HOW TO GET PEOPLE TO SING

HOW TO GET PEOPLE TO SING

OUR JOB IS TO HELP CONNECT PEOPLE TO GOD BY SINGING BUT OFTENTIMES WE FEEL LIKE WE CAN T GET THEM TO SING. IT S OUR RESPONSIBILITY, IT S OUR ROLE. WE RE THE LEADER. I never will forget when North Point first started and I was leading a Bible study called 722. When I led at 722, man, people were just singing at the top of their lungs every night.then on Sunday when I came in to lead at North Point people weren t as with me. It was frustrating. I was in the office one day and I was making that comment to our music director, Jeff Goode. I said, Man they just don t get it. They don t know how to sing. The crazy thing that happened is, my pastor Andy Stanley happened to be walking by our office and he heard that statement and he said, Hey Todd can we go to lunch today? Andy sat me down and I ll never forget it, we were at Mellow Mushroom Pizza and he told a story that I ll never forget. He said, Todd, this past summer my wife Sandra and I went to the beach with our 3 kids. His youngest daughter at the time, Allie, she was like 4 years old and his sons were a few years beyond them, Andrew and Garrett, and Andy had decided to take the kids for a walk on the beach. As they were walking on the beach they got into the walk for about 100 yards and realized that Allie was nowhere to be found. Andy was in a panic and looking everywhere. He turned around and he looked back down the beach and he saw Allie with her face in her hands sobbing and she was crying because they had left her. They had left her behind. They were going at their pace without paying attention to where she was. There s a massive principle to be learned in this, Andy said, Todd, don t ever blame your audience that you re leading for their lack of response. It s your job to lead. Man, that hit me like a dagger. I ve never forgotten it and it s really cemented that idea in my mind and how I am as a worship leader. THE PROBLEM: PEOPLE AREN T SIGNING We all know how powerful it can be for a room full of people to be singing out in praise and confession to God. The worst thing we can do is blame them. Our problem is people aren t singing. There s reasons why. We all know what it s like to see blank stares. You ve got the guy on the front row with his arms crossed or maybe somebody in the 5th row has coffee in their hand. Our job is to help connect people to God by singing but oftentimes we feel like we can t get them to sing. It s our responsibility, again, as that story said. It s our role. We re the leader. THE SOLUTION: INVITE PEOPLE TO RESPOND We ve come up with a solution and a key word to help you cement this idea in your brain. We want you to invite people to a response. When I say invite I don t mean just, hey, let s sing. Let s worship. Anybody can say that. That s easy. In order to invite we need to do some key things. 1. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. First, we need to know our audience. I d love to set this up, by using this illustration. Imagine that you re getting married. You got a wedding coming up and you re going to send out invitations. You re going to invite people that you know. So, the question for you as you re inviting people to sing is, do you know these people? Do you know their age? Who are you leading? 2

THE MORE WE BECOME STUDENTS OF OUR AUDIENCE THE BETTER WE LL BE ABLE TO LEAD THEM. Are these students? Are they empty nesters? Remember there are some widows in the audience. What season of life are they in? What demographic in the audience are you leading? We have to know the people we re leading. The more we become students of our audience the better we ll be able to lead them. Here s how we know our audience. These are some simple things we can do, but I promise you as one speaking from experience they go against the grain of everything in me, honestly. They re hard to do but I promise there will be a payoff for you getting to know your audience. GET OUT OF THE GREEN ROOM. In churches across America green rooms have been set up and they re great. They re a place we can go hibernate. That we can get away from the crowd. Those are important. Jesus got away from people oftentimes and withdrew to lonely places but when you re at church on a Sunday, when you have access to that many people, it can be so good to get out of the green room to get to know them. My friend Martin Smith in England told me when I asked him Martin what makes a great worship leader? He said, Todd, I don t care what someone s doing on stage if they re not getting to know the people in their audience off stage. I love that response. It was eye opening for me. SIT IN THE SERVICE. We can be a part of what s going on. I pick up so much by getting off the stage because I see the people around me. I feel what they re feeling. I hear what they re hearing. Your worship can be elevated and your ability to lead people sing by knowing what they re feeling like in the room. I would encourage you to sit in the service. HOLD DOORS FOR PEOPLE. It s an awesome way to serve. You can talk to people between services. I hate to say this but for years I was a green room rat. I confess. I sat in the green room. It s all I knew. No one had challenged me on that. In the past years I ve begun to get out of the green room as a leader and you have no idea how you coming up to a person and putting your arm around them or listening to them and what their family is going to what that can mean to them. As you get to know them, as you get to know their stories and listen to them you re going to become so much better at leading them because you re going to feel what they feel. You re going to know the season of life they re in. You re going to know their experiences. So that s another key way to know your audience, listen and get to know their stories. It ll make your songs have more meaning. You ll have more passion as you lead them, as you introduce them. 3

2. KNOW YOUR ENVIRONMENT. I ll never forget all my years of leading youth camps. Youth camp environment is great. Night one they ve come in to camp. You could sing Mary Had a Little Lamb and sing it and play it in three chords and people would jump up and down. Kids in that environment are excited, they can t wait to get into it. But, for most of us that s not what we re dealing with on a Sunday morning. I never will forget coming home from being on the road leading worship for a week with students. They were into it. They were worshiping. They were responding. They had seen Jesus. Then I would come into the room to lead on a Sunday morning and it was back to mom and dad, middle-aged business people, students, and they hadn t seen what we had seen in that environment. Oftentimes we need to change our approach depending on what environment we re leading in. For most of us we re leading in the morning. It s 9:00 am and we re asking people to sing. That is like the antithesis of what anyone naturally wakes up wanting to do. Well, most people anyway. 3. HELP THEM SEE WHERE THEY ARE. I referenced this in a previous module but I love this statement by Matt Redman, We can t sing until we ve seen. Your job is to help people see and respond. We do that oftentimes by acknowledging the season that someone may be in. Acknowledging the ordeal they may be dealing with in their life. When we speak that out as a leader we re making a connection to their heart and they re going to be more apt to respond and sing. They re going to be how did he know that I just lost my job? Well, we know because we re all in this crazy mess together on Earth and there s things that we re dealing with all the time. As we recognize those and call them out from stage it lets people know that we re listening, we re in tune with them. They re going to want to follow us. 4. HELP THEM SEE WHAT WE VE SEEN. I want you to imagine in the middle of a forest the most beautiful waterfall exists with a huge lake that s crystal clear. The water is refreshing and you know that for anyone to see this, for anyone to be able to swim in it, to experience it, would change their life. Imagine that we re half a mile away on the outskirts of this forest and there s a path and there s a group of people and they want to see this thing that you re talking about. You ve described it to them but it s your job to lead them there. We ve got to know the people we re leading and we ve got to take them and know that we re taking them on this journey to see and to bask in and to know the God we know. To experience the forgiveness we ve experienced. That s our job as a leader. Remember you ve got an awesome place to lead them to and you re going to do that better by getting to know their story and who they are. 5. GIVE THEM AN OPPORTUNITY TO RESPOND. Are we providing space for people to hear and get on board? I think sometimes because 4

I m nervous as a worship leader or as a band we re focused so much on getting the song right that we miss creating moments. Steve Fee talked about this in a module we did on performance but sometimes we just think if we get the song done, play it loud and rock it out and get it done that s the goal. Well, sometimes that can be great. Other times you need to make room for people to hear themselves. I love what Steve said. He said, sometimes when he s leading the band will work up into a crescendo, really powerful and loud, and then they ll back up when it comes to like the last chorus of the song and let the room hear themselves sing. By doing that we re inviting them. We re inviting them to take the volume of their voices, raise them out, raise it up in the room, make an awesome sound. We do that by that dynamic. We have to ask are we just playing loud and thinking they ll jump in? That s usually not the case. We ve got to be paying attention. Then, have we planned a moment? How long has it been since you ve done an acoustic set? How long has it been since you ve stripped down your format? When things are predictable the impact goes down. Sometimes we ve been doing the same thing so much every week that people are kind of numb to the way we do worship. For you to say hey we re just going to take a couple of acoustic guitars this week and we re just going to let it be voices and instrument. Again they ll be able to hear themselves and by doing that you re inviting them. You re inviting them to be the song. 6. CALL AND RESPONSE. The last thing is a call and response. This is huge. I ve got a song called Almighty God and one Sunday Andy was at one of our campuses and he did this and it was so effective. The chorus says, The maker of the heavens knows my name. The author of the oceans gave me grace. What Andy did is he took the first line of the chorus and after announcements he said, all right we re about to sing. I want you to say this after me. The maker of the heavens. The whole room responded the maker of the heavens. A little bit louder. The maker of the heavens. Then he said, knows my name. The whole room said, knows my name. He was engaging them, inviting them to participate before we had even played a musical note. We were coming in with a little bit of a swell with music but he was involving them in a call and response. If you ve got a chorus to teach sometimes this is easy to just speak the lines and ask them to repeat after you to invite them to join along. FINAL THOUGHTS As an action step to put this invite process in to play this week we d love for you and your team to study your audience and environment. Get out of the green room. Acknowledge people s circumstances. Listen to your attendees. Plan an opportunity to possibly respond in a way that s different for you and your church. Let the room hear themselves sing. Invite them and I promise this will gradually come along. 5