I once heard Bob Kauflin comment that if worship leaders were to do any kind of continued education, he would encourage them to study Biblical Counseling. Isn’t that interesting? Not necessarily theology, or music theory, not necessarily Greek, Hebrew, or composition, conducting, or sight-reading. No, Biblical Counseling. The longer I lead worship the more I am convinced that leading worship is primarily a pastoral function before it is a musical one. It is pastoral because we are dealing with real human souls. Souls in all of their brokenness and joy, souls in all of their immaturity and experience, souls in all of their comfort and distress, and we are seeking to guide, instruct, teach, and care for them through liturgy, song, Scripture, prayer, and preparation.
Worship As Pastoral Care by William H. Willimon, was one of the books that helped me continue to put language to the pastoral aspect of leading worship. Willimon says,
The history of pastoral care shows two dimensions of the care of our souls: (1) the preservation of spiritual health through preventive or protective care as well as daily guiding and sustaining care and (2) the restoration of spiritual and emotional health if and when dysfunction occurs…
Liturgy is education. The question before us… is not whether our people will learn when they worship. The question is, what will they learn when we lead them in worship? We sometimes forget that we are engaged in education every time we lead the congregation in prayer or in the Lord’s Supper or in any other occasion of public worship. Unfortunately, people often learn things when they worship that we may not have intended - but they still learn.
Public worship is always an invitation to the individual to risk communion, to move out from oneself into the larger body…
We are not simply choosing songs, we are forming people. Conviction and comfort is the work of the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit will often work through the people of God to voice that conviction or comfort. We must be attentive to the voice of the Spirit in our preparation as well as in our leading. We must choose songs that enable…
The line between work and worship, between the everyday, pedestrian details of the workaday world and the world within the liturgy should be a thin and frequently broken line.
When we see the liturgy and gathering as the people of God as more than something we do once a week, but something we inhabit - something which inhabits us - we are beginning to invite the conviction and comfort of the Holy Spirit more fully into the rhythms of our lives.
Karl Barth says: ‘It is not only in worship that the community is edified and edifies itself. But it is here first that this continuously takes place. And if it does not take place here, it does not take place anywhere.’ If the community does not worship, it is not a Christian community. If worship does not upbuild and sustain the community, it is not Christian worship.
The liturgy is ‘the work of the people,’ it is the action, the yearning, the heartbreak, and the outstretched hands of those who are gathered around the Table and the action, the yearning, the heartbreak, and outstretched hands of the God who deems to meet them in the flesh.