I have been working with our youth worship team for a little over 4 years now. In that time we have mostly played for our own youth evening programs and a few Sunday Mornings. This past summer that began to change. In June we had a District Youth Week. Several churches volunteered to sponsor a night of youth week by planning an activity, meal etc, but we also wanted to make sure worship was a part of each night. Since most of the participating churches did not have a youth worship team, they asked if our team could play.
Our team did play, did a great job, and I noticed that the act of playing outside our walls forced us to get better in different ways.
1. Efficient Setup- During the youth week we basically had about 30 minutes after arrival to get set up, sound check and be ready. Now I will not pretend that the set up was perfect, sound system dialed in, but we were able to play, hear ou selves and be heard. The team worked together to make sure that all the cords went into the right slots, the instruments got set up in the right place, and that we were ready to go.
2. Song Selection- When we were not playing often we would rehearse any number of songs. When we started playing for other groups we quickly took our list of 30 songs we could do and narrowed it down to about 15 songs we do well. This gave us enough to lead a few days of services without repeating too many, but without introducing too many new ones either.
3. More Involvement- When we began to travel we found that more people became involved in the youth band. We had the same number of singers and instrumentalist, but suddenly extra ways for youth to become involved began to surface. One of our girls took the responsibility to make slides for the screens. A few youth helped with set up and tear down.
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I remember growing up how Easter Sunday was. It seemed like for that Sunday the church went all out. We had an orchestra, dancers, and big choir anthems. We had a lot of things that only happened on that Sunday. And then the next Sunday was back to “normal.” I have begun to wonder if that is a good thing or not. Is going all out and putting such an emphasis on Easter Sunday theatrics helpful or hurtful for those that come back the next week?
Here is a little exercise we use with our youth band to work on playing together, keeping rhythm, following a leader and learning to listen to other parts. We took a repetitive section of a song, in our case we used the first part of “Undiginified” and we made sure everyone knew it. Then I told them that I had an on off switch. When I pointed to them they should play if they weren’t playing or stop playing if they were. I started off pointing to the drums and bass, then added guitar, keyboard etc. Then I switched off the drums to see how the rest of the group would keep beat. We played for about 10 minutes with this and I let my vocalists take a turn at telling members when to play or not.




