Here’s a bit of back story on this one.
Ever since I was blessed and privileged to have joined a certain school’s planning committee, I thought I’d go ahead and exercise our approach and strategy to planning, to my own worship team. I’ll also be honest – this is a direct response to another entity trying to impose their own plans on my own team, even if they know that we’re still establishing our own foundation. Instead of pushing back what they want us to do, I’m countering by setting up our own vision and plans as a worship team, so that anything that they insist on us doing would not be in accordance to their will, but seen as supplementary to our own vision and plan.
With that being said, well, this is a little more reactive than I’d want, but push came to shove, and I wasn’t about to stand by and let other folks tread on us.
Also, I told myself, you know what, this still counts, doesn’t it? I mean, I could add this as my thousand word a day quota, couldn’t I? I’ll just say this: For anyone random reading online, well, I apologize in advance if this seems a little vague to you all, but it is my prayer, along with every other bag of words that I dump, that I add value to your life, one way or the other.
August 04, 2023
Up until now, the pattern we’ve been taking in our school planning sessions was as follows: Acknowledge the vision that was set at the origin, as a pivot point to what we’re up to today, that we would re-establish plans and visions today. After said plans and goals were established, we categorized each one according to urgency, and after each goal was categorized, we agreed to go through each immediate-urgency goal, to convert each of them to SMART (Specific/Simple, Manageable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound – I think) goals, as well as listing down how to attain each goal, and who was responsible.
Here’s how it went on our part, as the church worship team: We started off by talking about what our vision was before, or rather, what we wanted before as a worship team. Our current Music Director (MD) immediately started off by saying that he wanted each one on the team to be enhanced when it came to technical skills. The ball kept rolling and we mentioned that in the past we wanted to have our own compositions, and we wanted to also introduce new songs from other artists – this, considering that the worship teams, oh, 10-15 years ago were more or less ‘comfortable’ with the songs of the age, without seeing any need to look for new songs.
MD also mentioned that we all talked about how we wanted to be ‘strike anywhere’ – that is, ready to step up to lead worship no matter who was around or what was available. Another person who was present whom I personally considered was the most technical (and actually, the most experienced) among us, who I’ll name Tech from now on, chimed in and said that it was our desire back in the day to be adept in Time Management.
I recalled that it was also our desire (considering the desires of our then Senior Pastor for the service we were placed in) to hold a concert in a nearby community, targeting the youth there in particular. That never materialized.
Yet another person who was present, who I’ll name Vocals from now on – or, okay, V – I believe it was V who mentioned that it was our vision back in the day to ensure that the worship team was accepting, or people who were practicing or participating with us were in a ‘safe zone’.
We then asked ourselves, in light of this, what are our goals today? What is our vision today? Again, I pushed MD, Tech and V to speak.
Tech was quick to say, we want to honor the vision of our then Senior-Senior Pastor. Now that I’m writing all this down I’m thinking, we’ll probably need to clarify on what that was exactly.
MD reiterated that we still wanted to be ‘strike anywhere’ – only now we wanted to expand the meaning of this to beyond the worship team, and as an attitude of the entire service – That is, because we’ve moved on as of late to be a full-blown church versus just a worship service.
I’m not sure but I think I was the one who reinforced this ‘strike anywhere’ philosophy and mindset by saying that we needed to be equipped, and constantly equipped – both technically, and spiritually. And then I took this time as an opportunity to say that we could certainly do better when it came to accent reduction (that is, proper pronunciation of P’s, F’s, B’s and V’s or PaFaBaVas, among other things), and we could certainly say or sing more when it came to free worship.
I kept the ball rolling a little more here by sharing on how it was still our desire to compose, and not only compose new songs, but to create more content – art in other forms. Not just songs, but instrumentals.
At around this time MD also thought to chime in with the moniker, ‘quality over quantity’, to which we all agreed.
I had to ask them again, what did we want today? How do we see ourselves as a worship team? What are our parameters for success? We shifted from ourselves from this point, and established that we all wanted a more engaged congregation.
MD again threw in that he wanted us to have ‘top of the line’ equipment, and not just for the team, but for each of us, personally.
With regards to equipping and ensuring that we want quality over quantity, we raised up the need to keep brainstorming, to keep reminding each other of our standards, and to enforce them by way of establishing checklists.
Through the conversations that also ensued we came up with the need to simplify ‘quality over quantity’, instead saying ‘quality of service over optics and appearances.’
And here I am thinking all of this was important, just minutes before I actually meet up with them again. I needed to recap personally before I recapped with them.
Tune in for more.
Until the next meeting, and the next post, God bless you.
JB's Personal Brain Defragmenter 
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