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Vital Worship
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 Bridgeway Community Church has worship teams focused on music, prayer, Scripture reading, and more. Photo courtesy of Bridgeway Community Church. |
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Worship Coordinators: Lead, learn, and let go
Today’s worship coordinators do far more than sing into a microphone. They lead congregations to broader, deeper worship. They plan, train, and lead worship while learning to let go and let God.
Before the Good Friday service at Bridgeway Community Church in Haledon, New Jersey, a few members chose roles of Jesus, Pilate, and others named in the John 19 account of Jesus sentenced to be crucified.
After worshipers gathered, but before the Good Friday service officially began, worship coordinator Jacie Sytsma led the congregation through a little rehearsal. They read aloud the verses with lines spoken by the crowd gathered outside Pilate’s palace.
“The service was simple but meaningful. The congregation shouted, ‘Take him away! Crucify him!’ It was the first time they were put in that position as sinners, as unforgiven,” says Claudia Godoy Cortes, who met Jacie Sytsma while coordinating worship for Good Shepherd Christian Reformed Church in Prospect Park, New Jersey.
Since becoming worship coordinators, Sytsma and Godoy Cortes have mirrored the changing roles of worship coordinators in many places. They’ve expanded their view of what worship is, how to lead it, and how to learn from other worship coordinators.
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What worship coordinators do
Worship coordinators often work part-time as paid or volunteer staff, so must balance church work with other roles. Claudia Godoy Cortes, who coordinated worship at Good Shepherd for two years before coming to Bridgeway, is also a high school Spanish teacher.
At East Whittier Friends Church in Whittier, California, worship coordinator Jeremy Cosand squeezes a lot—church staff meetings, planning, preparation, rehearsals, leading worship—into a dozen or so hours each week.
Cosand also plans bi-monthly praise and prayer services, coordinates seasonal services and events, and reports to the elders and congregation. Plus he’s a graduate student in philosophy and adjunct professor.
If you search online to find worship coordinator job openings or see how church websites describe this task, you’ll notice that many churches
- Use the terms “worship” and “music” interchangeably
- Want someone to lead a “contemporary” or “blended” service
- Seek someone good at singing and playing one or more instruments
- Hope for a worship coordinator who also has pastoral and administrative gifts or can design entire services, lead substance abuse events, oversee setup and takedown, run sound and AV systems…
 Kristy Ruthven reviews the morning’s Scripture passage with the young man who will read it. |
How worship coordinators define worship
Although worship coordinators and congregations may begin with the idea that worship equals music, many are expanding their view of what counts as worship.
“The conviction is pretty widespread that worship equals only singing. When my husband and I moved cross country to plant Bridgeway, we knew so little at first, not even how to structure a service. We’d spend 45 minutes on Saturday night to pick songs,” Jacie Sytsma says.
The experience of planning on the fly pushed the Sytsmas to seek out worship seminars, books, and mentors. They realized that worship is a multidirectional relationship that goes beyond individuals singing praise to God.
Worship also means listening for what God says to us. Amy and Henry Schenkel came to this understanding gradually. They began Monroe Community Church in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, when they graduated from seminary.
Amy says, “Although we had book knowledge, we were pretty green. Jeremiah Briggs has been worship team leader since the week before we started regular worship services. At the time, he could sing and play guitar but he knew nothing about worship, about leading worship, or even about organized church.
“We realized we have to approach planning and executing our worship with the belief that God is real! That belief ignites a passion to choose songs with truthful and important lyrics, read God’s Word as the most important words we hear all week, and pray like God is really listening,” she says.
Princeton Christian Reformed Church in Kentwood, Michigan, already had a history when Kristy Ruthven hired on to direct the worship and youth programs. “In designing worship, we use music, art, and words to highlight—and respond to—the truth of who God is and how he works throughout history and now in our lives,” she says.
Ruthven says some worship services focus on God’s beauty and compassion, others on God’s power and justice. “But each time we gather, the gospel is central because we present the life and mission of Christ.” Some weeks this comes out most strongly in a song, such as Martha Butler’s “Alleluia, He Is Coming.” Other weeks it’s in the sermon or Scripture readings.
During four years as volunteer worship coordinator and ten years as a paid one, Jeremy Cosand has helped East Whittier Friends see a third direction in worship. There’s God speaking to us, us responding to God…and all of us experiencing ourselves as part of Christ’s body.
“We’ve learned that, in addition to celebrating the Lord, a large purpose of worship is what Paul calls edification and mutual submission—building others up by sharing with each other openly, accepting one another lovingly, respecting (and in some cases encouraging) one another’s differences,” he says.
Cosand says people experience worship as a corporate activity in congregational singing and prayer as well as in contemplation, while the whole group is silent together. This often leads to spontaneous participatory testimony and calls to action. He reminds worshipers that offering financial gifts is a major part of corporate worship.
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Worship conversations for the long haul
“It’s a lot of work to train people to participate successfully in worship. Before skills training means anything, we need to articulate what we believe is going on,” Jacie Sytsma says.
After planning worship according to a new theme each week and learning to ask good questions, Jacie Sytsma began to see worship as “a holy conversation with God, one that goes beyond our Sunday experience to affect all our life. Worship has the potential to shape people’s lives. So how will our worship practices form us long-term?”
She and Claudia Godoy Cortes set up a schedule of monthly meetings so teams from Bridgeway and Good Shepherd could study worship together. They also hosted worship workshops open to area churches.
Learning about worship together helped people internalize a “worship as conversation” approach. Godoy Cortes relays an insight from a Good Shepherd teen, Anthony Mathias, who said, “God wants us to be actively involved in worship. It’s not enough to be a benchwarmer. When God calls us to worship him, that requires an intentional response on our part.”
Two Bridgeway women who’d grown up Catholic, one in Jamaica, the other in Kenya, told Sytsma, “Hey! We were in dialogue with God in the rote and structure of the Catholic mass. We just didn’t know it.”
Looking at worship as a conversation that shapes people for the long haul led Bridgeway to include confession and assurance every week. “We used to praise only but we realized we need to say ‘I’m sorry’ to God—and leave guilt and shame on the floor,” Sytsma says.
The story continues... Being a Worship Coordinator Is about God, Not You
Text by Joan Huyser-Honig
Photography by Steve Huyser-Honig
Don't miss the bonus story Resources that Worship Coordinators Recommend or Long for.
Listen to audio excerpts from worship coordinators Jacie Sytsma and Claudia Godoy Cortes:
- What two church worship teams learned from each other (2:04, 1.9MB)
- Ways to connect languages and cultures in worship (4:33, 4.17MB)
- How Bridgeway Community Church broadened and deepened its view of worship (4:40, 5.25MB)
Read and see results from “More Than Music: The Spoken Word in Worship,” sponsored by Good Shepherd Christian Reformed Church and Bridgeway Community Church, and led by Ron and Deb Rienstra and Julie Romeo.
Feel free to copy or adapt the congregational services survey that helped Kristy Ruthven recruit worship participants at Princeton Christian Reformed Church in Kentwood, Michigan. Administrative coordinator Yvonne Elliott put the results into Power Church Plus, a congregational database, and printed out reports for various committees. But you could input into Microsoft Excel or Open Office, freeware with a spreadsheet.
Read why John Witvliet describes worship coordinators as shepherds. Back in 1996, Robert Webber advised not getting hung up on worship style.
Need discussion ideas for your next worship committee meeting? You can discuss foundational worship principles, customize a worship element planning grid, identify gaps in your service plans, or choose a worship area to focus on for the next several meetings.
Ever run into conflicts while coordinating worship planning with other church staff or teams? Read this list of essentials for healthy partnerships.
If you are having trouble coming up with new and meaningful worship ideas, try visiting other churches. Or take a virtual visit, courtesy of The Rochester Pluralism Project or the book How the Other Half Worships by photographer Camilo Jose Vergara. What can you learn from traditions very different from your own?
Browse related stories about designing worship together, equipping worship leaders, the “in between” words, multistaff ministry, and worship masters programs.
Feel free to print and distribute these stories at your staff, council, worship, or education committee meeting. These questions will get members talking about the role of worship coordinators.
- What are the main tasks of the worship coordinator at your church? How well do these tasks align with how your church defines worship?
- In what ways and how often do your worship coordinator and other worship leaders study worship together? How have you applied this learning? If you don’t study, why not?
- In what ways could your worship coordinator and other worship leaders move the congregation to a broader, deeper view of worship? What first steps might you take?
- Name one or two regular worship practices that form people’s habits and lives in your congregation. Which worship practices might you add so that worshipers grow into the people your sermons ask them to become?
What is the best way you’ve found to expand the definition of worship from mainly music to include all that goes on in worship services? Please write to us so we can identify trends and share your great ideas. Whether you do these or any other things, we’d love to learn what works for you:
- Did you find a conference, workshop, book, multimedia series, or other resources that helped you engage more people in learning, planning, and leading worship?
- Did you create a worship or education series to help people experience different worship traditions, perhaps drawing on congregational members as resources? Which new worship ideas has your congregation been most receptive to?
- Have you developed a grid to help you identify places in a worship service or Sundays in the church year where you could easily plug in volunteers?
- Which methods have worked best to recruit more people to help plan and design worship?
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This article was first published by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, http://www.calvin.edu/worship/stories/.