HOW TO FIND THE RIGHT MUSICIANS

HOW TO FIND THE RIGHT MUSICIANS

WE WANT TO CREATE A COME-AND-SEE RESPONSE FROM OUR ATTENDERS. IN ORDER TO DO THAT, WE HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO FINDING THE RIGHT MUSICIANS THAT LL HELP CREATE THAT KIND OF EXPERIENCE SO THAT PEOPLE HAVE THAT KIND OF REACTION. Thirty years ago if you were to ask the question, How to find the right musicians? It was pretty easy. All you needed was a piano player and an organist and many of those knew family members that could pull that off. But the culture has changed, with the advent of music becoming such a big deal. People have more access to it from shows like American Idol and The Voice. Our culture really does value music, and they value quality in music. In church we have a great opportunity to engage, reach, and attract people with the music we perform. I know for me personally, over the eighteen years I ve been in North Point we ve always tried to do music in such a way that people come into the church and say, Man, I can t believe this is a church, that music was really good. I think the same thing can happen in your church. We want to create a come-and-see response from our attenders. In order to do that, we have to pay attention to finding the right musicians that ll help create that kind of experience so that people have that kind of reaction. THE PROBLEM for all of us is that it s hard to find great musicians. It s hard to find the right ones that will help us engage and reach people. THE SOLUTION is to identify our standard, our system, and our talent. We can t identify the right worship leader or musician until we ve done these. 1. IDENTIFY OUR STANDARD I want us to start by identifying the standard we re looking for. It s the filter for everything else that we do musically at our church. For years in our churches we ve had a good enough for church mentality. What I mean by that is we hold ourselves to a standard that s really not something we re shooting high for. We d say, Hey, this is okay. We don t really have to focus on this being great because this is church. It s good enough for church. In the end, that s mediocrity, and I don t believe we need that in churches. I think there s a better way. I think a high standard musically glorifies God, and it attracts people to your church. It attracts people to want to come and say to their friends and neighbors, Hey, you ve got to come see what these guys are doing. The music here is amazing. It also attracts great musicians. They want to be a part of something great. I ll never forget a few years ago being in Los Angeles, and I had the privilege of hanging out observing a service with a drummer named Russ Miller, who was playing on a lot of records, like, Christina Aguilera, and different people. He said, Todd, you know, one of the things that I see in LA is that really great musicians come in to attend a church, and if they see that the standard that a church has for music is not really that great, they don t want to be a part of that because they want to play with great people. 2

You ve heard the saying, Excellence attracts excellence. I want us to remember that phrase, Excellence attracts excellence, it does. It also means for you in whatever church you re in, regardless of the size, excellence may not mean having a full band. We need to get rid of that idea. I think sometimes we think, Well, excellence means looking like the guy down the street, and they ve got this great worship band. You may not have access yet to the best players you can find to pull off a great sounding band, so for you, it would be much more beneficial to find one person who can lead worship that s great, knows how to play guitar or keyboard, confident in that, and look can just look at that one musician, that one leader, and say that s excellent. 2. DECIDE YOUR SYSTEM The other thing we need to do is decide which system we want to adopt. Now there s two systems, and you either fall on one side of the fence or on the other on this: volunteer or pay. I want you to know that they both cost something. THE PAY SYSTEM to be on time, we can require them to know their music, because they re getting something in return as payment for their gas and time coming. I ve seen this play out at North Point in the way that we have built our system. It is also a reward to hard work, the excellence and the time that a musician puts in by bringing all the experience they have to the table is reward in a way. It doesn t have to be some massive amount of money, but a little bit can say a lot to someone, and it can help retain those musicians that you want. The tensions to manage with a pay system are that sometimes pay can cloud motivation. Sometimes you can get players involved and they really are just there because we re paying something, and we don t want that. We want their heart, we want their life, we want buy-in. The other tension to manage with a pay system is musicians can become dependent. It s like, I make x amount of dollars per week, and I m going to use that for my car payment, or whatever. It can start getting in the way of what the heart motivation is. The benefit of the pay system is we can retain those who are professionals. It s like if we were hiring an air conditioning man to come work on something in our church. We re paying him for what he does professionally. We also can require something. We can require people THE VOLUNTEER SYSTEM The benefit of a volunteer music system is that it doesn t cost money, obviously, and invested time can create love for the church. When we give our life away and invest our 3

time without asking for anything in return, we oftentimes end up loving the church and end up loving our community. The tensions to manage, as it pertains to the volunteer system, are you can have last minute cancellations, and they don t have to be there because they re not being paid. Hey, I ve got to cancel, this came up, or, Hey, I m going to be late, people not being on time and making that system excellent. Also, it s harder to retain the players in your ranks that are professionals. We ve got to pay attention to what kind of system we re using. Then, we need to identify the talent we want to use. We also need to assess by finding out who needs honest feedback. There may be musicians that you need to keep on, but you need to have a hard conversation. What s keeping them from being the right musician for your team is that there are some things that need to be addressed, and we owe them that honesty. Also ask the question, who needs more reps? Maybe you have a musician that s worked their way into the main service playing, and they re not killing it every week, they re not the best that you feel they could be. Oftentimes student ministries are a great place to get more reps in a place in an environment the stakes are not as high as the main service environment. 3. IDENTIFY THE TALENT There s three parts to identifying this talent. We want to assess, and address, and then we want to audition. Then, who do we have that we need to cut? This is a tough decision, and I believe quality is better than quantity. Again, I d rather have one good leader on acoustic or piano than a whole band of people that s hurting. 1. ASSESS The first thing we want to do with talent is assess. By that I mean we need to ask the question, who do we have in our musician pool? Who do we have in our community, in our town that we need to keep that s playing right now? Some of your musicians need to stay. They re doing a great job, they re faithful, they re learning their parts right, they re on time, you need to keep those people. They re the right people. Real quick, I want us to remember that God has created us all with a gift, all with a talent, and when we find those people that are plugged in to do what they were created to do, we won t have to ask the question. So if you re having to ask the question of people, I don t know if this is their thing, it s probably not. And loving someone well is calling attention to that, and having a tough conversation, but helping them also find something that they re great at. 4

2. ADDRESS The second thing we need to do with talent is to address. Let your team know that mediocre isn t going to cut it moving forward. Have the hard conversations, love them well by doing that. One addendum here, and I see this a lot. The stage should never be a place to placate friends or relatives. I know this is hard, and I may be hitting too close to home for some people, but oftentimes we think that the stage is needed for our ego. Or we want our granddaughter or our brother or somebody to be involved because we love them and they re close to us. We can t use that as a filter. That is not always what s best for our environment and for the people. Sometimes the people we re trying to hold on to and keep on stage, we re doing them more harm by keeping them in a role they weren t created to do. When someone is doing what they were created to do, everyone in the room knows. Another way is to get out and search for players. College campuses and ministries at college are a great place to look, so if you have colleges in your area, I would encourage you to get out and look in those ministries. Make some phone calls. Email. See if you can come watch something going on at one of those ministries one night. Word-of-mouth is also great. As an addendum to this, we actually found a friend of mine, Kristian Stanfill at Samford College years ago. We pulled him into our youth ministry, he worked his way up the ranks at North Point, led a worship with me at 722, and now he s an artist for Passion, and leading worship for thousands of people. You never know who you might find in a school somewhere. There s a lot of great talent out there. A lot of the right musicians. Another thing you can do is to ask musicians that are great in your community, Hey, do you know of a bass player? Hey, do you know of a drummer? A lot of times they network well together. Also network with other churches in the area, after all, we are the church, the big C church, even though we have denominational differences and we re called different names, we all are trying to do the best we can musically for the glory of God. You may find out that by networking and building relationships with other churches in your community, you guys can actually help each other discover right musicians and find great talent and share. 3. AUDITION Lastly, we need to audition musicians. Audition to find the right talent. I ve discovered, and I ve seen play out over and over again, that, all-call, announce at church, everybody come out audition type scenarios are not that effective. I ll never forget one year at North Point we 5

auditioned about 150 musicians, and I think we found two. It was just a large, cumbersome process, it involved a lot of people s time. You had people show up late. There s just so many variables that can go wrong with all-call musicians, so I d like to tell you an audition process that we ve been using lately that s worked really effectively. As an additional resource to this teaching module, I m going to be doing an interview with a friend of mine, Matt Goss, in Pennsylvania, at LCBC Church, and Matt s also going to give us some insight into how they ve done auditions. AUDITION PROCESS This is how we do it, this is a super, simple process, and with technology, it makes it easier than it s ever been. 1. SUBMIT A YOUTUBE OR VIMEO VIDEO. Step number one is to submit a YouTube or Vimeo video. It gives the person auditioning as many takes as they need to put their best foot forward. They can record themselves singing, playing their instrument, and it allows you the opportunity to review over and over again to get a real feel for what they re bringing to the table. A cool story about this, you probably have heard this or seen this movie, the rock group Journey discovered their latest lead singer on YouTube. Neil Schon actually found him on YouTube. Video is a great resource just to be able to check somebody out and see what they do without having to have that next conversation. 2. SET-UP AN IN-PERSON AUDITION The second step in the audition process is to set up an in-person audition for those who pass the video, so if you ve seen a video and you say, Hey, I love what you re doing, can you come in and meet with us? Set up a time, email about it, phone call about it, you want to set up a 30-minute time to listen to them audition. It needs to be a private audition so that they have someone to listen to them privately, but always have a third party, especially it s a guy/girl scenario. We have a rule at our church, and I love it, always keep doors, and if you re auditioning a girl if you re a guy worship pastor, bring in a third party. One, it helps with our standards, two, it helps having a second ear to listen to that person and evaluate who they are. After you set the audition, you have your third party ready, we want to communicate our standard up front. We want to let the person we re auditioning know this: Here s the deal: Regardless of the outcome of this 6

audition, we don t want you to view your worth to God, your worth to this church based on you passing this. This is huge because people are valuable to God, they just are. They are gifted by God in many different areas. You have an opportunity with the audition process to love people well. Don t forget that. They may not be the best guitar player, but put your arm around them, listen to them, and say, Listen we ve got other opportunities at church, and man, we love your heart, we d love to have you around. At the beginning of the audition, let them tell their story for about fifteen minutes. You want to just open up the floor and say, Hey, tell me about yourself, and tell me about how you met Christ. That s a huge piece. One addendum to that I want to say on this audition process. People ask me all the time, Todd, do you use nonbelievers on stage, or do you only use believers? I ll tell you this: For North Point and for Matt s church, LCBC, we ve decided that in a singing role, we won t use a nonbeliever. We want people who are vocalizing something with their mouth to be alive in Christ, and that to be who they are and that to come out. We will, however, on certain occasions be intentional about pulling in a nonbeliever in a role as a drummer or a bass player as we sense the Holy Spirit leading us to see if that might be a next step for this person coming to Christ. You can tell. There might be someone interested in coming to your church, they might be a nonbeliever, but they come in and see your music circle and they go, Man, this is pretty cool, I d love to play with you guys. Well, bring them in. Love on them, let them see what people who love Jesus, who they are, and how they treat people and treat them well, serve them well. After they ve told their story, have them play or sing the song that you sent out previously so that they can give you an example in person of what you ve asked them to perform. Then we need to communicate a response if possible, give them the positives of what they did, and the negatives, and be honest. I ll have people sing sometimes, and I ll say, Hey, I don t think that you re giving me all that God created you to give. I think there s more in your gas tank. I ll have them go back, and say, Hey, can you come back in six months, and work on your vocal tone, work on your pitch? Give them that positive feedback, that instructive feedback that s going to help them become great at what they do if they have that potential in them. Always call by phone to communicate the 7

results. There s nothing worse than getting an email that says, Sorry you didn t make it. You need to explain why, and you need to explain that you care and that you love them, and that you re not letting them go and cutting them loose, that your church loves them. You d love for them to serve in some kind of capacity. FINAL THOUGHTS To wrap things up, remember, there is a way to find the right musicians for you church. It begins with identifying the standard, or the bar you want to aim for. The system, pay or volunteer, that you want to adopt. Then, to find talent we need to address, assess, and audition people to find the right people that are going to make our worship services the best they can be. 8