A "Pipeline" for Training More Worship Leaders At Your Church

  I cannot overstate how much prayer really

is the primary fuel for the pipeline.

All the strategy in the world will not accomplish more than praying to the God

who oversees everything in the world.

It really feels like in the last year, after two years of praying every single

day, God just said, yes.

My bucket’s not big enough to catch all of the rain of God

saying yes to the prayers.

You have to pray for it if you want to see God do and he can do way more,

way more than you’re even asking for.

Welcome to the Worship Ministry Training podcast, a monthly podcast for

worship leaders who are serious about growing in their craft and calling.

My name is Alex, fellow worship leader.

Super stoked you’re here.

And if you’re a new listener, I’m going to encourage you to

hit that subscribe button because every single month I’m going to give you

helpful, practical guidance that you can immediately implement into your ministry.

Hit that subscribe button and then go back through the past nine years

of episodes and binge listen your way to a healthier Ministry.

If you’re someone who is really serious about growing as a worship leader,

I’m going to point you to the Worship Ministry Training Academy.

What is the academy?

It’s an online training platform that will give you everything you need

to build a thriving worship ministry.

You’ll get 10 in-depth courses on topics like set building, team building, musical

excellence, vocal technique, and more.

You’ll get live monthly training workshops on topics that are relevant to you.

You’ll get exclusive expert interviews with some of the best worship leaders

in the world.

You’ll get done for Ministry admin systems and audition process, onboarding

documents, team training materials, and even team discipleship materials.

We will take care of you so you can focus on leading your team.

If that sounds like something that would be of help to you,

you can try the Worship Ministry Training Academy for just one dollar

by going to worshipministrytraining. Com.

Sign up today for your one dollar trial, and I hope to see you

inside of the academy.

All right, let’s get into today’s episode.

So today we are talking about the very important topic of Raising up more

worship leaders, because I don’t know about you, but I need a break sometimes.

You probably need a break sometimes.

And if we just grind ourselves into dust, we’re going to burn out and be fruitless

and not very fun to be around.

Probably grumpy, maybe grumpy with our families.

And so we want to raise up more worship leaders selfishly

for ourselves, but also for our churches.

And the deeper I get into the worship training world, the more

I realise there are not enough qualified worship leaders in the world.

And I have large companies coming to me saying, We need you to help us find

worship leaders for all these churches that are looking for worship leaders.

And so there is a massive glut of worship leaders.

And I’m praying that this podcast episode helps all of us to get motivated

to train up more worship leaders from within our own church.

Because one, your church is going to benefit, but two,

that person is going to benefit.

And then three, that person might go out and help a new church

that needs a worship leader.

And so you’re actually helping advance the Kingdom of God.

And so my hope today, as I introduce our wonderful guest here in a second, is that

you would get a vision for developing more worship leaders at your church,

and that you would learn the practical principles for how you can do that.

And so I’m really excited to bring on to the screen, my friend Dalton

Schafer, who’s actually also in the academy with us.

So it’s really nice to have you here on the podcast.

Good to meet you.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s good to be here.

Thanks for having me. Cool.

So you are out in Iowa at a church called Kandah.

Candeo.

Tell us just a little bit about the church, but more, I want you just

to introduce this training programme that you’ve developed there.

So a little bit about the church and then a sweeping overview of what you’re doing.

Yeah.

Candeo Church was planted in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

We’re in a college town.

We were planted 10 years ago, so we just got to celebrate our 10-year anniversary.

In the last 10 years, we’ve planted three churches.

We’re about to plant our fourth this summer.

Alongside that, we’ve sent staff out to other churches that we’ve helped plant.

The first year I was on staff.

They had planted a church two weeks before I got here.

That next summer, we helped plant two more churches.

It just is the ethos of our community and our whole network.

We’re part of a network called the Salt Network.

About 30 churches all in college towns.

Of roughly 10,000 or more college students, that’s our target zones.

There’s about 403 major university centres in North America that we’re trying

to plant in and another 100 globally.

A lot of people would see our church and our network, and they would think

like, Oh, man, they’re college students, and so they plant churches

to reach college students. That’s true.

But I would actually say we’re about church planting,

and we have found college ministry to be such a fruitful place.

College students are the most unreached people group in America, and

every year you get more of them.

Even if your city has 10,000 college students, well, every four years,

that’s a whole new set of 10,000.

It’s not the same 10,000.

It’s just a really fruitful place to do ministry.

We go after college students because we know that they’re going

somewhere, and our hope that they’re going to go on mission.

I had a unique burden to help raise up worship leaders.

My wife and I had prayed for quite a while and felt like

the Lord had put on our heart.

College students, church planting and training worship leaders

for those church plants.

When I got connected to the network, it felt like the perfect match.

They weren’t really doing anything to train worship leaders

for those church plants.

We came in, we started just praying and asking the Lord,

Okay, what could this look like?

We developed a pipeline for training worship leaders.

As we’re talking right now, one of my worship leaders is in a car

driving to West Lafayette, Indiana, to lead worship this weekend at a church

plant where hopefully she’ll accept a job if they offer it after this weekend,

and she’ll move to be the worship leader for that church plant.

The overview of the pipeline is we have a youth group, we have a college

ministry, and our college ministry is larger proportionately.

We’re running 400, 500 sometimes on a Thursday night.

Our Sunday mornings, we might run a thousand.

It’s a lot of college students proportionate to how large our church is.

We use those as just context for worship leaders.

Our staff structure is me.

I have a tech guy that’s on staff with me.

Under me is a college worship leader.

Then I have a couple of interns, a tech intern, a couple of worship interns.

Then we have lay leaders, too, that we’re trying to train.

I just was trying to figure, How can I equip people?

I want our youth to have great worship.

I want college to have great worship.

How can I help equip people to do that?

And I just started writing down everything that I do and how I think about things

and realised that I wanted to put together a 52-week course.

And that’s really hard.

It’s really hard to go through 52 weeks of content.

And so I actually pared it back to six weeks.

And we just formulated a six-week pathway that I think jumpstart people

into knowing how to lead.

And we can talk more about that.

If there’s more, you want to dig into that.

Yes. Thank you.

And just So that our listeners can get a sense for how successful it’s been,

how many worship leaders have you pushed through this process and have sent out?

Or maybe not sent out, but have raised up even for within.

Yeah. So just content.

I’ve only been here two and a half years.

So we’re sending two this year.

We sent another worship leader out last year who took a part-time

role at a church that…

I mean, they just don’t have a full-time staff role.

And then another worship leader who moved to Syracuse to take a

full-time church plant worship role.

By the end of this year, it’ll have been four sent out.

I’ve taken 10 people through it.

Two of those are not a part of our church.

They’re actually lay leaders at another church plant in our network.

It’s about half of them go on, and some of them just become great volunteers.

Some of them are never going to lead the band and lead the whole thing.

But we found this, at least in-house with the people we’re

taking through here at Candeo, that, man, they come out the other side better

leaders, more dynamic, maybe able to do some speaking from stage,

and in a pinch, maybe could actually lead the thing if the leader got sick,

but they don’t quite have the desire to lead the whole thing on their own.

It’s six weeks.

Last night, I finished a round of six weeks with two leaders

from another church.

Next Wednesday, I start another round of six weeks with three more people here.

Two of those are going to come on as interns in the fall.

Hopefully, two years after that, they might come on staff and then 2-3 years

after that, they’ll go on church plan.

The pipeline of…

It’s a six-week course, but it pulls them into a process, at least in-house,

of what we’re usually saying is going to be four, five, six years of training.

The worship leader that’s in Indiana today,

this is our third year working together.

She’s gone through that six-week thing multiple times.

She’s helped teach it.

She’s going to help teach it this next round.

When she launches out, hopefully she’ll take that with her,

and she’s already been teaching it.

And day one, she’ll turn around and recruit a college student,

take them through it, and hopefully she’ll have another worship leader

as soon as she hits the ground there.

That’s amazing.

It’s a very duplicatable process, and I love that.

And I think what I want to highlight, I want to highlight a few things.

But first of all is that you just did it.

You’re like, we got to do this.

What can I teach?

52 weeks, that’s a lot.

Okay, six weeks.

And then you’re just figuring it out as you go.

And I think the thing I want to encourage the worship leaders

watching or listening is that you guys can do this at your church.

You don’t have to be at a big church.

You don’t have to be in a mega church that’s got everything figured out.

You can actually start to just figure it out.

But the key is the desire.

Do you desire to train up worship leaders?

Do you desire to pass on the mantle of worship leading to others,

whether kids in the youth band or other peers your age?

Because a lot of people don’t know this, but worship ministry training

started 10 years ago out of me teaching three other worship leaders

at my church how I do what I do.

So I just would come up with a lesson, give it to them, talk about it.

And then I was like, wow, I have 10 lessons here.

Maybe I’ll just start reading it into a microphone and putting it

out there on the Internet, and that’s how the podcast started.

But the point was, I was in a church of 350 people, maybe, and I was like,

all right, there are three people here who have some potential.

Let’s train them.

And my encouragement is just that all of us can do this.

And It’s about taking intentionality.

And it might even be borrowing material, like maybe Dalton will let us borrow some

of his material or the academy material, and you borrow the material and you just

talk about it with your worship leaders.

You don’t even have to create the material, but the desire

has to be there and should be there.

And we covered why early in the introduction for yourself,

for your church, and for the person.

But let’s talk a little bit more about this programme.

So it’s a six-week programme.

Let’s talk about how do you identify people to get involved?

What are you looking for?

What should the worship leaders watching or listening be looking

for in potential candidates? Yeah.

I think sometimes we think, who’s called to do it?

And it’s so hard to navigate, who are the right people?

And I think about myself, I think sometimes if I had

20-year-old Dalton in front of me, I would go, No, he’s not the one.

And so I try to broaden who might be willing to do this.

But there’s four things that I’m always thinking through, which is passion,

ability, opportunity, and availability.

Are they passionate about it?

Do they actually want to do it?

So that’s really key at the start.

If you don’t want to do it, I’m not going to waste my time.

It’s like you have to want to do it. Ability.

Do you have some of the basic abilities it’s going

to take to be a worship leader?

Can you sing?

Can you talk in front of people?

You don’t have to be good at it yet, but at least

is there that willingness to grow in it?

A lot of times I’m also looking for an instrumentalist I actually make all

of my, at least if you come on as an intern, if you don’t know how to play

guitar when you start, we’re going to teach you how to play

guitar because I do foresee a world where, hopefully, one day you’re on a church

plant and you might be the only one leading.

You got passion, Ability.

Opportunity.

Sometimes we just have to look at what’s in front of us and go,

I don’t have any more spots.

We’re maxed out.

I’ve got how many worship leaders going through it right now.

It’s like, I just don’t have any more capacity to bring on another.

And that might help determine if it’s the right next step for them.

And then availability.

How available are they to do it?

So for us, we have a set time.

Our class, almost always, I say almost because there’s some flexibility,

but almost always meets at five o’clock on Wednesdays, 5:00 PM.

It’s usually enough time for someone if they’re working a job

to make it here after work.

But the reason we do five o’clock on Wednesdays is because that’s actually

when our youth group meets to rehearse.

Because the youth group meets at that time, we’re like, Hey,

let’s meet at the same time, because your next step after this six-week thing

is actually to jump in and do everything we taught you at youth group.

You’re going to plan the youth group set.

You’re going to plan a shepherding moment for the youth group band.

You’re going to do all this in youth group.

If you’re not free during that time, we’re not going to make a new time

to meet with you, because I actually need you to go do that.

Unless you’re exceptionally gifted already, and I’m confident you could

do these in one of our other contexts, we want to that lowest, easiest entry point

where everybody funnels through first.

And so that would be like some just four things to think through: passion,

ability, opportunity, and availability as you’re trying to identify someone.

So everybody listening, think about your crew around you.

Is there anyone that looks like that?

And it doesn’t have to be a specific age category.

Is there anyone?

I’ve seen some really gifted older worship leaders.

We always tend to focus on raising up the young people, which is great.

But I know some of you don’t have that in your church.

You’re like, There are no young people in my church.

Okay, but in the 40 age category, 50, 60, even 70.

We have a few worship leaders in the academy that are almost 70,

and they’re crushing it.

And so I love that.

I love that you are being strategic with your time.

So you’re doing it at the same time as youth group,

and there’s reasons for that.

One of the reasons is just because you’re probably already at church.

So I want everybody to think strategically about this.

You don’t have to add another night of the week into your calendar.

Is there a time where you’re already at church and you could just

add a 30-minute training thing?

So one of the academy members yesterday on our monthly live team building class is

Theresa, and she was sharing about 30 minutes before rehearsal,

they do the 15 minute Worship Ministry Training, Divo,

and then they do 15 minutes of scales and musical ear training.

And she started doing this because they’re already there.

They’re already at church.

So she just training them in that time slot where

they’re already coming to church.

And she said the growth has been phenomenal over the last few months.

I love that you’re tacking this onto a time slot where you’re already at church.

I want to highlight that as well.

I also love that you are giving them training.

They’re learning the practicals, but then you’re giving them an opportunity

to express and practise what they’re learning in youth group.

I’d love to hear more about the six key lessons that you’ve focused

on, like 52 weeks, you’re like, no, okay, if I can only teach people this many

things, what would I teach them?

So what are the six keys? Yeah.

Well, there’s a few things.

One, I want to say the reason we pared it down so much is so that

it could be reproducible in context where you don’t have college students

and you don’t have staff.

Six weeks, anybody can give six weeks in a row to an equipment class

if they want to do it. And so that’s why we did that.

The six things that we identified is

one, character over competency, because

we just believe that as worship leader.

The 2% of competency that happens on the stage is what gets you hired,

but the 98% that’s off the stage is what gets you fired.

We actually just believe character matters more.

We’ll often say who you are in Christ matters more

than what you can do for Christ.

We start with character over competency.

We move into how to develop a philosophy of worship.

Then we talk about gospel-shaped service planning.

We teach people a certain way of planning a liturgy or a worship service

that is shaped by the gospel.

We talk about how to arrange the band and lead rehearsals.

That’d be the the fourth week.

The fifth week is on speaking moments, and then the last week is on postures

of worship and a biblical foundations for postures of worship and stage presence.

Those are all so good.

Now, just curious, if you could add a seventh, do you feel like

there’s anything there that’s missing?

Oh, yeah.

I have a 12-week version of this, too, that I would do if I was leading a little

cohort for someone else’s church.

And so some of the other things that we would add is a week

on spiritual disciplines.

I would take that character over competency, and I would elaborate

that using a resource like spiritual disciplines For the Christian Life

by Donald Whitney, something like that, and maybe find two or

three of the best chapters.

Every week, there is pre-work that you have to read or listen to, podcast.

You come with, I don’t know, 30 minutes to an hour of pre-work.

We do a 90-minute session, and there’s homework at the end.

In the next week, you go through the homework.

Maybe you plan a set, or you work out some arrangement notes, or you prepare

a speaking moment or something like that.

It ends up being a couple-hour commitment every week.

But if you can give about two hours of your week to it, you can get it done.

But I would say that for leaders, if I’m sending out a worship leader

to a church plant, if they’ve been on staff with me,

maybe two years in an internship and then two years on staff, they’re going to catch

a lot of this without needing a session.

But I would do a session on how to lead a value-driven culture

for your worship team.

Then a third one would be administrative, structural leadership.

There’s a number of things that are really practical I think.

I don’t do those here because they learn that naturally through the problem.

I have weekly meetings once you’re an intern or on staff.

But there’s a number of other things that I would add to it.

I love it.

And just to reiterate what you shared so that everybody can think through these

boxes is like, you said pre-work, watch this, listen to this, read

this, 90-minute teaching session discussion in person

at the same time as youth group, and then homework after the fact,

now go do what you just learned.

I mean, that’s like regular school, right?

Now, I’d love to talk with you because sometimes worship leaders

can feel already overwhelmed with like, I have a million things to do.

I’m not even a full-time worship leader.

I do this as a volunteer.

But the content.

So obviously, you had to sit down and you had to come up with teachings

for each of these six topics.

But did you start with a minimum viable product?

Meaning, did you just go, okay, I’m just going to sit down for 40 minutes

and write what I can, put it on a nice formatted sheet, and this is version one.

Because I think a lot of worship leaders get like, I got to get it all perfect.

It’s got to be super polished.

But it’s actually, no, you just need to start.

And And then you iterate as you do it and you learn

what you forgot to put in there.

So you want to share about your content process?

Yeah. The first year went…

So I’m just going to use her name.

Anna is this worship leader I keep referring to.

Anna was my intern three years ago.

And the first year of her internship was terrible.

I was like, I’m still learning how to do this.

I want to train you. And it was just discussion.

It was like every week like, Hey, what do you want to talk about?

What do you need to learn?

And I was like, Okay, that’s not going to work next year.

So the next year, I’m like, okay, I’m I’m going to write out predetermined topics.

We start going through that.

This was last year, and I maybe wrote up my first version

of philosophy of worship.

Basically, what we did is I just read a chapter, maybe we talked through

a chapter, and I just started writing down some of the stuff we talked about.

And then I took another crew through it, and she was with me, and we just

began typing what I was saying.

And so now that I’ve been through that teaching four times,

and she’s helped me so much with this, I owe a lot of how successful this thing

working for us to Anna Hoynes.

But she’ll sit in the session while I’m teaching it and in real-time

in the Google Doc, delete stuff that I skipped and write in new stuff I said,

if it’s better than what’s in there.

And so it’s been an update.

I finished one I was in a session once, and it said 113 edits

to this document was made.

She changed 113 things in the document while I was teaching it live.

She’s done that for me four times now.

What we have now is quite good compared to what we started with.

But it started as just saying, I just am trying to write down what I want to say.

And so now it’s a manuscript.

I actually read it off.

I no longer am trying to just teach it on the fly.

I’m actually reading a manuscript when I go through it so that I say everything

that we want to say in the way that we’ve crafted to be the best way to say it.

But yeah, it’s literally changed every time we’ve taught it.

Thank you. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.

You don’t have to have it all figured out, guys.

Just start.

If you believe you’re called to raise up leadership leaders in your church.

Borrow content, read a book, whatever.

Just get some people interested together and go and then iterate as you learn.

That’s just the best way to move forward.

And by the way, Anna sounds awesome, and she sounds like your personal AI bot

who’s listening and updating all your stuff.

But no offence, Anna.

So first step, identify good candidates.

Second step, invite them into a six-week process.

I’m not sure if there’s anything else we need to cover in that six-week process.

I’ll ask a few follow-up Third step is after they finish that process,

they get plugged into youth band or an appropriate level of service.

If they’re super gifted, they go right to main stage or whatever.

And then lastly, some of those people, you say, Hey, you,

join my internship programme.

And why don’t you describe the internship programme?

Because that can sound intimidating, but my guess is they’re just there helping.

And obviously, college students have more free time and all that stuff.

But share about that fourth step.

Yeah.

So we would see the an internship programme as a place

where people can come and discern.

It’s about 10 hours a week worth of work.

And that time is split between planning sets, prepping for youth group, leading

at youth group, and then doing feedback.

So a culture of feedback, I think, is critical for this to work.

Every time someone leads in our context, we either chat or set up a lunch

to meet and talk about it.

But we’re always going to ask the questions, okay, what went

really well that we can celebrate and what can we grow in and do better.

Even our Sunday, man, we do this every Sunday after the morning run through

before service, 15 minutes, five minutes of celebrating each other,

and we’re clapping and we’re like, Dude, that was amazing when you did that.

We’re just celebrating what we see that’s going really well.

Five minutes of, Hey, what can we actually grow in and do better as we head out?

Maybe we were just going through the motions this morning,

but we were disconnected.

We’re just playing the right notes, but we weren’t really

We try to have a culture of worship.

We don’t worship when people get in the room.

We worship when God’s in the room, and God’s always in the room.

So we worship during rehearsal, but we were just going through the mode.

Someone might say that, or we got off to click here, or we missed a note here.

And then we spend five minutes praying, and that’s our 15 minutes

before service, how we spend our time.

We have that culture of feedback, so that’s always happening.

If we pull someone in, I offered an internship to someone last week.

It’s someone who, through being a part of our team, has identified personally

that they feel like they may be called to ministry.

They’re wrestling through a call to ministry, and we want

to help them discern that.

It’s someone we’ve already identified, has a clear expression of skill in the area

of worship ministry and a high character.

Those are the things we’re really looking for, like a willing heart.

It’s those same four things we talked about.

The internship, primarily, it looks like taking what we would say is ownership

or co-ownership of a particular context of our worship ministry, most often used.

They’ll come, hopefully, Lord willing, there will be two

interns, and they’ll co-lead youth.

We do youth worship three times a month.

One of them will lead by themselves the first week, one will lead

by themselves the second week, and then they’ll lead together the third week.

That’s going to be how they lead youth.

Then they’ll also serve on our college team because they’re college-age people.

One of them actually works full-time, and one’s a student and a D1 track athlete.

But it’s like, hopefully, they have time to do that.

It makes it easier if they’re co-leading the youth.

Then they’ll serve regularly at Salt Company, which is our college

ministry, and then on Sundays.

They’ll be the ones in charge of planning the sets, planning shepherding moments.

They’ll get evaluation.

One person on our team will be giving feedback to their shepherding moment.

I do the training during youth group a lot of times, so I’m not always

in here for rehearsal.

But I finish before the service, and I’ll come in and watch the service.

Because when they finish music, I got 20 minutes to set up the stage

for my rehearsal, so it’s just really a fishing it back to back to back.

But I’ll watch the shepherding moment and give feedback.

I’ll give feedback to how the band was sounding.

A lot of times that feedback will happen during that 20 minutes set up.

It’s just immediate feedback right when they finish.

They’ll do that for one to two years.

Then as people go through that, usually they’ll either discern,

Man, I’ve got a real gifting for this and a real passion for this,

and I want to take my next step, which would look like coming on as

a resident full-time with our college ministry as a worship

leader, which is what Anna did.

Then through that process, then it’s looking at church planting.

I talk about church planting all the time.

Every team event we do, I just constantly say, Hey, we’re praying.

We talked about this.

My 10:02 alarm went off right before we hopped on this because here in Iowa,

it was We hopped on right around 10:00.

But 10:02, Luke 10:2, we pray to the Lord of the Harvest to raise up labourers.

We pray for it every day, and then we identify people, we call them

to it, and we celebrate going.

We celebrate going.

Going is for us one of the greatest gifts because we’ve

received something so great.

I think that’s actually part of the culture of Raising of worship leaders for

us is that people are constantly catching a vision for what they could do if they

were raised up far beyond filling in once every eight weeks or something like that.

That’s a beautiful thing.

Filling in once every week is a gii