It’s a small congregation. Forty members, about twenty-five at Sunday worship. Many are elderly, a significant minority struggle with mental health issues. We can’t cover every necessary job in the church.
One such area is playing music for worship. We can’t find someone to sit on the organ stool every week. Some weeks we have to use CDs of hymn tunes. For convenience, we’ve ripped them on a laptop and one of our members creates a playlist when he knows what songs the preacher has chosen.
Sunday was one of those days. It was harvest festival, and I had picked five well-known harvest hymns. This should be easy, I thought.
Wrong.
Usually there is an organist for my services. Kicking off with the definitely well-known ‘Come, ye thankful people, come’ we soon hit a problem. Our singing was an aural car crash by the end of the second verse, and I don’t mean that I’d forgotten to switch off the radio mic during the hymn. (You wouldn’t want to hear me sing. No, really.) However familiar the hymn was, the congregation was not singing at the same tempo as the recorded organist. They couldn’t hear it well enough in order to do so.
I asked for the volume to be turned up, but that wasn’t possible. We had a clarinettist accompanying the MP3. A real live one. She was altering her tempo to match the congregation, and was able to make her volume a little louder than the recording.
But that risked conflict with the laptop operator. We wouldn’t have had an outbreak of fisticuffs in Christian love – the two people in question are too lovable for that – but you could feel the tension rising.
What was the difference? The real live human musician could adjust to the congregation’s rate of progress. An inaminate recording couldn’t. (Yes, I know you can get software and gadgets that can vary the tempo of music and keep the pitch the same, but we don’t have the riches for swish gizmos.) And that’s the skill of musicians who accompany worship. It’s not a performance: it’s an enabling of the congregation. They may believe a hymn should be sung at a certain rate of knots, but if the worshippers are not up to it, they adjust, in order to achieve the goal of sung praise to our Maker and Lord.
Which in my opinion makes for a parable of church life and leadership. How many of us know how something should be done and at what speed, and won’t adjust for those who are coming along more slowly? If they are coming along and not resisting, why are they a problem? Are the best leaders like the live musicians, who instinctively adjust to the pace of the congregation in order to take them forward?
Yes, conversely, there is a time to urge a congregation forward and get them out of a rut – I don’t deny that. But in our fast-paced always-on culture, we sometimes miss the truth of which Eugene Peterson has often reminded his readers, namely that pastoral work is slow work.
Big Circumstance 
This story reminded me a bit of my church’s bus trip to Floriade (festival of spring flowers) in Canberra yesterday. Many on the bus were elderly, including the gentleman who sat in front of me. It was an early start, a long day on our feet and I covered a fair bit of territory admiring the beautiful display of flowers. On our return trip I managed to fall asleep fairly quickly. When we stopped halfway at Braidwood, the gentleman sitting in front of me said “It was a big day for you!”. If only I could have gone at his pace. 🙂
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The last Church we went to used to meet Church in the Hall “children” the rest in the Church..Now they do 9.30 Service and 11.The 9 30 Traditional 11 Modern .Of course different people like different Services. But eventually People will be together.I wish my Spiritual life had been faster.Knowing about the Holy Spirit.
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Dave, I totally disagree here. Leadership is not about slowing down to the natural pace of the slowest and laziest. That way you never get anywhere, except the grave. And it is not what good worship music leaders do. Leadership is about setting the pace and direction and encouraging others to follow at that pace. Of course the pace should be appropriate, and proper care should be made of those who really can’t keep up. But if people don’t want to follow but only to pull everyone else back, then best to let them drop out.
In this case the only swish gizmo you needed was a more powerful amplifier. A good organist doesn’t slow down for the congregation but plays loud enough for them to hear and follow. A good CD alternative needs to do the same.
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I’ll take that as a rebuke for not expressing myself clearly enough, Peter. These are not lazy people. These are people who want to keep up with the worship, but who struggle. Had they been lazy Christians who wanted to pull others back, I would entirely share your sentiments. There certainly are people who want to hold churches back, and I do not believe in pandering to them.
Allow me to offer another story-as-metaphor. At secondary school, I was OK-ish at Woodwork. I more or less coped with the assignments. But our teacher stopped the class every time the most talented boy (and yes, it was only boys who took the subject) to show us the next step. As a result, some of us who wanted to learn got left behind and discouraged. It’s that kind of concern in a spiritual setting that concerns me.
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Thanks for the clarification. The hard task for any leader has to be to get the pace correct. Sometimes this may mean allowing different people or groups to go at different paces. I guess that’s why we have different churches, and that’s not a bad thing.
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Thank you Peter Kirk we agree with you we need to Grow all t he time
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