Aaron Williams: Spiritual Health in Leadership

Speaker 2 Leading worship is primarily a spiritual work, not a musical one. So when you get up on stage to lead worship, you’re not just making music, you’re actually waging war. And that’s why it’s critical that we are spiritually strong in our walk with the Lord as worship leaders. Our spiritual health affects not just us, but also everyone that we lead, our families, our teams, and then our churches. And that’s why my spiritual health and your spiritual health is crucial for us to be effective worship leaders. The problem is in our modern society, society, with all of its many distractions, and I know you know what I’m talking about, it can be hard to keep our hearts close to God. How can we maintain that connexion and that intimacy with God and foster a close relationship with him in the midst of all the craziness and all of our busy schedules and lives? And so if you’re someone who struggles to stay spiritually healthy, I feel you. I think we all feel it. Or if you know someone who struggles in this area, please send them this episode because we are talking exactly about that today, how to be spiritually healthy as a leader with the one and only Aaron Williams.

Speaker 2 Aaron is a songwriter, a worship leader, and the founder of The Way of Worship. And he’s best known, I think, probably best known for his song Abide, which has millions of streams and is song all over the world in churches across the globe. So I’m going to bring Aaron on the screen. Hello, Aaron. Welcome to the podcast, man.

Speaker 1 Hello. Thank you. So good to be here. Wonderful to be with you guys today.

Speaker 2 Awesome. Aaron, well, when you and I connected, I asked, Hey, what topics are on your heart? What do you like to talk about? And you said spiritual health and leadership. So I just want to start with a simple question. Why did you want to talk about spiritual health and leadership? Why is that topic important to you and just in general?

Speaker 1 This has been a topic that the Lord has brought up over and over in my life, and it seems that some of the thoughts I share about it seem to resonate with people. I love talking about this. Spiritual health and leadership is the thing that we all probably need to talk about more, but for whatever reasons, we talk about quite little in my experience. It’s most of the time and energy in worship leading circles is given to the things that happen on the stage. And so your intro here is perfect. I feel like I should just let you elaborate because you said so many things, and I’m like, That’s exactly right. So it’s hugely important. And I just feel like if there’s one thing I can encourage leaders in is just the importance of the health of their own soul.

Speaker 2 And it is a huge struggle to fight to stay spiritually healthy. It’s not something that you can happenstance into. It has to be intentionally built, right? Yes. But it’s interesting because you said we don’t, as worship leaders, talk about it enough. And it’s funny because I’ll release a video on Worship Leader Health or Worship Leader Burnout, and it’ll go nowhere, right? But then I’ll do a tech tour, and then there’s like 18,000 views or whatever. And it’s like, Good grief. Worship leaders are focused on the wrong stuff. Okay.

Speaker 1 How do we make this one be the one that goes viral, talking about important things? You are right. I don’t know what that phenomenon is. What we’re talking about today, it is a work. It requires a time and attention and effort. It’s oftentimes a lot easier to talk about gear where it’s cerebral and it’s not requiring me to be introspective and invite the Holy spirit to show me weakness in my life. That is like real hard work, but I would argue that it is the most important work we can do as leaders and will be the difference between a really fruitful, long-lasting ministry or one that maybe is super awesome but burns hot and then fades out.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, your song Abide, it’s from John, is it 10? I’m a bad pastor here.

Speaker 1 Fifteen. Fifteen. Fifteen.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Abiding with Christ, Jesus says, Abide in me and you will bear much fruit. What you’re saying, this is the crucial key, the clutch, the point of everything is if we abide with Christ, we will bear fruit no matter for what? Have there been seasons? I didn’t put this question for you in advance, but just in your own life, if you feel like being vulnerable of people, have there been seasons of spiritual and health for you? And if so, what did that look like? How did that unfold? How did you get there? And then how did you get out of that?

Speaker 1 Yes, there have been seasons. You said just a minute ago, sometimes we don’t know how we get there. I think of it like a stream that’s flowing downhill. The gravitational pull of the world around us is forming us in some way or another. And so Essentially, how I’ve gotten there is just I’ve not been intentional, and I’ve neglected the necessities of a healthy spiritual life. Then all of a sudden, I look up, and it’s like if you’ve ever been in the ocean and your family’s on the beach, and you’re playing with your kids or something, and you look up, and all of a sudden, you’re a few hundred yards away from them. You’re like, How did I get way down here? I think that happens spiritually, where we just look up and we’re like, Oh, man, my heart just feels calloused or apathetic. I mean, I notice it as apathy in my own life. We’re like, Oh, that thing happened, and I feel like I should be excited about that, but I’m really not, if I’m being honest. Burnout is a common one. I think burnout happens a lot when we go about doing a lot of ministry in the name of Jesus without living with him and without being continually filled back up.

Speaker 1 It’s like going around and pouring water out, but you’re never replenishing. You just to a place where you’re like, I’m done. The reason we’re done is because we don’t have anything left to give. I think that’s why John 15 is so powerful. It is so devotional, but it’s also piercing because Jesus says right before the passage that you quoted, he says, Apart from me, you can do nothing. That is a really hard passage for someone like myself who’s a task-oriented, driven leader. I don’t know if any of you watching or listening to this resonate, because what I don’t think he means is that we can’t do any tasks. I think he means you can’t do anything that lasts in the kingdom. There’s this differentiation that he’s pointing out of it’s possible to live a life that’s filled with activity but produces little fruit. Gosh, that’s the life I don’t want to live. But the gravitational pull for me is in that direction. That’s the way I will naturally drift if I’m not intentional. I would say that’s probably the direction most of us will naturally drift if we’re not intentional. The question is, how do I align my actions with fruitfulness so that I’m not spinning my wheels and doing all of these things and giving out all of this energy.

Speaker 1 Then I look up a year or two later and I’m like, I don’t know if there was any kingdom fruit to show for that. Jesus’s answer is you’ve got to learn how to remain, to abide. When you do that, exactly what you said, fruitfulness will happen. It’s not even a question. This is why I love that he gives us the metaphor of a vine and a branch, an agricultural metaphor, is because when you look at a vineyard, per se, the vines that have the most grapes on them are the healthiest. That stands in contrast to our modern culture, where the lie that we believe is that if we will just hustle, hustle, hurry, hurry, do more, we’ll produce more fruit. Jesus turns it upside down and he goes, No, the disciples who learn how to remain in me and go at my pace and live with me, some Somehow they flourish as individuals and they’re fruitful. Jesus’s life is the perfect example. Somehow he lived this perfect way of doing what the Father told him to do and not straying too far from or not straying at all from that. We’ll do it imperfectly, but man, that’s more of an art.

Speaker 1 The thing that I’ve learned is it’s more of an art than it is in science to learn how to abide in him. But gosh, for anyone who’s watching or listening, The ache of your heart is you want to live a life that’s meaningful, that actually produces Kingdom fruit, that helps other people. You want to lead worship in a way that people see Jesus and come closer to him. The thing that we often neglect is the quiet, hidden aspect. It might be a piece of technology that helps you in some way, but more than likely, the care for your own soul can help that go so much further than you would imagine.

Speaker 2 It’s so terrifying what you shared, which apart from him, we can do nothing. And it makes me worried that much of my and maybe the listener or viewers, frivolous activity, we’re doing tonnes of activity, we’re spinning all of our wheels, we’re burning a lot of calories, so to speak, doing all this stuff. And then at the end of time, it’s going to be like, it didn’t make into the kingdom. You know what I mean? Paul talks about that where it’s like, if you build with things not on Christ, all that’s going to be burned up and just chaff. And it’s like, whoa, did I just waste… How many years of my ministry life or even worship ministry training life have I wasted because I didn’t build it with Christ building it through me? You know what I mean? But I was just like, I got an idea. I’m going to do it. I’m going to make it happen in my own strength. That’s a terrifying thought. Lord willing, everybody watching or listening isn’t building their ministry on activity, but letting the Lord grow in them and bear fruit. But anyway, any thoughts before we go?

Speaker 1 I was just going to say, the word of encouragement for any of us who may feel our inadequacy in that, I do think the Lord has so much grace for us. Jesus’s life and what he did is a covering that we live under. But I don’t think we should ever use that covering and that grace as an excuse to stay in that place, because we want to increasingly like Christ. I think about my life now, and I think about what would I like to be like in 10 years from now or 20 years from now? I hope it’s said of me that I’m learning how to live in Jesus’s way and live in his fruitfulness. Increasingly, there’s an older man in the church that I’m leading at right now who’s in his 90s. He’s one of the most joy-filled, scripture-saturated. His name’s Albert. I see Jesus in him, and I told someone recently, I’m like, Isn’t it wonderful to see someone decades ahead of you? I see something in Albert’s life that I want to be true of mine, and I know that it’s not just going to happen. That brings us to some of the practical things of how are we intentional with this?

Speaker 1 How do we even recognise if we’ve got off course? Because so often we find out that we’re off course when we’ve been going that way for a while. How do we get back on track and grow in Christ-likeness?

Speaker 2 I want to get to the solutions, but I’d like to first look into the problem or the root cause of much of our spiritual unhealth. Do you have any theories or hypotheses about what is causing spiritual unhealth in worship leaders or just in people in general? Any thoughts on that?

Speaker 1 Yeah. I’m just going to read straight from a post that I did on Instagram because it was after you sent me these questions, I got to thinking about it. And These are more like, if you think about the dashboard of your vehicle, you have these lights that pop up and tell you that there may be something wrong going on with the engine. Here are a few dashboard lights, if you will, for worship leaders, I think. One, for worship leaders, you walk off stage, you immediately ask for feedback because you have a deep need for approval. All right, this is coming from my own life. I derived this because I did this for a lot of years. Number two, you feel competitive other members of the worship team, especially those who serve in the same role as you do. Number three, you’re incredibly hard on yourself if you make a mistake. You sang something wrong. You fumbled your words during a transition. You walk off stage and you’re just beating yourself up. Again, this was me. You’re super into worship when you’re leading, but cynical toward other leaders and movements. I see this a lot, especially in young leaders.

Speaker 1 Very zealous when they’re the one on the stage, very cynical when they’re not. You spend more time worshipping on stage than you do reading scripture privately or engaging in personal prayer. There’s this disconnect between the stage and the real you. You consider playing an instrument on your worship team, your form of biblical community. So your community doesn’t exist beyond that. Number seven, you’re not really interested in leading from the scriptures because you’re, quote, into the Holy spirit. This is getting into some theological aspects of this. And then the other side, you’re not really interested in learning to be a spirit-led leader because God works through your planning, too. I’ve been on both sides of this paradigm. The last two, you struggle to lead your church forward in worship because you’re too concerned with the complaints that you’re going to get from a few people. You have a fear of man that’s too high in your life. Another one could be you struggle to shepherd your people well because you’re constantly frustrated with them, and they’re not doing what you want them to do. They are sheep, and they’re to be shepherded. These are just the things that came to my mind.

Speaker 1 These are really practical, and I almost view these as weeds growing in my heart. They’re things that are not Jesus’s way. They’re not of the kingdom. A thing like jealousy coming up, but it’s very human. If there’s another leader who leads in a similar capacity than I do, and they’re given the song to lead on Sunday, and I’m not, it’s a very normal thing to go, Well, can I not lead that? Did I not see it? What I’ve noticed in my own life is when that pops up, it’s a little bit of a weed coming to the surface, and I have the choice to either just push it back down, which it’ll keep growing, or I have the choice to bring it into the light, bring it before the Lord, and say, Okay, Lord, I’m dealing with jealousy here. Would you help me with this? What I’ve noticed is that drift that we’re talking about The drift happens when I ignore those weeds that pop up in my heart and my soul. When I have a little bit of jealousy or a need for too much attention, and you get three or four of those things going wrong, the reality is Most people can’t see those things when you’re leading worship.

Speaker 1 They see you leading the song, they hear you praying the prayer, they have no idea you’re struggling with those things or that they’re crouching into your heart. But if you’re not careful, your words and your actions are going in one direction and your heart is going in another. Just to be vulnerable, there was a season in my early 20s where I quit songwriting, which is the thing that I love the most in my ministry right now. I quit altogether, and it was primarily around comparison. I couldn’t write songs without comparing my songs to other people’s songs. Why is that person getting to collaborate with them? Why is that not me? Why are they getting this opportunity and not me? It almost drove the gift that the Lord had given me to write songs completely off the rails. Thankfully, like I mentioned, the Lord has grace for all of us in this. He doesn’t expect us to be perfect. What it meant for me is I needed to be honest with myself and the Lord about that. He let me quit for a while. I almost view it like a dad or a father letting their son put away the thing that they know that they’re good at.

Speaker 1 Then in time, he came back and was like, Hey, let’s just address how to do this in a better way. I went through about a year of just writing in quiet, in silence, hidden. I didn’t show those songs to anyone. Never have, probably never will. In that time, the Lord did some purifying work in my heart. Ever since then, when I felt his permission to come back into the public, so to speak, I’ve written songs that have resonated deeper The crazy thing is my songs from that point on have sounded more like me, not like me imitating someone else. I think that’s because the Lord really freed me to be who I am. To bring that all the way back around, we have to be really sensitive to these, we’ll just call them weeds, to these weeds that come up in our heart that are not the way of Jesus. When we are sensitive to those and bring those to him, he has a way of just purifying us. That purity of heart usually translates into authority and power as you lead. People will notice it. They’ll notice it in the way you sing, the way you play, the way you lead.

Speaker 1 They’ll just feel like, wow, he feels free, or she feels free, or she sounds free. When you don’t deal with those things, it’ll still be you, but there’ll just be a part of you that’s unable to operate in all that you’re meant to because it’s got weeds holding you back. At least that’s how my experience was. I felt like I couldn’t be the leader I was intended to be because I had these struggles. These are the things that everyone on a worship team feels, but we just don’t talk about enough. We all feel comparison and jealousies and things like that. It’s just healthy, I think, for us to talk about them. How do we live in ways that are congruent with Jesus’s life and teaching when it comes to leading on worship teams?

Speaker 2 If you’re feeling stuck, mediocre, or inadequate in your ministry, if you know there must be a better way of doing things, but you’re not sure how, if you’re looking for fresh inspiration and new ideas that will improve your ministry and give you a team that you’re proud of leading, then I invite you to join me and over 1400 worship leaders from all over the world who are growing inside the Worship Ministry Training Academy. Our C3 format is proven to get you results because you get courses, coaching, and community. The courses teach you what to do, the coaches help you apply it to your specific situation, and the community helps stay accountable and encouraged as you take the right steps to improve the ministry God has called you to. Get access to over a dozen practical courses, 20 time-saving templates, done for you team discipleship material, and live expert interviews with guests like Matt Redman, Christian Stanfield, Charity Gael and others. The best part is it’s completely free to try for 15 days. Yes, free. And if you decide to sign up, the Academy is by far the most affordable online worship school that there is out there.

Speaker 2 Join thousands of other worship leaders like Alicia and Hyme, who both say the Academy has completely transformed their ministry. I hope you’ll start your free trial today. Take the guesswork out of building a thriving worship ministry and get a proven game plan to success. Go to worshipministrytraining. Com and click that big red button, and I hope to see you inside the Academy this week. Yeah, and it’s crazy to think that if you don’t deal with the weeds, it could actually destroy your entire ministry. And we see that all the time. But even your example, it’s like you almost gave up the thing God called you to because you didn’t deal with the weeds when they were small, and you let them grow up and they were really messing with you. It almost sidelined you. Then we wouldn’t have had this beautiful song Abide and all the other songs that you’re writing. We wouldn’t have Way of Worship. That’s you. Then there are other guys who, they go off the rails and they blow up their entire ministry. It affects their church. It affects everything. It affects their family, their spouse. We have to root up these weeds as fast as possible.

Speaker 2 I like your list of diagnostic tools. I think you call them diagnostics, our dashboard. I view those as symptoms that are really helpful for us to look out for. And so I would encourage the viewers and listeners to go through that list again and say, Are there any of these things in my life? But I wonder, what’s underneath the symptoms? What do you think? I know we talked about drifting. I think drifting is… It’s like rollerblading up a hill. If you stop pushing up, you’re going to go down. There’s no neutral in the Christian life. So I think drifting is one way that spiritual unhealth can come. Do you think there are other root causes when you’re working with some of these worship leaders that you work with, do you see some underlying issues that are causing spiritual unhealth in their life? If so, what are they?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Thank you for asking. I feel like that’s the needful question to ask. There are a few overarching themes that I have felt like have deeply connected with lots of leaders over the years. One of them is around identity and this reality that if we’re not careful as leaders who lead on a stage, we will operate under the premise that I must do well here in order to gain an identity. I must sing well enough, play well enough, write songs well enough that it will build up who Aaron Williams is, and I’ll have an identity from it. I see this all the time in young leaders. It’s like this energy toward building an identity. In the Christian life, it’s the other way around. It’s that we have been given our identity. You are valuable before you do anything on a stage. When we can learn to live and operate and lead from that place, it’s like all these entanglements don’t have any power over us anymore. I used to, I should probably still do this, but I used to, every time before I would go up to lead, I would pray these two things, Lord, remind me that this couldn’t go so well that I could earn any more love.

Speaker 1 I just already have it all. Also remind me this couldn’t go so wrong that I could lose any of your love, because that was the one I was really afraid of. I was afraid of it going really wrong and me losing value. It’s a real challenge to believe at the core of who you are, that you’re loved and that you’re already valuable no matter how this goes. I don’t know if anyone on here is watching American Idol because they’re right in the middle of a season again. But there’s a great metaphor when When the final happens on American Idol and the confetti falls, they crown someone the American Idol, they always ask them to sing the song again. What you always see every single season is you see the person sing the song one more time, but they’re like 20% more free, and they just let a rip. They sound different. They look different. Honestly, it looks like there’s a thousand pounds off their shoulders, and you see them in the fullness of who they are. The reason is because they have already won. They’re not competing for anything anymore. I think this is just such a great image of how we’re supposed to lead in God’s Kingdom.

Speaker 1 You’ve already been given everything in Christ. His love for you, his identity over you is already spoken. We ought to be leading with that freedom. But my story for a whole lot of years was the opposite, where I was putting this pressure on myself to build an identity. I’m not sure if there’s anyone out there that’s connecting to that, especially anyone who deals with anxiety or panic attacks related to the pressure of the stage. I mean, this is where it’s at, because that was me, too. I dealt with severe anxiety as a leader for a long time. No one would have known it. I still led pretty effectively on the stage, but what was going on inside me was pretty intense. I mean, I think that one is one of the underlying aspects of all of this, that if we’re not careful, we will do all these things trying to build up. I think that’s in the same conversation of all this activity and not much fruitfulness. Because if we’re being real honest, a lot of the activity is not completely just for kingdom advancement, it’s for personal identity. The most effective leaders, Jesus himself said, and these are crazy words from Jesus to say, I just did what the Father told me to do.

Speaker 1 What I heard him say, I did. You get this real intimate picture of even Jesus is listening to the Father. He’s well aware of who he is and what his mission is, and he just does that. I’m so thankful Aren’t you? That Jesus had this laser focus on who he was and what he was meant to do. He’s obviously the perfect example. But you and I, we all know leaders who have exhibited this well, and they’re wonderful to be around because they’re really good what they do, but they’re very others-focused. When you can be others-focused is whenever you’ve gotten your eyes off of yourself, off of what you’re trying to build, and you’re able to really serve people. But these entanglements, these weeds, they come at us. I felt it in my spirit a minute ago, Alex, when you were just talking about how the enemy wants to derail us. That’s what I feel for any leader watching and listening to this. You need to know that what you carry and who you are is needed in the kingdom. Every single one of you, it’s needed, and we don’t need anyone derailed. We don’t need what anyone is carrying to cease to exist because God’s image is on every single one of you.

Speaker 1 I think that’s why it’s worth these conversations because we need the fullness of what God is trying to bring to the Earth through your life. We need that, and the kingdom needs that, and God wants to use it.

Speaker 2 I felt the weight on my shoulders as I’m imagining, I need to on stage to prove myself. I think so many of us operate in that is like, I need to prove my worth, my value. I love this identity piece that you’re honing in on. Kay, one of our newer academy students, I just met her today. She said, Someone once said to me, God is neither impressed nor disappointed in you. For all of us. I love that. That’s so great. My struggle, this is a theory that I have that I think it’s not just me, is that a lot of the spiritual unhealth that best in my life, yes, it gets there by me not being intentional, but I think the biggest thing fighting against my intentions is bad boundaries, and there’s multiple layers to this. So I’ll just say bad boundaries, lack of self-discipline, and information overload. And what I mean is the fact that we have these digital devices, whether it’s your laptop or your tablet or your phone or whatever it is, you have access all the time. And I’m pretty good about, I block everything. Everything’s super locked down. I don’t really have social media, although I’ve been unblocking Twitter lately, and that’s been a whole bad rabbit hole for me.

Speaker 2 But the bad boundary is meaning I can be in line at the grocery store and pull down and look at my email. I can be on a walk with my kids, and I only have email on my phone, and I actually just deleted that, too. But it’s like, no matter where I am, I can be distracted. I can have no boundaries. And so these devices and the information coming into us, you can listen to podcasts, you can watch YouTube, you can scroll Instagram. There’s 8,000 ways to get information into your brain. And that eats into quietness. It eats into introspection, reflection, thoughtfulness, prayer, listening to the Holy spirit, listening to who he’s putting on your heart, what he’s putting on your heart. All of those things eat away our boundaries. And now we live in this big blur. It’s like all the lines have been blurred and there’s no… My wife and I, this is maybe too much information. We have a percussion massage gun. It’s for sports people. I’ll be buzzing her back. I’ll just be buzzing her back, but I’ll be scrolling and reading news. That, to me, is probably the biggest thing fighting against our spiritual well-being in this current state that we’re in as a society.

Speaker 2 Do you have any thoughts about that?

Speaker 1 Yes. I’m really resonating with what you’re saying. I think about this like if you held up a single piece of paper and that was an image of your life, it’s almost like most of our pieces of paper are just colouring across every square inch of it. I I love the things you mentioned, quiet, stillness, listening to the spirit, meditating upon the scriptures. These are things that require quiet, stillness, space. Space of mind, space of heart and soul as well. The word getting back to abide, that word abide in the Greek transliteration is meno, M-E-N-O. Another way it can be translated is to continue to exist. One of the things that Jesus is trying to communicate is that abiding with him is not one of those tasks on your check. It’s not like you wake up and spend 12 minutes abiding, and then you go about the rest of your day. What he’s inviting us into is, continue to exist with me in the whole day. I think what you’re mentioning, boundaries, is such a great word to use because it’s like all of these things are coming at us to try to infringe upon that existence, to to infringe upon our mindfulness of his presence, to infringe upon what the task we’re supposed to be really giving ourselves to on any given day.

Speaker 1 I’m guilty as well of getting to the end of the day and going like, I think I got bombarded by too many things today. I’m not sure I was completely about the Father’s work that he had for me. It’s crazy how easy it is on a Sunday morning to get to the end of the worship service and feel that as well. I think I tended to Planning Centre and to the Upset Volunteer and all these things more than I did to what the Lord was saying. I think that’s why it’s such an art and a discipline to learn how to live in this way. It’s like a manner of being more than a task to check off our list. The leaders that are