So what happens when we think we don’t have the right people in place to raise up? It’s time to ask some questions:
- Are you praying? If you aren’t praying for a person to train and raise up, chances are that God’s not going to give you one. It’s possible that He would, but much more likely that He will if you ask Him.
- Are you looking? Or are you just saying “There’s no one available” when you haven’t even looked?
- Are you asking? It’s very likely that your pastor or another ministry leader would know of someone with the gifts and abilities you’re looking for. Ask them!
- Are you equipping? Surely you already have several volunteers involved in your music and worship ministry. Have you been training all along, with the intention of raising up someone out of that group?
In summary, the best way to avoid burnout in your ministry is to let go of our selfishness and our fear, learn how to train and equip, and pray, look, and ask if there is anyone available to raise up. Once that person (or persons) is found, the burnout we would face from trying to do everything ourselves will go away, and a new leader will emerge.
This week we’ll finish looking at some reasons why we might be afraid to raise up new worship leaders, which eventually causes us to burn ourselves out.
One of the reason that we don’t want to raise up new worship leaders is that we don’t know how. This is a very valid reason with some potentially easy solutions:
- First of all, learn how. This might seem obvious, but many times we rely on our own talent to get us through things. Because we rely on our own talent, we don’t know how to teach and train others. It is our responsiblity to continuously learn and train ourselves. I believe the most important training we could ever go through is that of learning how to equip others.
- Recognize that you might not have the gift of teaching. The Bible is clear that certain gifts are given to certain people. Perhaps you can play and instrument, sing, and lead worship really well but you have no idea how to teach others how to do it. Find people who do. Find music teachers within your church or even within your community. Find people that can teach you how to be a better leader, and let those people teach your volunteers as well.
- Make time to teach. So often in the world of church music we are constantly rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing. Schedule some time for teaching. Come up with a monthly workshop time to teach your volunteers. If that is too often, do it quarterly, or even twice a year. Make time to teach.
Tomorrow we’ll look at what happens when we think we don’t have the right people in which to pass on leadership.
Rather humorously lately, even though I’ve been making a big push for our pastor to have his own blog on our new church website (which is coming VERY soon, by the way), I’ve been a bit burned out about blogging myself..hence the lack of posts. However, I’m ready to go again and a couple search phrases have motivated me.
I want to address burnout in worship ministry, and address how to raise up new worship leaders, two things that I think go hand in hand. So, beginning next Monday, I will do a series of posts on these two topics. But in the meantime, a question: how do you deal with burnout in your ministry? How do you deal with keeping yourself from getting exhausted and how do you deal with keeping your volunteers from getting exhausted?
