like someone who made it. Sing the old song and the brand new one with the same posture, because they came to you the same way, through a hundred hands you will never shake. Let the room feel that they are being handed something, not sold something.

And then, when the gear is packed and the building is empty and it is just you in the car, let yourself off the hook for not being the source of it. You were never supposed to be. The most important thing you will carry into that room this Sunday was carried to you first, across more years and more heartbreak than you know, by people who only ever got to add one line before they passed it on.

You are one more set of hands in a line that runs back through a refugee camp and a stadium and a box of CDs on a living room floor. Receive it well. Add your part. Hand it on better than you found it.

That is not a smaller calling than being the author. It might be the only one there ever was.

Pass it on.

— Dr. Ryan

New posts here several times a week, free for anyone in this work. Paid subscribers also get the team companion studies that go with each season of my podcast, Formation to Transformation. The first, The Retreat Your Team Keeps Almost Having, is a 13-unit walk through Psalm 23, John 10, and John 20. The newest, the Romans 12 booklet, takes your team through what worship looks like off the platform, Monday through Saturday. Both are built for teams to use together. New devotionals weekday mornings. Sunday mornings, Before the Doors Open.

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And then the comments came in, and one of them put the old theology in plain words: if you’re carrying a heavy burden, that’s your fault. Jesus said his yoke is easy. Give it up.

I knew that comment was coming before I hit publish. Anytime we talk about burnout, somebody will show up to say you’re only worn down because you’re not really serving the Lord right. I have watched that comment arrive, almost word for word, for years.

Monday’s letter was written to your pastor. This one is for you, whether you hold the mic or run the board. Because that comment lands hardest on the person it’s aimed at, and we should talk about it.

The invitation was never an indictment

Start with what’s true in it. Matthew 11 is real. The yoke is easy. The burden is light. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

But the invitation cuts the other way. Jesus is not scolding the weary. He is assuming them. He looks out at a crowd and takes it as given that they are laboring and heavy laden, and his response is not “whose fault is this,” it is “come to me.” The easy yoke was an invitation, not an indictment. The moment we turn it into a test that tired people are failing, we have made it say the opposite of what it says.

I’d go further. There are some sentences that sound like faith and function like warning lights. God won’t give me more than I can handle. If the Lord called me to it, he’ll equip me for it. He doesn’t call the qualified, he qualifies the called. Every one of those is true. And when they become the load-bearing wall, the thing you say instead of answering the question “how are you actually doing,” they’ve stopped being faith and started being a way to keep moving past the meter that’s telling you something.

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This is not what every job looks like

Somebody else in those comments said every occupation has the same mental health rate.

It would be easier if that were true. Earlier this year, the largest survey of worship leaders ever conducted put numbers on it: 3.4 percent of worship leaders rate their mental health as excellent. The general population comes in around 29. That’s not “every job is hard.” That’s the people in one specific chair, eight and a half times less likely to say they’re well than the people in the seats they serve. And the same researchers found that 87 percent of worship leaders meet regularly with no counselor and no spiritual director. Nobody at all whose job is to help them carry it.

They called it a support desert. High purpose, real distress, almost no structured care.

The high purpose part matters, and it’s why the “just quit if it’s so hard” reading misses. When we surveyed hundreds of worship leaders about what they love, the answers ran long. They love watching people grow. They love the team. They’d do this for free, and a lot of them do. Nobody in this desert is looking for an exit. They’re looking for water.

Diagnose the chair, not the person

One person in those comments described the anxiety they carried at their old church. Then the worship leader at the other campus, same anxiety. Then the person hired after them, worse.

When three people in the same chair get the same wound, you stop diagnosing the people and start diagnosing the chair.

I say that as someone who has helped build that chair. I had a season where my one drummer needed a weekend off, getting home from vacation at two in the morning, and I heard myself say: you sure you can’t just come in? I know you’ll be tired. I’ll buy you a coffee. Nobody made me say that. I was feeling pressure from above me that I’d never had a real conversation about, so I passed it down, with a smile, one small rationalized ask at a time. You would never look back at any single one of those moments and say that was the one that did it. It’s a thousand of those little things, and nobody ever notices the moment.

That’s how the desert forms. Not by villains. By pressure that keeps getting handed down the row because nobody stopped to name it.

The chapter opens with a closed courtroom

This week on my podcast we started walking Romans 8, one verse a morning, and we will be in it for weeks. It opens with the verse the whole chapter hangs on: there is therefore now no condemnation. Before Paul says one word about weakness or groaning or help, he closes the courtroom.

I don’t think that order is an accident. And further down that same chapter, there’s a line we’ll get to, one morning at a time: the Spirit helps us in our weakness. Help is not the emergency measure in that chapter. It’s the design. A God who builds intercession into the plan for your weakness is not a God who is embarrassed by your need for help. So a worship leader seeing a counselor isn’t a crack in their faith. It’s them agreeing with how the chapter says people actually work.

Three moves, none of them dramatic

Get honest about the meter. The hardest thing about burnout is that you almost never catch it ahead of time yourself. It reads as “just a busy season” right up until it doesn’t. We built a burnout self-check for exactly this, because sometimes you need the questions asked from outside your own head. It takes a few minutes. Let it tell you what it sees.

Get somewhere you’re known. Not networked. Known. People outside your org chart who can look at you and say “you’re not actually burnt out, you’re disorganized,” or “you are burning out and you don’t know it,” and be right, because they know you. That’s most of why our community of worship leaders exists. I have watched a room full of strangers become that for each other. The loneliest job in the church building doesn’t have to stay that way.

Let real help be wisdom, not weakness. If you’re in the 87 percent, the invitation is not “try harder.” A counselor. A spiritual director. Someone paid to ask you a true question and wait. I have a friend whose church made him take his sabbatical, and he called me to complain about it. This is dumb, he said. I like doing ministry. Halfway through he told me he was realizing how much of his identity was tied to his throughput, that without the doing he didn’t know what to do with his hands. He didn’t find that out by pushing through. He found it out because somebody made him stop. Sometimes help looks exactly like that.

You’re allowed to love this work and need water at the same time. That’s not a contradiction. That’s just what a person in a desert looks like.

The chapter we’re walking this week says the courtroom is closed. Come in out of the heat.

In your corner,

Dr. Ryan

I have been doing worship ministry for twenty-five years, and there have been long seasons where the only time I worshiped was on a stage.

I want to be careful to say that plainly, because it is easy to dress up. Some of the best emotional moments I have ever had with God happened front and center, mic on, lights up, a few thousand people singing back at me. And for long stretches of my life, almost none of them happened anywhere else. Not in my car. Not at my kitchen table. Not anywhere the schedule didn’t put me.

Looking back on that, that is not a healthy place to be.

Nobody could tell.

If you lead a church, this letter is for you. There is a decent chance your worship leader sent it to you, and I want to say something about that before anything else: they were not filing a complaint. Forwarding a letter like this is what it looks like when someone is trying to tell you something they do not have the words to say across a desk. Receive it that way.

Here is what they are trying to tell you.

Earlier this year, worshipleaderresearch.com published the largest survey of worship leaders ever conducted in North America. More than 3,300 of them, across denominations and traditions. When they were asked to rate their own mental health, 3.4 percent said excellent.

The number for U.S. adults overall is about 29 percent.

The person who builds your most visible hour is roughly eight and a half times less likely than the people in your congregation to say they are doing well. And the researchers found something else, which I think matters more: 87 percent of worship leaders meet regularly with no one who is helping them carry any of it. No counselor. No spiritual director. Nobody whose job it is to ask how they are actually doing and wait for a true answer.

The researchers called it a support desert. Their phrase, and it is the right one. High purpose, real distress, and almost no structured care of any kind.

That is not a morale problem. That is a support desert.

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Now, why haven’t you seen it?

Because looking fine is half the job. Nobody put that in the job description on purpose, but it is in there. Your worship leader stands in front of the room every week and leads people toward joy, or grief, or hope, on schedule, whether or not they have any of those things in the tank that morning. Over the years they get very good at it. Good enough that the gap between what is happening in the room and what is happening in them becomes invisible from every seat in the building.

Including yours.

I need you to hear that this is not an accusation. It is a description of a structural feature of the role. You see the room. The room sees the lights. The interior of the person holding all of it together is the one thing on that platform nobody has a sight line to. I have written before about what that does to a person over time, and the short version is: the lonelier the interior gets, the better the exterior tends to look. The polish is not evidence of health. Sometimes it is the symptom.

Two things this is not, so we are clear.

It is not a spiritual failing. There is a theology floating around that says if you are burning out, you must not be abiding right. I was raised in ministry on that framing, and it nearly buried me, because it turns every honest moment of weariness into proof that something is wrong with your soul. Elijah was not failing to abide. He was tired. Those are different diagnoses, and they have different treatments.

And it is not your fault. Nobody handed you a manual for pastoring the person who pastors the room. The structure is the problem, and structures do not get fixed by anyone feeling bad. They get fixed by somebody with authority deciding to change them. In your building, that is you.

So here is what I would actually ask of you. I don’t have a program for this. I have three small things, and none of them need a budget line approved.

Ask on a Tuesday, not a Sunday. A Sunday “how are you doing” gets the professional answer, because on Sunday your worship leader is at work, holding the room, and they will not put that down mid-shift to hand you something heavy. Ask on a Tuesday. Ask specifically. And then do the hard part, which is waiting through the first answer, because the first answer is the polished one. The conversation your worship leader most needs is one almost nobody is having with them.

Do not count the stage as their formation. This is the one I most wish someone had said to my pastors twenty years ago. The most worshipful person on your platform may be worshiping only on your platform. It looks like devotion. It can even feel like devotion to them. But platform time is output, not intake, and a person cannot live on output. Ask your worship leader what feeds them when the mic is off. If the question produces a long pause, you have just learned the most important thing about them you have learned in years.

Make real help unremarkable. That 87 percent does not exist because worship leaders are stubborn. It exists because in most churches, a worship leader asking for a counselor or a spiritual director still feels like a confession of weakness, or a crisis flare, or a hint that maybe they should be replaced. You can change that with a sentence. Tell them you would consider it normal. Better, tell them you would consider it wise. The leaders I served under were generous with me, took me under their wing, taught me the craft. Nobody discipled me. Mentoring the skill is not the same as tending the soul, and your worship leader can be surrounded by investment and still be entirely alone in the part that matters.

It took me years to notice that the stage had become the only place I met God. It took me longer to say it to anyone out loud.

I am still learning how to let people see that part. Most of us are. But I think about what it would have meant, somewhere back in the years when my interior life was running on fumes and my Sundays looked immaculate, if the man I served under had pulled me aside on some ordinary Tuesday and asked what fed me when the mic was off, and then just waited.

I did not need a program. I needed one person with a sight line.

Be that for yours.

In your corner,

Dr. Ryan

P.S. If a worship leader sent you this, they were not filing a complaint. They were telling you something they did not know how to say out loud. That might be the most important information you’ve gotten all week.

I say that because I have spent most of my life carrying a private math problem. If the grace were real, if it had actually taken in me, I would be further along than this by now. Faster. Cleaner. Less of the same old thing showing up in me at forty that was showing up at twenty. I never said it to anyone. I just kept the ledger, and I kept coming up short on it. It is a lonely kind of arithmetic, the sort you run in private and show to no one. I have written before about how alone this work can leave you.

This week I put out a video about the man who wrote “Amazing Grace.” I am not going to retell his story here. The video does that, and it deserves the room to do it. But there is one fact in it that I keep coming back to, and it is the reason I made the whole thing. The man who wrote the world’s most beloved song about being saved was, for years after he was saved, still a slave trader. Not before the storm. After it. He was being changed and he was still complicit, at the same time, for a long time. The grace in him was real the entire way. It was just slow.

We built the whole thing around the lightning strike

I think we have done something to ourselves in the church, and I put myself at the front of the line for it. We have fallen in love with the instant version. We love the testimony where the addict is free overnight, the marriage healed in a weekend, the wretch turned saint in a single storm at sea. We build our services around that moment. We put the songs that celebrate it at the emotional peak of the set, and we watch the room lift, and it is real, and it is good.

And then Monday comes, and real people go back to the long, slow, unspectacular middle of their actual lives. They have believed for years and they are still fighting the same thing they were fighting last year. They prayed the prayer and the change did not arrive like a switch being thrown. So, without ever saying it to a single soul, they do the math on themselves the same way I have always done it on me, and they come up short. They decide the grace must not have taken. Because it did not work on them the way the song promised it would.

I find that almost unbearable. Because these are the same people who will tell you, if you ask them what they love most about ministry, that their favorite thing in the world is watching someone grow. Slowly. Over years. They will talk about the life change that happens through the smallest, most ordinary tasks. They believe in slow grace completely. They just believe in it for everyone except themselves.

Changed and still wrong, at the same time, for years

The true story of that hymn is the best correction I know for this, and it is a pastoral correction, not a history lesson. The man was being truly formed and he was still deeply in the wrong, both at once, for the better part of forty years. If grace is a light switch, that is a scandal, and we should be embarrassed by him. But grace is not a light switch. And the moment you actually see that, the forty years stops being the problem with his story and becomes the entire point of it.

Because a grace that only works in dramatic instants is a small grace. It leaves almost all of us out, since almost all of our lives are the middle. A grace that is willing to spend forty years on a slave trader and refuse to let go is the only kind big enough to earn the word amazing. That is not a lower view of grace. It is a higher one.

I have been in this work long enough to know that the important things in a person almost never change on a stage, or in a moment you could circle on a calendar. They change the way water wears a stone. I have watched good people erode by a thousand small compromises, not one of which they could ever point to and name as the day it happened. Grace works in the very same direction, just the other way. A thousand ordinary, unspectacular acts of faithfulness on the weeks when nothing was wrong. No single moment you could circle. You only ever see the shape of it looking back. That slow, unglamorous, weekday kind of formation is the whole reason I put out a short devotional every morning. Not for the dramatic weeks. For the ordinary ones, which are most of them.

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What this does to how you lead

Two things happen when you start to actually believe this, and the first one is about the room.

When you put “that saved a wretch like me” in front of people, you are not handing them a song about a man who got fixed in a night. You are handing them permission to still be in process. You are telling a room full of people stuck in the slow middle that the slowness is not the absence of grace. It is the shape of it. That is a very different thing to give someone than a highlight reel of an overnight rescue, and it is a truer thing, and the people in your seats need it more than almost anything else you could hand them on a Sunday.

That goes for the whole team, not just the person with the in-ears and the setlist. The volunteer at the back pushing “I once was lost” up onto the screen is handing the room that same patient grace, and that person is somewhere in the slow middle of their own story while they do it. The techs are worship leaders too, and they need this song to be telling the truth about slow grace as much as anyone in the band does.

What this does to you

But there is a second thing, and it is the one I actually care about more, because I have been on the wrong end of it for years.

You are in the room too. You are not just running the song about slow grace. You are living inside it. The same patience that spent four decades on Newton is the patience you are standing in right now, on all the parts of your own life that have not turned the corner yet. The parts you have been counting against yourself for years.

You do not have to be finished to lead this. That is the thing I most want you to hear, and it is the thing I am still learning to believe about myself. Newton was not finished when he sat down and wrote it. He gave the hymn a title almost nobody remembers. He called it “Faith’s Review and Expectation.” A review. He was not writing from the finish line. He was looking back over a long, embarrassing, unfinished life and naming the grace that had been patient with him the whole way through it. He was reviewing. So are you. So am I.

Don’t despise the slowness

So this is the small thing I would ask you to try, and it costs you almost nothing. This week, when you lead something about being changed, lead it like a tide and not a switch. Give the room permission to be in the middle of the story instead of at the end of it.

And then, when you are done, when the gear is packed and the building is empty and it is just you and the private ledger you have been keeping on yourself, hand yourself the same grace you just handed everyone else. Stop despising the slowness in you. It is not evidence that the grace did not take. It may be the clearest sign you have that it did.

You are being carried, slowly, further than you deserve, by a grace that has not once, in your whole long story, decided you were too slow to bother with.

It has not decided that about the people in your room either. Go tell them.

— Dr. Ryan.

We spent the hour talking about Christmas planning, of all things. When we finally signed off, I did not tell anybody who to vote for or what any of it would mean. I think the last real thing I said was Maranatha. Come, Lord. He has his hands on all of it. That was the whole political statement I had in me that night, and I meant every word.

I think about that call every year around now, because a version of it lands on every worship leader I know in the next few days. Not a screen full of pastors. A Sunday morning. The Sunday around the Fourth of July.

The Sunday nobody hands you a playbook for

Every other loaded Sunday at least comes with some cover. Easter and Christmas have a hundred years of songs already sorted. Mother’s Day, you grit your teeth and you get through it. But the Sunday after the Fourth of July is its own animal, because whatever you put in that first slot is going to make somebody in the room feel something strong, and the two somebodies who feel it are sitting on opposite ends of your sanctuary.

Put the patriotic worship song up, and the man three rows back who served feels finally, actually seen. The twenty-four-year-old on your team quietly decides the church just confused two kingdoms. Leave it off, and you flip exactly who feels at home and who feels preached at. There is no neutral slot. You are doing weekly song selection under a clock, the way you always are, except this week the clock has a flag on it.

If you have ever stared at Planning Center on the last week of June and felt your stomach drop, you are not doing it wrong. You are feeling the actual weight of the thing.

You are not really fighting about patriotic worship songs

Here is what took me a while to learn. The fight over whether to sing patriotic songs in church is almost never about the songs.

I spent a whole podcast episode on why the hymns fight is never actually about hymns (the episode is here). The short version: when somebody comes to you wanting more hymns, they are rarely making a music argument. They are telling you something about identity, about grief, about a church they helped build becoming something they do not recognize. The flag is the same. The God-and-country Sunday is a proxy. Underneath it is belonging, memory, fear, and a real question about what we are allowed to love and how much.

So if you try to win the surface argument, you lose. You lose the older saint, or you lose the young leader, or you lose your own peace, and you were never actually arguing about a song.

I can say that because I have been on the wrong side of it. When I started, I was hired to be the contemporary guy. Those were my literal marching orders, bring the fresh stuff, leave the hymns alone. I was the cool guitar kid in a room of keyboard players, and I came in like a missile. The senior saints came for me, and they were not wrong to, because I was asking them to set down the songs their faith was forged in and I was doing it without much care for what that cost them. I thought I was bringing life. I was also stepping on people.

I am forty-four now, and I will tell you the funny part. I feel the pull the other way these days. There are songs from the beginning of my own story that I would defend a little too hard if you tried to take them off the screen. I am becoming the person I used to roll my eyes at. That is not a flaw in them or in me. That is just what it is to have your faith shaped by music over time. Which is the whole point.

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What your July 4 setlist is teaching the room to love

I have written before that we do not just sing what we believe, we come to believe what we sing (the long version of that argument is here, and the shorter on-ramp is here). Repetition is how belief gets into the body. Sing a line enough times and your people stop trying it on and start meaning it.

That mechanism does not take the holiday off. So the real question underneath your Fourth of July worship service is not whether you love your country. You can love your country. The question is what the song is teaching the room to love, and in what order. By the third verse, are we singing to God, or are we singing to a flag and using God’s name to do it? Because the room will not parse that distinction the way you can. The room will just absorb the order of loves you put in front of them and walk out having learned it.

That is not a music problem. It is a discipleship problem wearing a music problem’s clothes.

Paul walked into a city full of altars

There is a moment in Acts 17 I keep coming back to for exactly this. Paul walks into Athens, and the place is wall to wall with idols. Every god they could think of, plus one extra altar labeled “to an unknown God,” just to cover their bases in case they missed one.

Paul could have spent his whole time there cataloging what was wrong with each of those altars. He had the credentials to do it. Instead he points at the one labeled to an unknown God and basically says, let me tell you about that one. Let me tell you about Jesus. He does not run a teardown. He redirects the worship that is already in the room toward the only one who can hold it.

That is the move for the Sunday after the Fourth. You are not the prophet sent to scold your congregation for loving America too much, and you are not the chaplain of the empire either. You are the person who gets to take all that real feeling in the room, the gratitude, the grief, the longing for a good and safe place, and point it one degree past the flag to the kingdom that outlasts every nation. Our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20). The room John sees in Revelation 7 is gathered out of every nation, not built around one. You do not have to argue anybody down. You just have to aim the worship at the right altar.

Patriotism is not the problem. The pedestal is.

I said something once about Christmas that applies cleanly here. Nostalgia, by itself, is not good or bad. You can make it an idol, or you can make it the thing that bolsters your faith. The exact same is true of love of country. It can sit rightly under God as gratitude, or it can climb up onto the pedestal next to him, and from the platform you usually cannot tell which one is happening in the room until you have already taught it.

So here is the honest test before you place a song. Could a person sing this and walk away loving the nation a notch more than they love Jesus, and not even notice the swap? If yes, the song is not necessarily evil, but it is not safe to be the center of your set. Move it, frame it, or leave it. And if somebody pushes back hard, do not defend the setlist. Try the thing that has saved me more conversations than any argument ever has. Look at the person and say, “It sounds like you are worried the church you love is becoming something you do not recognize. Tell me about that.” Then actually listen. Most of the time people do not need to win. They need to be seen.

What to actually do before Sunday

A few practical moves, because you have about a week.

Get on the same page with your pastor first. Not after the conflict. Before. Half of your protection on a loaded Sunday is whether your pastor sees it the way you do. When I was the young guy taking heat, the times it went okay were the times my pastor and I had already talked, so when someone went to him upset, he had my back instead of changing the plan on me midweek. Go ask, this week, “what are we doing on the Fourth, and are we agreed on why?”

Decide which hill is worth it. I had a guy on my team once who was ready to die on every hill, down to whether we allowed hats on the stage. He nearly did die on that one, over hats. The Fourth of July setlist is not a hill to die on by planting a political flag in it, in either direction. Pick the hill that is actually about Jesus and let the rest be lighter than it feels right now.

Make a small, honest concession if you can. One song, framed well, that honors the gratitude in the room without handing the morning over to it. A prayer for the country that also remembers the church is bigger than the country. You do not have to choose between pretending the Fourth is not happening and turning the gathering into a rally. There is a pastoral middle, and you are the one standing in it.

You did not sign up to referee a culture war. You signed up because you love Jesus and you can carry a room. But this week you are carrying a setlist that is going to teach your people something about what they worship, and that is too much to do by accident in a dark auditorium by yourself.

If you would rather not do it alone, that is most of what we do over in our community. We meet for live training every Monday night, and the songs, the team, the pressure of weeks exactly like this one are the whole reason the room exists. It is free. Come sit in. I also walk through Scripture for worship leaders every weekday on Formation to Transformation if you want the daily version. And if you want the working tool for picking any loaded song on purpose, the full test and the one-page worksheet are in What Your Setlist Is Teaching Your Church.

So when you sit down to build it, do not start with the argument. Start with the altar. Ask what the room will have learned to love by the time you all sing the last line. Then pick on purpose.

May the songs you choose this week point past every flag to the only King who was never elected and will never be voted out.

-Dr. Ryan

The first time I led “It Is Well with My Soul,” I treated it like a soft place to land. Last song of the set, lights coming down, a quiet way to settle the room before the pastor stepped up. I knew it was old. I knew people loved it, the older folks especially, the way they sang it without looking at the screen. I did not know a single thing about where it came from. And it did not occur to me that I should.

I have been in this work long enough to know that this is how most of us lead most of the time. We are not handling songs. We are managing a service. We pick what fits the key, the theme, the energy, the runtime. We put it in Planning Center, we send it to the team, we run it. The song is a unit on a timeline. It does its job, and we move to the next one.

This week I put out a video about the man who wrote that particular hymn. I am not going to retell his story here. The video does that, and it deserves the room to do it. What I want to talk about instead is what happened to me when I finally knew it. Because something does happen to you when you find out what a song is actually made of, and I think it is one of the most underrated things that can happen to a worship leader.

A supply line, not a setlist

You stop being able to lead it the same way.

Not because the backstory is a sad fact you can mention from the stage. Please do not do that, by the way. Nobody needs you to narrate a man’s dead children before the bridge. The change is quieter than that, and it goes deeper. When you know what a song cost the person who wrote it, you understand for the first time what you are actually doing when you put it in front of a room. You are not running a song. You are handing people words that have already held someone in the worst place a person can stand.

That is not a setlist. That is a supply line.

There is a line I keep coming back to, from Vernon Whaley. “We do not just sing what we believe. We come to believe what we sing.” I used to read that as a warning, and it is one. Bad theology in a catchy song will teach your people something whether you meant to or not. But it is also a promise. The true things, sung over and over on ordinary weeks, settle into people below the level of argument. They become the words that are simply there when a person reaches for something to say and has nothing of their own left. That is the whole reason the church has always sung. Not to fill time before the sermon. To put sentences into people that will still be standing when the rest of them is not.

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It changes how you lead

Knowing the story returns the weight. A song you have led four hundred times goes flat. It becomes furniture. You can run “It Is Well” on autopilot and feel nothing, because familiarity sands the edges off everything. But find out what is underneath it, and the weight comes back. You are holding something heavy again. You lead heavy things differently than you lead furniture.

I would say this is true for the whole team, not just the person with the in-ears and the setlist. The person at the back pushing that lyric to the screen is handing those words to the room just as much as the one singing them. The line comes up clean and in time because someone decided it would. I have said it before and I will keep saying it. The techs are worship leaders too. When the words land on someone three years from now in a hospital parking lot, the clarity of those words in their memory was shaped, in part, by a person they never met, at a console, paying attention on an ordinary Tuesday. Knowing what a song carries dignifies every hand it passes through to get to the room.

So that is the first thing this kind of story does.

But there is a second thing, and it is the one I actually care about more.

It changes what is happening to you

I have been all the way inside this one. You can spend years as the person who curates the songs and slowly stop being the person who is formed by them. You become an expert in worship the way a sommelier is an expert in wine. You can name the key change, the theological problem in the second verse, the better arrangement, the reason it works on a Sunday. And somewhere in becoming good at handling worship, you stopped letting it handle you. That is not faithfulness. That is competence wearing faithfulness as a costume, and from the front of the room, almost no one can tell the difference. You usually cannot tell yourself.

The man who wrote that hymn could say what he said over the deepest water in the world because of who he had already become in the comfortable years before he ever needed it. The peace was not produced by the crisis. It was revealed by it. It had been forming for a long time, in ordinary obedience, while nothing was wrong. That is the part of the story that should stop a worship leader cold. Not the tragedy. The formation that was already in place when the tragedy came.

Because you are putting those songs into a room every week. But you are also in the room. You are singing them too. And the question the story turns back on you is not whether you can run “It Is Well” well. It is whether the things you are singing on your easy weeks are actually forming you, or whether you are only handling them. Whether there is anything real settling into you underneath the performance. Whether, if your own telegram came this year, and for some of you it already has, you would have anything in you to reach for that you did not have to manufacture on the spot.

Why this is worth your time

A story like this is not trivia. We are surrounded by songs that have gone familiar, and familiar is one short step from empty. A thing like this video does the opposite of familiar. It makes a song you had filed under “slow closer” land on you again. And a worship leader who knows what is underneath the songs leads from a different place, and gets fed by a different thing, than one who is only running a service.

The small move

Try this. It costs you almost nothing. This week, before you open Planning Center and start dragging songs into Sunday, pick one of them. Just one. Sit with it long enough to remember, or to find out, what it is made of. Where it came from. What it cost. What it is actually claiming.

You will lead it differently. That part is almost automatic.

But the better thing might be the quieter one. You might find that the song, the one you were about to manage, has something left to do in you. That it was never only a unit on a timeline. That it has been trying to form you the whole time, on all those ordinary weeks, and you were too busy handling it to let it.

Let it.

-Dr. Loche

Thank you. The replies, the long emails, the people who told me a specific episode showed up on a specific hard Tuesday. I did not see this coming. I keep getting stopped in the middle of my own to-do list because one of you wrote something I have to go sit with. I’ll be straight with you: that is part of why I am behind on getting the devotional books out the door. I keep stopping to read what you send. I’m catching up now, and this post is part of catching up.

So let me tell you about the season I most want in your hands first.

Worship was never just the singing

That was the whole wager of the Romans 12 season. I said it right out loud in the introduction: singing is a slice, and Romans 12 is the whole pie. Paul spends eleven chapters on what God has done, then he says “therefore,” and the rest of the chapter is what a mercy-formed life actually looks like from the inside. Your body. Your mind. Your relationships. Your speech. Your patience in traffic. Your refusal to repay evil for evil.

If you have spent years thinking of worship as the four songs before the sermon, this chapter quietly rearranges the furniture.

It starts in a strange place. Romans 12:1 calls your life a living sacrifice, which is an altar image, except this altar gets up and walks around. The offering is not your Sunday. It is your Monday. It is the ordinary, off-platform you.

Then 12:2 says the thing I cannot stop repeating: you are going to be formed. That part is not optional. The only question is what is doing the forming. Scrolling forms you. Hurry forms you. Comparison forms you. The songs you sing eight times a Sunday form you. Paul’s word for the alternative is “transformed,” and it happens by what you give your attention to on purpose.

By 12:4 it stops being personal and becomes a body. Many members, different functions, and not one of them a spectator. This is the verse that dismantles celebrity Christianity in a worship ministry. The person on the patch bay and the person on the microphone are both members. The one who got there first to turn the lights on is not support staff. They are part of the worship.

And the chapter does not pretend the work is easy. 12:12 is the one for the season you might actually be in right now, the one where you are leading a room toward a hope you are personally running low on. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, keep praying. Notice it assumes the tribulation.

Then Paul lands the whole thing in 12:21. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. That is resurrection logic. It is the Shepherd who walked out of the tomb teaching you how to walk through a hard week without becoming someone you did not mean to become.

Why I want this one in your church, not just your ears

Here is why I keep pushing Romans 12 at worship leaders specifically.

Our whole craft is built to make worship feel like a moment you attend and rate. Romans 12 refuses that. It makes worship a whole life and a whole body. It is the antidote to the comparison that is eating you alive, because it tells you to use your actual gift instead of coveting the one in someone else’s hands. It is the antidote to the burnout, because the fervency it asks for is fueled by the Spirit, not squeezed out of your own tank. And it is the thing your team needs to hear together, out loud, not just you alone with your headphones in.

A chapter like this does not really land as information. It lands when a team sits in it together and lets it change how they treat each other on a Tuesday.

This post is the study

This is the part I have been catching up on. I have been turning each season of the podcast into something you can actually put in your team’s hands. A companion study, twelve sessions, built to run in about fifteen minutes before rehearsal or around a table on a Tuesday. The Shepherd one is already up, The Retreat Your Team Keeps Almost Having. This one is Romans 12, and it is right here.

Below this line is the full Romans 12 Team Companion Study, free for paid subscribers. Twelve sessions, each with a place to settle, the Scripture read out loud, a few questions for the team, and one thing to actually do that week. Print it, mark it up, hand a copy around and walk a session together.

If these episodes have meant something to you, becoming a paid subscriber is how you get this study, and the one for every season that follows, and it is how you keep the whole thing running. If now is not the time, you are still wanted here. The free posts keep coming and the daily podcast keeps going.

Thank you for making something I started in a quiet recording corner feel like a room full of people who actually get it.

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It wasn’t a Bible verse. It was our bridge.

That is the moment the whole thing clicked for me. The people in your seats are not memorizing your church’s statement of faith. Most of them have never read it. They are memorizing your setlist.

We come to believe what we sing

I’ll say it the way I said it in a talk this spring. We do not just sing what we believe. We come to believe what we sing.

Read that again. We come to believe what we sing.

I grew up Lutheran, so for me catechism was a little book I read in Sunday school. The real definition is simpler than the book made it feel. A catechism is just the body of belief a faith hands down, repeated until it sticks. By that definition, the most powerful catechism in your church is not the membership class. It is the forty-five minutes on a Sunday when you ask a room full of regular people to put words in their own mouths and say them back to God.

Paul says it plainly. Let the message of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit (Colossians 3:16). Teach and admonish. The songs are not the decoration around the teaching. The songs are the teaching.

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Eight repetitions and they believe it

Think about how repetition actually works on a person. The first time the congregation sings a bridge, they are hearing a claim. The third time, they are trying it on. By the eighth time, twice a month, for a year, they are not singing the claim anymore. They believe it.

That is the same mechanism behind the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed and the blessing your pastor speaks over the room every week. Repetition is how belief gets into the body. So the bridge everybody loves is doing theology whether you chose it on purpose or not. The only question is whether you know what it is teaching.

How most of us actually pick songs

I’ll be honest about how I have built most of my setlists, including recent ones. Is it singable for a normal room. Does it have a moment that lifts people. Is it new enough that we haven’t worn it out.

Those are real concerns. I am not apologizing for them. But look at what is not on that list. The actual claim the song makes about God is not on that list. And I have put songs on the screen, inside the last year, that I would never have preached from a stage if you slowed the lyrics down and made me defend them line by line.

That is not a music problem. It is a discipleship problem wearing a music problem’s clothes.

Weekly song selection is harder than it looks

If you lead worship, you already feel this even if you have never named it. You are the one with the keys to Planning Center. You are doing weekly song selection under a clock. You are trying to choose biblically sound songs while one half of the church wants the hymns back and the other half wants whatever dropped last week. You are trying not to get pulled around by trending culture and still do what is right for your actual room.

That tension is not a sign you are doing it wrong. It is a sign you understand the stakes. You are not curating a playlist. You are choosing what your church will believe by Christmas.

The setlist is forming you, too

Here is the part that took me too long to see. Whatever your rotation is teaching the room, it is teaching you first. You sing those songs more than anyone in the building. Rehearsal on Wednesday, the run-through on Sunday morning, the same lines coming back through your in-ears while you lead.

If your whole rotation is big victory choruses and no songs of lament, you slowly lose the language to be honest with God about your own discouragement, because you never actually sing it. I spent a full podcast season, What the Room Cannot See, on the interior life of the worship leader and the team, and this sits underneath all of it. The catechism is forming the catechist.

A test you can run on Monday

So what do you do with this on a Monday morning when you actually have to pick songs.

A few weeks back I wrote the long version of this, the part with the actual test I run every song through now. I put it behind the paywall because it is the working tool, not the manifesto. There is a one-page PDF worksheet in there built to be printed and marked up, or handed to your team at rehearsal. Fifteen minutes a song.

I’ll give you the one filter from it that changes the most minds the fastest. Read the lyrics of the song you are considering, slowly, and ask this. Could someone who believed in a genuinely different religion sing this and mean every word. Not someone who believes nothing. Someone who believes something specifically other. A Buddhist who reveres a transcendent power. A vague spiritual-but-not-religious neighbor. If the answer is yes, the song might still be useful as connective tissue, but it probably is not specific enough about Jesus to be the center of a Christian set.

That one question will reshape your rotation faster than any new release will.

The full test, the rest of the filters, and the worksheet are here: What Your Setlist Is Teaching Your Church. If you want the original argument this all grew out of, it is in We Come to Believe What We Sing.

You should not have to do this alone

If you want to work through this with other worship leaders instead of by yourself in a dark auditorium, that is most of what we do in our community. We meet for live training every Monday night, and this exact thing, the songs, the team, the interior life under all of it, is the room it is built for. It’s free to join. Come sit in. I also walk through Scripture for worship leaders every weekday on Formation to Transformation if you want the daily version.

You did not sign up to be a theologian. You signed up because you love Jesus and you can carry a room. But the songs you choose are catechizing everyone in earshot, including you, and that is too much to carry by accident.

So pick on purpose. Read the bridge before you put it on the screen. Ask what it will have taught the room, and you, by the time you have all sung it a hundred times.

May the songs you choose be songs you would want sung over you.

- Dr. Ryan

This Substack is free for anyone in this work. If it served you, subscribe so the next one finds you, and pass it to the worship leader who is building a setlist this week.

I didn’t know what to say in the moment. I think I managed something like “that’s interesting.” What I was actually feeling was closer to grief.

Because she wasn’t describing prayer. She was describing spiritual direction. And the director was a chatbot.

I might have filed that away as a one-off if the numbers hadn’t come out a few weeks later.

Barna’s State of the Church 2026 research found that nearly half of practicing Christians have already turned to AI for personal growth, largely without any pastoral input. Forty-one percent say it has helped them pray, and forty-five percent say it has helped them study the Bible. Almost half, 48 percent, would trust it with their spiritual growth outright. And among the most engaged people in our churches, the ones sitting in your front few rows, 34 percent say AI’s spiritual guidance is as trustworthy as a pastor’s.

Barna called it one of the most urgent and under-addressed formation challenges leaders are facing right now. I think that’s right. I also think most of us in worship ministry have not started the conversation at all.

Here is the part I want to say carefully, because it is easy to turn this into a panic about technology, and panic has never once formed anybody.

This is not a technology problem. It is a formation problem wearing a technology costume.

ChatGPT did not recruit anyone. It did not knock on a door. It just answered. At 11pm, when the question finally surfaced, it was there, and it was patient, and it never once sounded tired. It never asked anyone to wait until office hours. It never got that look on its face. It just answered, instantly, about the most intimate question a person can ask.

So the question I keep landing on is not “is AI good or bad for the church.” The question is quieter and harder than that. Who is forming your people in the hours you are not in the room?

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I wrote a while back about the spiritual director gap, the strange and well-documented fact that the people who lead everyone else into the presence of God are mostly doing it without anyone tending their own interior life.

Here is what I did not see coming when I wrote that.

While we were going without a director, our people quietly found one. It lives on their phone. It answers in seconds. It does not carry the loneliness we carry. And it will never, not once, tell them it needs to pray about it and get back to them.

We have a loneliness problem on the platform and a formation vacuum in the seats, and something fluent and tireless just walked into both.

I keep coming back to a line I have taught for years. We do not only sing what we believe. We come to believe what we sing. Repetition is formation. The thing you return to, over and over, in the small hours, is the thing that quietly decides what you believe is true about God.

We come to believe what we sing. I think we also come to believe what we consult.

We got into this on one of our live trainings a while ago and I have not been able to shake it since. We have gotten comfortable forming ourselves on autopilot. Turn on the favorite playlist, pull up a video of the favorite preacher, and call it discipleship. It felt great. You loved it. It was a great performance. So it must have been true. And just like that, it becomes your scripture for the day.

The chatbot is the next rung down that same ladder. Smoother. Faster. More personal. It does not even make you sit through the worship set first.

I want to be fair to the thing. The reason AI works as a spiritual director is not that people are lazy or faithless. It works because it offers the one thing the church has gotten bad at offering. Availability without shame. You can ask it the question you would never raise your hand to ask. It will not remember it on Sunday. It will not tell your small group.

But here is what it cannot do, and the gap is the whole point.

There is an old word for what a spiritual director is actually for. Accompaniment. Not answers. Presence. Someone who walks next to you long enough to learn your patterns and stays when the answer does not come quickly.

A chatbot can give you an answer. It cannot accompany you. It cannot sit with you. It cannot notice that you have asked the same question four different ways this month because the real question is underneath the one you keep typing. It cannot tell you that the ache you are describing is not a problem to be solved but a place where God is actually near. It cannot put bread in your hands. It cannot show up at the funeral. It cannot say “I know you, and I have watched you carry this, and I am not worried about your faith even though you are.”

Formation was always meant to happen in a body. With people who know your name and your story and your patterns. The chatbot knows your prompts. That is not the same thing, and I think your people can feel the difference even when they cannot name it.

Here is why this lands on worship leaders and not only the senior pastor.

If you lead worship, you are running one of the last formation spaces most people have left that still has a body in it. A real person, present, in the room, saying true things about God out loud while everyone breathes the same air. That is rare now, and it is getting rarer. Most of the rest of your people’s spiritual input this week will arrive through a screen, alone and unaccompanied.

We were trained to lead the room. We were not trained for this. For the reality that the people in front of us are being quietly catechized all week by something that is very good at sounding right and has no idea who they are.

I do not think the answer is to stand up and warn everyone about AI. That mostly makes us sound afraid, and afraid is not a formation posture either.

I am still working out what this asks of me. I do not have a program. I am a little suspicious of anyone who already has the clean five-step response, because that is exactly the kind of fast, fluent, confident answer I am trying to say we should slow down around.

But I think there might be one small move available this week.

Ask one person what they last asked a chatbot about God. Do not correct the answer they got. Do not turn it into a teaching moment. Just be the first actual human who was curious enough to ask. Let them feel what it is like to bring the real question to someone who knows their name.

Your people already have a spiritual director. It answers fast and it never gets tired.

You can offer them the one thing it cannot. You can know them.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments here.

— Dr. Ryan.

New posts here several times a week, free for anyone in this work. New episodes of my podcast, Formation to Transformation, publish weekdays, with Before the Doors Open on Sunday mornings. Paid subscribers also get the team companion studies built to use with your worship team.

This is a healthy church. This is a healthy leader. I trust this man with my life. I have known him long enough to know that when he says something direct, it is direct, and when he says he wants you to rest, he wants you to rest.

And my first internal reaction was a single complete sentence with no comma in it. Oh my gosh I’m getting fired.

I caught myself sitting across from him and watched the spiral happen inside my chest in real time. Have I done something wrong. Why is he doing this to me. I thought you liked me. Don’t you want me here. The whole script ran in about four seconds, and then I had to stop and ask out loud where any of it was coming from, because none of it was being said in the room. None of it was on his face. None of it was in his actual sentence.

I said it to him. I said, “I’m sitting here feeling like you don’t want me, and I know that’s not what you’re saying. I just want you to know I’m feeling that.” He kind of laughed and said no, that is not what we are trying to do. We are both about the same age. We came up in big-church worlds from two different states. We are both at a small church in Tennessee now, enjoying the heck out of it, and we both carry a kind of internal organ specifically tuned to hear the wrong frequency in a healthy conversation. He looked at me and said, “Yeah, I get that. That is not what this is.”

The whole spiral evaporated in the conversation. It did not need a counselor. It did not need a verse. It needed a sentence out loud across a desk.

The reel and the spiral are the same wound

I am telling you that scene because that exact spiral, the one I had with my lead pastor, is the same spiral that hits when you pick up your phone on a Tuesday morning and scroll past a reel of someone leading worship in a 4,000-seat room with a forty-person team and a thousand lit cell phones. The information is different. The wound is the same.

Oh my gosh I’m getting replaced. Have I done something wrong. Why doesn’t anyone want what I’m doing. I thought you liked me. Don’t you want me here.

The reel does not have a face you can talk to. The reel does not laugh and say no, that is not what this is. The reel just sits in your pocket and the spiral runs and you do not have anybody to say the sentence out loud to. So you carry it into rehearsal. You carry it into the green room. You carry it onto the platform. And whatever happens in the room that Sunday, you measure against the reel you watched on Tuesday, and the measuring is the deformation.

I think this is one of the quiet things eating the under-45 cohort of worship leaders alive right now. We were the first generation of worship leaders to grow up with the highlight in our hand. And nobody told us that the highlight is not the standard. We are losing the spiritual middle of our lives to a measuring rod that was never ours to pick up.

I wrote about an earlier version of this dynamic in The Loneliest Job in the Church Building back in the spring. That piece became the spine of the What the Room Cannot See season on Formation to Transformation because hundreds of worship leaders told me, in long honest replies, that they had been carrying this exact spiral and had never had a name for it. Comparison is the engine. Loneliness is the fuel. The reel is the match.

I have been on both sides of this

I have been the new guy who walked in and watched a longtime worship leader watching me. I could tell, from the way the room went, that the longtime person was running a private spiral about me. Ooh, this kid sings better. He can hit higher. He can play. I was twenty-three and I had a lot of confidence and not a lot of wisdom. I almost certainly contributed to that spiral without meaning to. I have not always been kind about that.

I have also been the one running that spiral about somebody else. A new vocalist comes in and you can hear that she is better than you. You can see how the room responds. You go home and you cannot sleep, and you cannot tell anyone you are not sleeping over it because it would sound ridiculous if you said it out loud. So you carry it. You check Planning Center eighteen times that week to see who is scheduled. You text the worship pastor to ask whether something is going on, when nothing is going on. The worship pastor was just slow on this week’s matrix because life is happening to him too. And you build a story.

I know this is happening on my team because I have been the one getting those texts on the receiving end. I would get pings from people on my team when they were not put on Planning Center over the course of like a day or two. They were checking Planning Center more than I was as the worship pastor. They were looking and they were watching and they were seeing where they were booked and where they were not booked, and they were making whole stories about it. And I was on my side not even thinking about it. I was just behind on the matrix. I was wearing eighteen hats and I had not gotten around to finishing the schedule.

That is comparison in its native form. It is not the influencer reel. The influencer reel is just the version that scales. The native version is Planning Center on a Tuesday afternoon and an unread text and a story you build in the gap.

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You do not actually know what you are looking at

There is a framework I teach all the time in my courses called, the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is a fancy way of saying you do not know what you do not know. My friend Chris, who’s a touring musician and cofounder of The Church Collective with me, brings this up almost every time the topic of comparison comes up. He and I do a live training together every Monday at 6 Central inside our community, and the boredom-and-comparison conversation has come up more times than I can count. He says when people complain that a song is boring or that they could play it better than the recording, what they actually mean is they do not know what they are not hearing. They are listening to a four-chord song and saying it is easy, and what they are not perceiving is that the drummer hit the snare exactly the same way every single time. That the bass player’s pocket is so tight you cannot tell where one bar ended and the next began. That the guitarist’s right hand was muting six strings while playing two. That the singer’s vibrato came in at a specific moment in the phrase and not a fraction of a second sooner.

The same is true of the reel you are scrolling.

The reel is the eighth take. The reel was lit by someone who has been lighting rooms like that for fifteen years. The reel was mixed by an engineer whose entire job is to make the kick drum sit in the chest of whoever is watching. The reel has a click track running underneath it that is so well played you cannot hear it. The reel has a vocalist who has not slept right in three weeks because she has been touring. The reel has a worship pastor backstage who is having the exact same spiral about the worship pastor at the church down the street whose reel was even bigger.

You are not seeing the take. You are not seeing the rehearsal. You are not seeing the conversation backstage about how something was not working in service one. You are watching a highlight, and you are measuring your unedited Sunday against it, and you are calling that measurement honest.

That is not honest. That is the wound dressing itself up as discernment.

The hidden injury

I want to tell you one more story from Chris, because it sits underneath the whole conversation. While on tour, he developed a hernia from the way the saxophone made him hold his body, blowing for a couple hours every night. He hid it from management for months. He kept playing through it. He hid it because he believed that if he asked for time off, they would replace him.

Eventually management came to him. Not the other way around. Somebody on the team had quietly told the office what was going on, and the office came to him and said you need to get this dealt with, get the surgery, we want you long-term, we will be here when you get back. And he said in his own words that he did not believe them. They had to have the conversation more than once. They had to talk him into accepting that he was not being canned.

That is what comparison-driven fear actually does to a person who has been at this for a long time. It does not just whisper. It does not just nag. It actively overrides what the people in your life are telling you in plain English. It makes you hide injuries. It makes you push through things you should not push through. It makes you suspicious of generosity. It makes you read kindness as performance.

If a real medical issue and a literal we want you long-term from people who pay him cannot break the spiral, the algorithmic reel sure isn’t going to break it on its own.

The weird checklist we hand ourselves

There is a thing I keep watching worship leaders do, including myself. We build a weird checklist of things that, if true, mean we are allowed to lead. I did my devotional. I did not look at anything I should not have looked at. I did not cuss on the way to the church. I do not currently have an unresolved fight with my spouse. I have not skipped a small group in two months. The list varies. The mechanic does not.

And when we have ticked the checklist, we go up. And when we have not ticked the checklist, we walk up anyway and then carry the unticked items into the platform with us like a backpack of shame.

What I am working toward in my own life is the slow recognition that the checklist does not actually exist. There is no version of me that is sufficient to lead the room into the presence of God. There is no checklist I can run that earns the right to be there. I do not get to be the one who decides, by my morning, whether the Spirit is going to do what the Spirit is going to do in the room.

This is not licence to phone it in. This is the gospel. It is freeing. It is also terrifying if you are wired the way I am wired, because I would prefer a checklist that I can tick. I am a very black and white person. I like to have solutions. I am learning to not do that, even at forty-four. I have been at this a long time, and I am still working on it.

I wrote a piece a while back called I Confused My Competence for Faithfulness that lives in this same neighborhood. The checklist is the secular version of the same instinct, scrubbed of the theology so it feels neutral. It is not neutral. It is the same wound in a different costume.

I serve at your pleasure

An executive pastor I served under a long time ago told me his life verse was 1 Corinthians 4 verses 3 and 4. I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court. Indeed I do not even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me. He told me he used to say to his lead pastors and to the boards he served, “I serve at your pleasure. If for some reason I am not meeting expectations, then I do not need to be there anyway.”

Young me heard that and thought it was a power move. I read it as fight-the-power energy. I thought it meant he was going to do whatever he wanted and forget the rest of the staff. I was bringing my own wounds into it. I was reading combat language onto a verse that was actually about peace.

Forty-four-year-old me understands it now. He was telling me that the measuring rod was not the senior pastor and not the board and not the room. The measuring rod was not even his own conscience. The measuring rod was the Lord, full stop. Everything else, the room, the reel, the worship leader down the road, the senior pastor across the desk, was data. None of it was verdict.

The reel is not your verdict. The forty-person team in the 4,000-seat room is not your verdict. The kid who came in last Sunday and sang better than you sang last Sunday is not your verdict. Planning Center is not your verdict. The text you did not get is not your verdict. The text you did get is not your verdict.

The measuring is not yours.

What I am doing about it

I do not have a clean three-step practice to hand you. I have a posture. I have the conversation with my lead pastor as the working model.

When the spiral runs, I say it out loud. Not on Instagram. Out loud. To a person. To a real friend. To a spouse. To a mentor. To the lead pastor if it is about the lead pastor. Most of the spiral does not survive being said out loud across a desk to somebody who will look you in the eye and tell you it is not true.

I stop scrolling worship reels on Tuesdays. Not as a discipline. As a kindness to myself. Tuesday is the day I am building the set. I do not need the highlight reel of someone else’s Sunday in my head while I am choosing songs for mine. If I want to watch the reel, I save it for a day when I am not making decisions.

I stop checking Planning Center as an emotional thermometer. If the schedule has not changed, the schedule has not changed. If someone on my team is checking it as an emotional thermometer, I make a point to text them and tell them they are fine. Both directions of that exchange are the same wound.

I bring real-life details into my prayer life. Not the abstracted version. The lit reel, the bigger team, the better singer, the eighteen-hat exhaustion of building the matrix. I say the actual specifics to God like a child telling a parent what hurt. The specifics are what defuse it. Comparison stays sharp as long as it remains an unnamed feeling. It loses its blade when it gets a name and a sentence.

And I keep remembering that the room I am actually leading is not a reel. The room I am leading is real people in real chairs with real Tuesday afternoons in front of them on the drive home, and the lyric that goes up on the screen for them will be the lyric they sing while it is raining and they are trying to remember whether God is who he says he is. The reel I scroll on my phone does not know those people. The reel cannot serve those people. The reel cannot pray for those people. I can.

That is not nothing. That is the whole job.

The small move

If you have been measuring your Sunday against a reel, here is the move I would offer.

Say it out loud. To one real person. This week. Not “I have been struggling with comparison.” That is the polished version. The polished version does not get healed. Say the actual sentence. I scrolled a reel on Tuesday and looked at my room on Sunday and I felt like I was a fraud. Say that. Across a desk, on a porch, on a walk. To someone who can look you in the eye and tell you that is not what this is.

If you do not have a person for this yet, that is exactly what Chris and I built The Church Collective for. It is a free network for worship leaders and the whole worship team, including the techs. We do a live training together every Monday at 6 Central, and most weeks the conversation is some version of this exact wound. Drop in. Listen. Say the sentence when you are ready. Nobody there will be measuring you against a reel.

You may be surprised, the way I was surprised across the desk from my lead pastor, how much of the spiral does not survive that sentence.

In your corner,

Dr. Ryan

New posts here several times a week, free for anyone in this work. Paid subscribers also get the team companion studies that go with each season of my podcast, Formation to Transformation. The first one, The Retreat Your Team Keeps Almost Having, is a 13-unit guide through Psalm 23, John 10, and John 20, built for worship teams to actually use. New podcast episodes weekdays. Sunday mornings, Before the Doors Open.

Which is the part that should make all of us nervous.

I have a daily podcast where I’m walking through scripture for worship leaders, and the longer I do it, the more convinced I get that the part of our craft that gets the least attention is the part that’s doing the most work. Not the gear. Not the arrangement. The actual claims the songs are making about God, week after week, fifty-two Sundays a year.

The people in the seats are not theologians. They’re not picking the lyrics apart on the screen. They’re singing them. And the longer they sing them, the more they become them.

The catechism nobody is naming

I grew up Lutheran, so for me, catechism was just the little book I read in Sunday school. The definition is much simpler than that though. A catechism is the body of beliefs for any given religion. So, in most of our modern worship contexts, the songs we sing are catechizing our churches. Check this out:

We do not just sing what we believe. We come to believe what we sing.

Read that again.

We do not just sing what we believe. We come to believe what we sing.

That isn’t a poetic flourish. It’s a pretty plain description of what’s happening to your congregation forty-five minutes into a service every Sunday. The lines you put on the screen, the words you ask the room to put in their own mouths and say back to God, are forming the theology of the room. Not the sermon. The songs.

If the sermon teaches the room what to believe about God, the songs teach the room how to believe it. The songs become the prayer. They become the confession. They become the only language a lot of your people have for talking about God on a Tuesday afternoon when they’re driving home from work and it’s raining.

That’s catechism. Whether you decided that or not.

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What most setlists are actually doing

Most of the setlists I’ve built, including the ones I built recently, were built around three priorities, in this order.

One. Is it singable for a room of regular people?

Two. Does it have a moment that lifts the room?

Three. Is it new enough that we haven’t worn it out?

Those aren’t bad priorities. They’re real priorities. But look at what’s missing.

Theology isn’t in that list. The actual claim the song is making about God isn’t in that list. The picture of God your congregation is going to form over the next six months of singing this song twice a month isn’t in that list.

I’ve learned, mostly the hard way, that those three priorities can produce a setlist that’s excellent on every metric the room can see and quietly forming the room into a picture of God I wouldn’t preach from a pulpit.

That isn’t a setlist problem. It’s a discipleship problem.

The two-filter test

I’ve stumbled into this two-filter test in how I prepare anything in church:

Filter one: is it theologically accurate?

Does the central claim of the song line up with what scripture actually says about God? Not loosely. Not poetically. Specifically. If the lyric makes a claim about God’s character, does it line up with how scripture actually describes him? If it makes a claim about salvation, does it line up with the actual mechanism of salvation in the New Testament?

Filter two: is it contextually appropriate?

Does it fit the room you’re leading? Is the level of repetition right for your congregation? Does it match what the rest of the service is doing? Is it pastorally responsible for the season your church is in?

A theologically rich song that’s musically inaccessible for your room is not appropriate. A song that works fine somewhere else but cuts wrong against what your congregation just walked through is not appropriate. A song that’s right for one room isn’t automatically right for yours.

You need both. Pass theologically and fail contextually, and you’re forming a confused room. Pass contextually and fail theologically, and you’re forming a room into something that isn’t the gospel.

The temptation is to settle for one. Run songs through the contextual filter only because the theological filter is harder. Or run them through the theological filter only because you don’t want to admit that some of your favorite theologically sound songs aren’t actually working in your room.

Both. Every time.

The cross-religion test

Pick the song you’re considering. Read the lyrics straight through, slow. Then ask:

Could someone who believed in a different religion sing this song and mean it?

Not believed in nothing. Believed in something specifically different. A Buddhist who reveres a transcendent power. A Mormon who reveres a different Jesus than the one of the New Testament. A vague spiritual-but-not-religious post-Christian American who’d describe themselves as spiritual.

If the answer is yes, the song probably isn’t specifically Christian enough to be the centerpiece of a Christian congregational set. It might still be useful as connective tissue. It’s not the centerpiece.

This isn’t about being uncharitable to other religions. It’s about being honest that “you are good,” “you are with me,” “you fill me up,” “I am yours,” and “your love is everything” can be sung by a person who means something completely different by God than what Christian scripture means.

If the lyric doesn’t name Jesus, doesn’t name the cross, doesn’t name the resurrection, doesn’t name something specifically Christian, the song can still be in the service. It’s just not the centerpiece. It’s not the climactic moment. It’s not the song I’d want catechizing my congregation into a picture of God for the next six months.

What’s happening when you repeat the bridge eight times

Repetition is the hidden mechanism of the worship setlist.

When the congregation sings the bridge once, they’re hearing a claim. When they sing it three times, they’re testing the claim against their own life. When they sing it eight times, they’re believing the claim.

That’s not opinion. That’s how formation works.

The Lord’s Prayer forms us because we say it over and over for the rest of our lives. The Apostles’ Creed forms us because we say it again and again until it becomes the shape of our belief. The Aaronic Blessing forms us because we hear it spoken at the end of every service for forty years until we can hear it in our sleep.

The bridge of your favorite worship song is doing the same thing. It’s forming the room into the shape of what it says. The fifth time the congregation sings “your love is everything I need,” they’re not just singing it. They’re believing it. They’re walking out of the room having received that bridge as the truth.

So the question for me isn’t just “is this lyric biblically accurate.” The question is “do I want this lyric to be the catechism this congregation receives, sung eight times this Sunday, twice a month, for the next year?”

That’s a bigger question than the chord chart.

I’m writing this as someone who’s gotten it wrong

I want to be honest. I’ve run songs in rotation that didn’t pass the two filters. I’ve run songs that absolutely failed the cross-religion test. I’ve done it recently. Inside the last twelve months.

I did it because the room loved the song. I did it because the band wanted to play it. I did it because the song was popular and I didn’t want to be the worship leader who was the buzzkill at rehearsal. I did it because I hadn’t sat down on a Monday morning and read the lyrics slowly.

What I’ve learned, mostly the hard way, is that running every song through the filters doesn’t actually make you the buzzkill at rehearsal. It makes you the worship leader your team starts to trust. They want to be told the songs matter. They want to be told the work is theological, not just musical. They want to be led.

It also makes your senior pastor’s job easier, because now the songs are catechizing the room into the same gospel he’s preaching. It also makes the lyric scroll feel different to the person in the third row who’s having the worst Tuesday of her year. And eventually, it changes you. Because you start to notice what the songs are doing not just to the room, but to the worship leader singing them.

That’s the part nobody warns you about. The catechism’s forming you, too.

Three set-list models that already do this on purpose

If the catechism through song thing is true, then a setlist isn’t just a sequence. It’s a liturgical arc. The order of the songs is doing work.

Here are three setlist models I’ve used in different seasons. None of them is sacred. All three of them assume the setlist is forming the room, not just filling it.

The Isaiah 6 model. Holiness, conviction, cleansing, commission. You open with a song that names God as holy. The second song lets the congregation feel the gap between God’s holiness and their own week. The third is the gospel song that names the cleansing of Christ. The fourth sends the congregation back into the week with a charge to live differently. The arc lands the way Isaiah lands.

The Gospel Ark model. Recognition, confession, assurance, response. Open with recognition that God is God and we are not. Move to confession of what’s actually true about our lives this week. Move to assurance of what Christ has done about our confession. Close with response. We are sent into the week as people the gospel has changed.

The Tabernacle model. Outer court, inner court, holy of holies. You open at the gate with songs of joyful approach. You move into the inner court with songs of dedication and offering. You land in the holy of holies with songs of intimate communion and rest.

None of these is fast-fast-slow. None of them is built around the felt energy curve of the room. All of them are built around what the setlist is forming the congregation into.

If you pick one of these and run every setlist through it for a quarter, the songs that survive and the songs that get cut won’t be the songs you’d have picked by feel. They’ll be the songs that complete the liturgical arc you decided the room was going to walk through.

I work through formation material like this every weekday on the podcast. Formation to Transformation is the daily worship devotional. The What the Room Cannot See season earlier this year sits underneath everything I’ve written here.

What this post isn’t

This isn’t a list of songs to cut or a list of songs to add. I’m not going to name songs. There are worship leaders smarter than me who do that work, and the right song for your room isn’t the same as the right song for mine.

This is the framework. The five-question audit below is the practice. You run the audit against your own setlist with your own theology and your own room in mind. Do that quarterly, and the songs on the screen six months from now won’t be the same set they are today. The room those songs are forming won’t be the same either.

I’ve kept the audit small enough that you can run it on a Monday morning before you build the week’s setlist, or you can hand it to your team at a Tuesday rehearsal and walk a song through together. Fifteen minutes per song. The PDF worksheet is built so you can mark it up and keep it.

If you’ve been doing this long enough to know your setlist is catechizing your church, and you haven’t yet built the practice to do it on purpose, what’s below is what comes next.

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What’s your biggest challenge in ministry?

The answers were not surprising. One out of three of them named their team. Recruitment. Engagement. Commitment. The same musicians playing every Sunday because nobody else will show up. Unity. The pastor who does not understand why this is hard. The volunteers who promise and do not deliver. The good musicians who keep moving away.

I have been in this work long enough to recognize what I was reading. Those answers are not about the team.

What over 1000 worship leaders said when nobody was looking

The data is striking when you sit with it. When you ask worship leaders what they love about ministry, you get worship, serving, helping people see God. When you ask what is hardest, the vocabulary shifts entirely. The biggest cluster, by a long way, is the team. Almost two hundred of them named some version of it.

Here are some of the actual sentences they used. I am not editing them. I am pulling them as written:

Burnout. Running a big team by myself.

Enough team to share the load of all the things we’re involved in. Not just wanting to rely on the same people all the time.

Lack of skills cause no one is full time.

Pushing my team to give more, to be more confident and step out the box.

Still jumping when nobody else is engaged with the worship.

I am a volunteer musician and I have a f/t job. I struggle to give everything enough attention and time.

Read those out loud and tell me what they have in common.

It is not really the team. The team is the language. The thing underneath the language is the same sentence, written one hundred and ninety-six different ways: I am the only one carrying what I am carrying.

What they were actually saying

The team problem, almost every time, is the loneliness problem dressed up in vocational language.

You are not actually frustrated that the bass player did not learn the chord changes. You are frustrated because YOU learned them, you spent forty minutes Monday afternoon putting the chart in Planning Center for him, and now on Wednesday you are doing the work he did not do AND the work he was supposed to do AND the work nobody else is going to do. He went home and watched the game. You went home and did not.

You are not actually frustrated that recruitment is hard. You are frustrated because every conversation you have about recruitment is a conversation YOU are starting, with people who have never thought about it the way you think about it, and at the end of every one of those conversations you walk away feeling slightly more alone than you did before.

You are not actually frustrated that nobody on the team is preparing. You are frustrated because the level of care you bring to a Sunday is not being met by anyone else in the room, and you have spent years assuming that if you just modeled it harder, the team would catch up. They have not caught up. They are not going to catch up. Not because they are bad. Because they cannot give you what you are asking for. What you are asking for is somebody to carry this with you. Not somebody to play their part more cleanly.\

That is not a team problem. That is a Loneliest-Job problem in different clothes.

Why the team conversation never works

Here is what I have learned, mostly the hard way.

The conversation you keep trying to have with your team is the wrong conversation. Not because the team does not need any conversations. They do. But the conversation you are trying to have, the one that would actually settle what you are feeling, is not a conversation the team can have with you. The people on the team are not in the role you are in. They are not carrying what you are carrying. You can recruit a better drummer and the loneliness will still be there on Wednesday afternoon.

The thing the team CAN do for you, they are already doing. They are showing up. They are caring as much as they know how. Many of them are also volunteers, with day jobs, with kids, with marriages that need their Tuesday nights more than rehearsal does. They are not failing you. They are not the wrong people. They are simply not the people who can be in the role you are in, because the role you are in only fits one person on most worship teams, and that person is you.

The conversation you actually need is a different conversation. It is the one I wrote about a few weeks ago in The Fourth Conversation. The one that is not with your team. The one that is with somebody who has been where you are.

The conversation that does not include the team

If you have been in this role long enough to feel what I am describing, you already know the team is not the problem the way you have been saying it is. You know the way you talk about the team to your spouse on a Wednesday night is a stand-in for something else. You know you would feel different on Wednesday night if one person had texted you Tuesday afternoon and asked how you were actually doing.

The five-day rhythm below is not about better team management. It is about having five different conversations, in the right order, with the right people, so that by Friday you are not carrying what you are carrying alone.

Only one of those five conversations is with your team. The other four are the ones you have not been having. The paid portion below is the actual five-conversation rhythm, day by day, with the script line, the prompt, and the breath prayer for each one. Built for the leader who has been carrying it alone and is ready to stop.

Five Conversations for the Worship Leader Who Has Been Carrying It Alone

Five days. Five conversations. They are sequenced. The order is on purpose. If you have only ten minutes a day, that is enough.

The thing I am asking you to do this week is the thing the data says you are not doing. The thing that, by Saturday, will make Sunday lighter without changing a single thing about the set list.

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Yesterday was Pentecost. Today is Memorial Day. The calendar says I have the day off. The calendar is a liar.

I have been in this work long enough to know that the Mondays that follow the big Sundays are the ones that quietly take the most out of you. Easter. Christmas Eve. The Sunday after a funeral you led the day before. And Pentecost, which is the one almost nobody outside of liturgical churches treats like it matters and which, if you take it seriously, asks more of the room than any Sunday except Easter and the Sunday before Christmas.

If you are reading this on a Monday after Pentecost and your spouse asked you over coffee why you seem so tired and you said “I am fine, I just need to drink some water,” that is the post.

What is actually happening today

Here is what I think is actually happening on the Monday after Pentecost.

You spent yesterday helping a room receive the Holy Spirit. You picked the songs. You pitched the songs. You made sure the kid running ProPresenter had the lyric breaks in the right places. You had a long conversation with your audio engineer about whether the kick was hitting the same frequency as the bass in the bridge of Holy Spirit and whether the FOH mix was going to mud out before the second chorus. You stewarded a room through something theologically enormous.

And then you walked off the platform and you did not actually receive any of it yourself.

That is the wound. That is the thing nobody is naming. You are not tired today because Pentecost is long. You are tired today because you were the one most responsible for how the room received and you were the one least available to receive.

This is the difference between leading worship and worshiping while leading. They are not the same thing. They have never been the same thing. And the Monday after Pentecost is the day the difference shows up in your body.

This is not a burnout problem

That is not a burnout problem. That is a formation problem.

If you treat today as a Monday where you need to catch up on sleep, you will sleep, and on Wednesday you will be just as empty as you were this morning. The thing that is empty is not your physical reserves. It is the part of you that needed to receive yesterday and was busy delivering.

I have done this for almost twenty years and I still get it wrong. I am writing this on a Monday with my water bottle still on the stage, which is to say I am not writing as somebody who has figured it out. I am writing as somebody who has missed it enough times to recognize the shape of it when it happens.

Nobody asks you about Pentecost

There is also a particular weight to the Monday after Pentecost that the Monday after Easter does not carry. Easter is loud. Easter is the lily and the brass and the choir loft and the room full of relatives who showed up because grandma was in town. The exhaustion that follows Easter is at least recognized. People ask you about it. People bring you coffee on Monday afternoon.

Nobody asks you about Pentecost. The relatives are not in town. Half your congregation is not entirely sure what Pentecost is. You preached the Acts 2 text or you sang it or you watched your pastor walk the room through tongues of fire, and now it is Monday, and the cultural script for what just happened does not exist.

So you carry it alone. Which is, if I am being honest, the actual Pentecost problem for the worship leader. The Holy Spirit came on a room full of people who were sitting together, in one place, with one another. You came home from a room full of people who were receiving together. And then you went to bed by yourself, woke up by yourself, and put on coffee by yourself. The being-together-ness was for them. The aloneness is, again, for you.

The question is not how you recover

If today is a day where you are exhausted and you cannot explain why, this might be why. You did your job yesterday. You did it well. And the job did not feed you, because that was never what the job was for.

The question on a Monday like today is not how you recover. The question is whether you will let this week be a week where you receive something instead of just continuing to deliver.

If the answer to that question is anything other than a clear yes, here is something you can do about it.

A Five-Day Receiving Rhythm for the Week After Pentecost

Five days. One scripture. One short reflection. One prompt. One breath prayer. Each day takes ten to fifteen minutes. Do them in the morning if you can. If you cannot, do them at the kitchen table at 9 p.m. with the dishwasher running. Either is fine.

The whole rhythm is built on a single idea: the Monday after Pentecost is a week to receive, not a week to recover. Recovery is what you do when you ran a marathon. Receiving is what you do when somebody gave you a gift you forgot to open.

The paid portion below is the five-day receiving rhythm itself. One scripture, one reflection, one prompt, one breath prayer for each day Monday through Friday, plus a closing blessing for the Sunday after and a question to bring to the next rehearsal. If you need the practice and not just the diagnosis, this is where it lives.

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I had a different season in the folder. Verse-by-verse Philippians 4, six more weeks, the kind of slow Scripture walk the show was built on. It was good. It was ready to record. It was not the thing the audience had just told me to make.

What happened is this. I wrote a piece called The Loneliest Job in the Church Building. It went farther than anything I have ever written. Three thousand reads in the first weekend. Hundreds of comments across Substack and Facebook. Long, honest replies from worship leaders I did not know existed, all saying some version of the same sentence in different words.

Yes. This. I have not had the language for it.

The week before that, I had written Easter Doesn’t Need Your Best Performance. The week after, I Confused My Competence for Faithfulness. All three pieces hit the same nerve, and all three responses said the same thing. I needed somebody to name this out loud.

So I shelved the Philippians 4 walk. And I made the season the audience had handed me.

That season was What the Room Cannot See. Eleven episodes, two weeks, weekday mornings.

This is the recap.

How the Season Got Its Source Material

The season is unusual for me because I did not write it from the top down. I wrote it from the comments up.

Three places fed the content.

The Substack hits, named above. The reads and the replies became a living document of what worship leaders actually carry.

The Facebook comment thread under the Loneliest Job. Hundreds of long replies. People saying things in the comments I would not have asked them about in a survey.

The intake questions at The Church Collective, the free side of the training network I run for worship, creative, and production leaders. Every new member answers a short set of honest questions when they join. What they are carrying right now. What is missing in the role. What the gap is between what they wanted from this work and what they actually got. Nearly six hundred worship leaders have answered those questions over the last year. Almost all of them named some version of the same five wounds. Those answers gave me the structure. The Substack comments gave me the voice.

Every episode in this season starts with something somebody actually wrote to me or said to me. None of the wounds in this season are inventions. They are the words of the people the season was made for, played back to them in a different key.

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The Editorial Decision That Shaped Everything

Halfway through writing the first episode I made an editorial choice that I think was the most important one of the season.

I decided that when we say worship leader in this season, we mean everyone who shapes what the room hears, sees, or attends to. Not just front-of-stage musicians. The console is an instrument. The lighting board is an instrument. ProPresenter is an instrument. The camera is an instrument. The patch bay is an instrument. If you shape what the room can attend to on a Sunday morning, you are leading worship.

That sentence is the load-bearing claim of the season. The techs are worship leaders too.

I wrote the line in the first episode and I kept it consistent across all eleven. And the response from production crew, audio engineers, lighting directors, FILO members who arrive at six a.m., has been the single biggest signal of any season we have ever run. Inboxes full of the same paragraph in different handwriting. I have been at the board for fifteen years and nobody has ever called me a worship leader.

That paragraph is the season.

The Structure: Name. Diagnose. Return.

Every episode walked the same three moves.

Name the wound. Diagnose what is underneath it. Return the listener to the source.

That third move is the one I want to talk about. There are a lot of podcasts in the worship space right now that name wounds and stop. You are not okay. The system is broken. Sunday is exhausting. All of those things are true. None of them, by themselves, are the gospel.

Every episode in this season ends by walking the listener back to a chapter of Scripture that has been there the whole time. John 15. Romans 12. Psalm 23. Revelation 2. 1 Kings 19. The wound is real and the vine is real, and the season’s discipline was never to name one without naming the other.

This is also what I think the wider worship leader conversation needs right now. The naming is necessary. The naming is not enough. The return is what makes the naming pastoral instead of cathartic.

What I Learned About What Worship Leaders Actually Carry

A few things from inside the season I did not expect.

The wound is older than the pandemic. I assumed a lot of what I was hearing was post-2020. It is not. The Loneliest Job dynamic. The Monday After dynamic. The Competence-Confused-for-Faithfulness dynamic. The Door You Keep Looking At dynamic. These have been there since worship teams were built around production. The pandemic just accelerated something that was already happening.

The relief is not in the diagnosis. The relief is in the language. Almost nobody in the inbox said thank you for solving the problem. Hundreds of people said thank you for putting words to it. Most of the people in this work were not waiting for a fix. They were waiting for somebody to say the thing they had not let themselves say.

The thing nobody said out loud is the thing the Competence for Faithfulness episode named. It is the most uncomfortable sentence in the season and the one that got the most quiet yes in reply. I think it might be the line worship leaders most need to hear out loud right now.

What I Was Wrong About

I went into the season assuming the worship leaders carrying this the heaviest were the senior people, the lifers, the worship pastors at year fifteen.

What the data actually says is that the under-45 cohort is carrying it the heaviest, and the Notre Dame Flourishing in Ministry research is naming the same thing in numbers. The under-45 cohort still has a sense of calling. They have very little else. Almost no other dimension of life is in good shape. The data and the inbox were saying the same thing from two different sides of the room.

That changed how I closed the season. The final two episodes are more directly addressed to the worship leader in year three than the worship leader in year twenty. Year twenty has already developed coping. Year three is making the decisions right now that will determine whether year twenty exists.

The Episodes That Did the Heaviest Pastoral Work

I am not going to link every one of the eleven. I will name the four that I think did the heaviest work for the most people, and trust you to find the rest.

Episode 1. The Loneliest Job in the Church Building. The anchor. The most-shared episode in the show’s history.

Episode 7. I Confused My Competence for Faithfulness. The episode the longest emails came from.

Episode 8. Stewarding the Room When the Invitation Is for You. The pivot episode where the season turns from naming the wound to handing the listener back to the work.

Episode 10. Where the Vine Is in This. The closer. John 15:5. The whole season’s claim, in one sentence. This was a description of the soil the vine grows in, not a complaint about a job.

What Is Next

Two things, one short term and one longer.

Sunday mornings now have a permanent layer of the show called Before the Doors Open. Two to three minutes. A short scripture, a pastoral framing, a spoken blessing over whoever is about to walk into the building. It is the show speaking a blessing over the priest, before the priest speaks a blessing over the room.

The next M–F thematic season, launching in June, is a verse-by-verse walk through Philippians 4. The chapter most worship leaders have quoted at people without always letting it preach to them. Rejoice. Be anxious for nothing. Whatever is true. The peace that surpasses understanding. The contentment I have learned in whatsoever state I am. Built the way the show has always been built, one verse at a time, two to five minutes a morning. Paid subscribers will get a team companion study to walk it with their teams.

And the Shepherd companion study from earlier this year, The Retreat Your Team Keeps Almost Having, is still the best on-ramp for any team that wants to take this conversation off the podcast and into a room together.

A Final Word

The thing I want to name about this season, more than anything else, is that I did not make it for the worship leader who has the language already. I made it for the worship leader who has been carrying something for ten years without a name for it.

If somewhere in those eleven episodes the language showed up, that was the season’s whole job. The rest of the work, the formation, the abiding, the slow return to the vine, is what was already there. We just made room for it.

You are not alone in this work. You never have been.

Carry on.

— Dr. Ryan

New posts here several times a week, free for anyone in this work. Paid subscribers also get the team companion studies that go with each season of my podcast, Formation to Transformation. The first one, The Retreat Your Team Keeps Almost Having, is a 13-unit guide through Psalm 23, John 10, and John 20, built for worship teams to actually use. New podcast episodes weekdays. Sunday mornings, Before the Doors Open.

Conversation one is what we are doing this Sunday. Set list, key, intro tag, transitions, who is on rotation, what the senior pastor is preaching on.

Conversation two is what we are doing for the next big Sunday. Easter, Christmas, Mother’s Day, baptism Sunday, the youth-led service, the missions emphasis weekend.

Conversation three is what we are doing about the broken thing. The vocalist who keeps showing up late. The drummer who is on his way out. The sound system that is failing. The volunteer who left and never came back.

Three conversations. Every worship leader I know is having all three of them, every week, in some form. The Sundays demand it.

There is a fourth conversation. Most worship leaders are not having it.

The Fourth Conversation

The fourth conversation is what is happening to me, in this work, over time.

Not what is happening this Sunday. Not what is happening to the team. Not what is broken. What is happening to me. The actual interior life of the leader. Five years in. Ten years in. Twenty years in.

This is the conversation almost nobody is having. Not with their senior pastor. Not with their spouse, beyond the surface. Not with their team. Not with their friends. Not with themselves.

The other three conversations crowd it out. There is always a Sunday. There is always a problem. There is always a fire.

Meanwhile, the leader is changing, slowly, in ways the leader cannot see, because the leader has not made space for the fourth conversation.

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Why This Is Different

The first three conversations are about the work. The fourth conversation is about the worker.

The first three conversations have stakeholders who will demand the conversation if you skip it. The Sunday will demand it. The team will demand it. The broken thing will demand it.

The fourth conversation has no stakeholder except you. Nobody will demand it on your behalf. If you skip it for a year, nobody on staff will notice. If you skip it for five years, you will notice, but you will not have the language for what you are noticing, because you skipped the fourth conversation for five years.

This is how worship leaders quietly become someone they did not intend to become. Not through any single decision. Through the slow accumulation of three-conversation weeks. It is the same dynamic I tried to name in The Loneliest Job in the Church Building and I Confused My Competence for Faithfulness. The cost compounds in silence.

What the Fourth Conversation Sounds Like

It sounds like this.

What is the role doing to me, over time, that I am not naming?

Where am I quietly bitter that I have not admitted yet?

What am I performing that I no longer believe?

What is the next chapter of my own formation supposed to look like, and what am I doing on purpose to walk into it?

Who am I becoming, and is that the person I want to be?

These are not the questions a worship leader asks in the green room before second service. These are the questions a worship leader asks on a Tuesday afternoon, with a journal, in a quiet room, with another faithful person. Or with a spiritual director. Or in a long walk alone.

Most worship leaders have not asked these questions in years.

Why You Are Not Having It

Three reasons.

First, you do not have time. You have set list time, you have meeting time, you have crisis time. You have not built fourth-conversation time into the calendar, so it does not happen.

Second, you do not have a person. The fourth conversation is not a solo conversation. It needs a faithful witness. Most worship leaders do not have one. The senior pastor is not the right person. The spouse is sometimes part of the answer but not all of it. You need someone whose only job in the relationship is to listen to your interior life. The Leader Nobody Is Pastoring episode of Formation to Transformation sits with this directly.

Third, you are afraid of what you will find. You suspect the fourth conversation will surface things you do not want to know. You are right. It will. That is part of why you need it.

How to Start Having It

Block 90 minutes on a Tuesday.

Write three sentences in a journal. Here is what I am performing that I no longer believe. Here is where I am quietly bitter. Here is who I am becoming.

Write for 60 minutes without judgment.

Then find a person. A spiritual director. A counselor. A peer pastor in another city who will hold what you say without weaponizing it.

Give them the journal.

Have the fourth conversation.

Do this once a quarter at minimum. Once a month if you can.

A Final Word

The first three conversations are unavoidable. They will keep happening as long as you lead worship.

The fourth conversation is the one that determines whether you are still leading worship in fifteen years, and what kind of person you are when you are.

Build it into your calendar. Find your person. Have the conversation.

Nobody else is going to demand it of you. That is exactly why it has to be the work you do on purpose.

Carry on.

— Dr. Ryan

New posts here several times a week, free for anyone in this work. Paid subscribers also get the team companion studies that go with each season of my podcast, Formation to Transformation. The first one, The Retreat Your Team Keeps Almost Having, is a 13-unit guide through Psalm 23, John 10, and John 20, built for worship teams to actually use. New podcast episodes weekdays.