Investing In Your Worship Team Volunteers w/ Lee Baker (12 Stone Church)

Speaker 1How well do you take care of your volunteers?

Speaker 2Hello, everybody.

Welcome back to another episode of the Worship Ministry Training podcast. My name is Alex and Fierce and your host. And today I am talking with Lee Baker from Twelve Stone Church about how to invest in our volunteers. I don’t know about you, but our Church doesn’t pay our musicians to play on our team, and yet they are so incredibly vital to making Church services happen. And we want them to feel valued and valuable. And so we need to as leaders, invest in them. And that doesn’t always mean in monetary ways, but it can be in so many other ways.

And so I’m excited to share this episode with you because Lee has so much to share about how to develop a robust system for caring for and shepherding and pastorally caring for the people on your team. And I think it’s such a need conversation, especially after the last year and a half when everybody’s feeling beat down. And so I pray you are encouraged by this conversation. I also want to let you know that I have a whole course about developing great and healthy and vibrant and high functioning worship teams and worship team culture.

You can get that on my website, go to Worship ministrytraining. Comcourses and you can see the whole course bundle there. But there is a team building component to that that I think will be helpful to you. So check that out if you haven’t, I try to keep those courses very affordable and you can always enter Wmtpodcast at checkout to save an additional 25%. All right. Well, that’s it. Let’s get into the podcast today with Lee Baker from Twelve Stone Church. Hey, everybody, I am here with Lee Baker from Twelve Stone Church.

Speaker 1Welcome, Lee. How are you doing?

Speaker 2What’s up, man? Good to see you.

Speaker 1Good to have you. So Lee and I connected through a mutual friend, Andrew Woodell, who was on the podcast recently as well. So thank you, Andrew, for hooking us up, but you serve at Twelve Stone Church. Why don’t you tell our listeners about Twelve Stone and what your role is there? I know you’re recently getting shifted in your role, but just share how long you’ve been there, what the Church is like, those kinds of things.

Speaker 2Yeah. So Twelve Stone is just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, just north of Atlanta and Gwanet County. We had seven locations here in the Metroplex, and Tulson is about 34 years old. I think maybe 35, right around there. Great place. My wife and I, my family. I’ve been here seven years. We moved here in the summer of 14, and I was the worship pastor at one of our campuses, was there about three years and then became the lead worship pastor. And so for the past four years, I’ve overseen worship for Twelve Stone and then just recently, am now overseeing production and service programming as well.

Speaker 2So I had a little shift, as you mentioned there in the roles and been super fun. Man, I work with a lot of my best friends and God just leaving us in awe of who he is and what only he can do. Obviously, 2020 was what it was. The last 18 months have been what they have been. But despite all that, man, it’s really been an amazing season of refreshing, and we’re so grateful for that.

Speaker 1There’s been a lot of change in 2020 or through 2020. It brought about a lot of change. I’d be interested to hear what the past season has done for your Church.

Speaker 2What would you say?

Speaker 1Are some of, like, the primary transformations that it’s brought about in your church’s life?

Speaker 2Yeah. We were online before, and we had a decent engagement online, but there was no vision or strategy behind our online. We were really just broadcasting our Sunday morning services, obviously, over the period of Kobe and all that sort of stuff, we went digital only. We were online only, and God was kind enough to give us, like, a discipleship strategy for mobilizing the Church and neighborhoods that we call Twelve Stone Home. And that’s what our broadcast really became. It affected us so much that our pastor used a language recently that it’s not just a stone.

Speaker 2It’s a cornerstone for us now. The Twelve Stone Home is as much a part of our vision as our campuses are. And the engagement of Twelve Stone Home has just been mind boggling across the country. We have Twelve Stone Home locations in Spokane, Washington, and Sacramento, California, and just outside of Boston, Massachusetts, like all over the place. We actually in two weeks, are having a home gathering here at our broadcast location. And a lot of those people are flying in, and they’re going to meet people that they’ve watched for months now.

Speaker 2And it’s been amazing because engaging the broadcast and the worship and the teaching, we completely reshaped what that is moved our broadcast from our central location to another campus that was easier for us to broadcast from. And so this became their Church, and they gathered their neighbors and their houses, and they’ve started these little micro Church house Church sort of things. And they’re making an impact in their community. And we’re spending together. It’s been amazing, Kobe. When you say it had an effect on us, we like reallocated staffing and budget and shifted our broadcast.

Speaker 2It had a massive, massive change for us. Yeah.

Speaker 1Even for the better, right?

Speaker 2Absolutely.

Speaker 1For the better. And even that’s what we experienced, too.

Speaker 2Yes.

Speaker 1Did we lose numbers? Yes, we did. But we gained, like, spiritual fervor and passion and hunger and purity and just all these really good things. It makes it a little bit harder to schedule now that I’m down to a smaller like, I don’t have as many people deep in my bench. But anyway, we can talk about all that later. What I really want to talk about with you, Lee, is investing in our volunteers because I think you guys are doing a good job of that. And I think all of the worship leaders listening to this want to do a better job, really equipping their volunteers, whether it’s musically or even just investing in them so that their volunteers know that they care about them.

Speaker 1And yeah, so I want to talk about you. I can’t speak this morning. I want to talk about that with you today. I think most of us are running volunteer teams. I know some churches do pay their musicians and hire out musicians, but most people don’t. And so we can’t pay our musicians with money, but we can pay them with care and we can pay them with investment, and we can pay them with helping them grow and accomplish new steps in their personal lives or their musical lives or their spiritual lives.

Speaker 1And so I’d love to hear how you guys are investing in your volunteers, and there are a lot of different directions. We can go with this topic, but I would like to know just in general, how happy are you with your church’s volunteer culture right now? Like on a scale of one to ten, how happy are you with your church’s volunteer culture?

Speaker 2Honestly, pretty happy with it. I love where our volunteer culture and I’ll speak specifically into worship, and I guess a little bit into production Ministry as well because they’re a little tied together. But I’ve always seen volunteer Ministry or worship Ministry as a section of the Discipleship pathway, meaning, like people get on the team, they join the team, they volunteer because they have desire calling and the skill to go with that. They play guitar, they run audio or whatever. And we have always the first way that we want to honor them and invest in our volunteers is by having a clear process for them.

Speaker 2Even if we say no to someone in an audition or not yet in an audition, we want them to feel so valued in the process. They’re not discouraged by the no because they felt valued. Either way.

Speaker 1How do you make people feel valued in the process of auditioning?

Speaker 2Man, clear next steps, clear communication, clear expectation. It’s all on the front end. So we have a growth track thing that’s very similar to Church of the Highlands, very similar to a lot of churches, where first people get plugged into just the volunteer culture of the Church and they learn about who we are. And then at some point in the growth track process, they get invited to join a volunteer team at the Church. If they pick worship, they get contacted by their worship pastor and he or she will walk them through all the steps of that.

Speaker 2They fill out a little form. They get an automatic download of some resources. They schedule a time for the most part we do auditions on the first Sunday of the month in the afternoon at each campus. There is a real rhythm to it, so that it’s really easy for our worship pastors to communicate to them what’s going on in the download that they get. They get ISO mixes, they get all the resources that you would expect. One of the things we say around here a lot is you can’t have higher expectations, and you’re willing to resource.

Speaker 2And so we have pretty high expectations. So we resource really highly. Clearly. I don’t like when things in planning center aren’t even, like, capitalized the same, like, I like volunteers to mouse over songs and see their resources in planning center or whatever. And it just be like, I know exactly what I’m looking for to me that’s honoring to them. We prepared something for you. We’re resourcing you. Yes, we have high expectations. But everything that we do is an act of pastoral care, even down to the thing.

Speaker 2That how we label something in planning center clearly is an act of shepherding and caretaking and pastoring people. And so it starts with the onboarding process, one of the documents they get in the download there, they’ll get all their ISO and everything. But they also get, like, an expectation sheets, like, hey, if you’re an electric guitar player, here’s the things we’re looking for. You’re a keyboard player. Here’s the things we’re looking for so that they don’t walk into an audition and go, I wonder what they’re looking for.

Speaker 2We want that to be clear. We let them know they’re not auditioning for the platform. They’re auditioning for our development process, which we call meta. Meta is just a prefix that means transformation. Meta is half live coaching. It’s a once a month lab where we do live instrument coaching and everything to get people ready. And then it’s a curriculum that we host on YouTube. It’s a series of classes that people watch videos and actually take quizzes on. And they have to pass the curriculum and go through the labs before they’re put on the platform at a campus.

Speaker 1So you’re actually tracking, like, this person took the quiz and passed. Okay.

Speaker 2Yes. And they have to get five. The quiz is really more so for accountability. It’s not gets hard, but they’ll finish like, everybody goes through a unit in the Meta curriculum called Worship Foundations, and it’s ten videos that are about four to six minutes long, a piece on basic worship theology things. And so they’ll take a little quiz. If they get five out of five, that test goes to their worship pastor, and they know that they can check that off. We thought, oh, if we add something that thick, people are going to get discouraged and quit the process.

Speaker 2But what we’ve experienced has been the opposite that people feel so invested in. And so like, oh, my gosh, you went to all this effort just to help me be prepared to serve on the team. That’s what we’ve experienced. And nobody circumvents the process. We have a keyboard player here, for instance, too. He’s one of the best musicians I’ve ever played with. He’s a voting member of the Latin Grammys. He’s a session guy. He’s amazing. He went through the process. There’s no favoritism. Nobody circumvents the process because the process isn’t about as much about whether you’re good or bad as it is meant to be an act of pastoring in people’s lives.

Speaker 2And we want their first experience in the onboarding process to be clear and to feel like they’ve been shepherded through it. And so when they do go through orientation, they know exactly what kind of team they’re joining, and they step on a platform. And so we’ve always described it like this meta is sort of the rock down here in which we kind of propel people up to join the team. And then once people are on the team, there are multiple things that our worship pastors will do to disciple people within their team.

Speaker 2And I can get as deep as you want. But then the other big rock in our Ministry is something we call worship Leadership team. Worship Leadership team consists of eight people, two music directors, two vocal directors, two production directors, and two pastoral leaders at every campus. These are volunteers that we asked to serve in a higher capacity and higher spiritual authority for one year. And the worship pastor that campus focuses on discipling them once a month, and then they serve in those capacities as elevated leaders.

Speaker 2For one year, they can serve again. Somebody else may jump in that role, whatever that may be. But meta as a developmental process kind of pushes people up to serve on the team and Worship Leadership team kind of pulls people up in the spiritual leadership and spiritual authority for a season in their life. But all of this is meant to be a discipleship pathway in their life so that they just man ultimately reflect Jesus more in the way that they live and work and play and parent and all that sort of stuff.

Speaker 2So that’s kind of the nuts and bolts of it. That’s kind of the 50,000 foot view of how we care for and disciple and pastor volunteers. And so we can kind of get in the weeds, whatever you want there.

Speaker 1Yeah, that’s so good. It’s so good. And I have so many different kinds of rabbit trails that I want to take. But one of them is just a simple like, do you think you could take a screenshot of your planning center resources and show us how you guys organize those things? And then I’ll get that from you later. And I can put our listeners so they can see specifically, like, how organized you guys are. Like you said, if we resource our volunteers, well, then we can expect more from them.

Speaker 2Yes. I think most of the breakdown from volunteers is when they feel like they can’t meet expectations. No volunteer wants to come in and go. I don’t know if I’m doing good enough. I don’t know if they feel equipped and know exactly what’s being asked for them. I think that’s an act of pastoral care. I care about you enough to communicate clearly the expectations, and I care about you enough and believe in you enough that if I resource you, clearly you can achieve it. So I think that’s a huge thing for volunteer musicians.

Speaker 2Yeah.

Speaker 1And you had mentioned that the worship pastors are discipling the leadership team. I forgot what phrase?

Speaker 2Yeah. The worship leadership team. Yeah.

Speaker 1So they’re getting disciple, and then they’re now pouring into the normal volunteers, the regular volunteers. But I guess one question that I have you said that the worship leaders are doing other types of investing and pastoral care. And you said there’s a whole bunch of other little things that they do to do that pastoral care. So what are some of those things that the pastors are doing to care for their people?

Speaker 2Yeah. We kind of have a yearly rhythm, like, one of the things that we give, like, for instance, when we hire a new worship pastor, we give them a little folder. And in that is all the resources and things that just gets them acquainted with the job. One of the things that I share with other worship pastors the most is we have a sheet that is like what they do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and what they do monthly and what we do yearly as a culture.

Speaker 2Some of the stuff I’ll speak in, like, mostly in the yearly thing. They’re discipling their worship leadership team once a month in the weeds of the weekend, the way that they communicate each week. Every campus has a lot of freedom to shuffle their schedule. So when we give the worship pastor here’s what you do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I don’t necessarily care when you get it done, because every campus may do things just a little bit differently. And there’s only a few tasks that it kind of matters that things get done on a certain day and the same as with our volunteer kind of schedule.

Speaker 2But I’ll give you a few for instances. So every August, every campus has a yearly vision meeting. So every volunteer from worship production at that campus, the worship pastor leads that meeting, they worship together, they probably play a little game together, do a little giveaway or something fun. And then the worship pastor has an opportunity to introduce the worship leadership team for that year. And they just cast vision for that team for that throughout the year, usually in the late spring, early summer, a lot of our worship pastors will take their teams out by instrument groups.

Speaker 2So, like, they’ll take all the bass players and drummers out to top golf, and they’ll take all the keyboard players and guitar players one night and they’ll go bowling or something like that. Those little things are super intentional for us. We do workshops in the fall. We do labs in the fall. Right now, I’m doing a workshop on worship leadership for all of our frontline volunteers, one campus at a time and having them actually over to my house. So it’s about, I don’t know, anywhere from twelve to 20, depending on the campus.

Speaker 2And we’ll just come over and have coffee, and my wife makes these amazing cookies, and I just get to pour into them. And I love getting to invite people into my home. We could easily do it at a campus. But there’s just something to me about, like inviting people into your house. And that’s important. This year’s workshop was on worship leadership and just how to do that as a frontline volunteer. We’re doing labs for worship leadership team this fall. We’ll do workshops, vocal care workshops. Usually every campus will do that once a year, so they’ll get the front line together for that.

Speaker 2We’ll do some kind of instrument clinic in the spring and some kind of instrument clinic in the fall, whether it be like drums or electric guitar or whatever. Then we’ll bring somebody in that sort of stuff. We also have a lot of little things that we offer to volunteers. I’ve been a Fender artist for three years now, and when our relationship started with them, it’s really a relationship with the Church. It’s not so much that I’m an artist as much as through that relationship. We built this connection with Fender in the Church, and we’re able to pass on the artist discount to every volunteer in our Church.

Speaker 2Nice, which is amazing. We have the same relationship with an Inier company we have the same relationship with. We’ve been with DeDario for, like, six years now. And so we get to pass those things along to our volunteers. And so when volunteers need drumsticks or heads for their personal drums or guitar strings, whatever. And so those relationships have been. So we want to promote the company and really help the company because we see it as a relationship with some of the most incredible. If you told 14 year old guitarist me that I would be connected to Fender and DiDario, I would have freaked out.

Speaker 2And now we get to be connected with these big, amazing companies that are historically some of the best companies in the world when it comes to guitars and strings and all those sorts of things. And we get to bless our volunteers with those connections. Oh, my gosh, man. That’s just huge. And so that was always an incentive for us, as we were looking for relationships that were mutually beneficial, that we can help promote things for them with integrity, because we don’t have the Adario and not use the Adario.

Speaker 2We all use those things. You know what I’m saying? I have more Fender guitars than I do of anything else. It’s like that sort of thing. We didn’t just partner with companies because it was easy. We really like what they do, and we really like working with them. And they were willing to understand that we wanted to use this as a way to bless volunteers. So all the way from events to gear connections and things like that all the way to workshops for vocals or worship leadership.

Speaker 2These aren’t like one off events. We look at the Ministry and the investment of our volunteers as an ecosystem through the seasons, and there needs to be seasons of rest. We don’t do a ton in the late fall, early winter, like November, December, there’s not a ton of stuff going on. We don’t do a ton in January, we don’t do a ton in May or June. There’s months that we don’t do a lot. But we look at it like that. And doing something once doesn’t produce fruit.

Speaker 2If you want to have a culture, an ecosystem of volunteer care, it has to be based on rhythms and layers, and you have to build that in and fight for consistency in it.

Speaker 1That’s so good. And you said that you give the new worship pastors when they get hired, like, a list of here’s what you have to do every week and here’s what you have to do every year. Could you also give us access to that so I can post it in the show notes because I think these are really helpful, and I love that concept of, like, you can’t just do something once and say, okay, cool. I can wipe my hands of that now because I took care of my volunteers.

Speaker 1It has to be constant rhythms and layers.

Speaker 2You said, yeah, one more small thing that made me think of this was something we instituted maybe three or four years ago, but we call them volunteer care packs, and they’re in our green rooms and all of our campuses. It’s like the little box. And every campus looks a little bit different, but it’s like Tylenol and Kleenex and mouthwash and Qtips and Hairspray and deodorant. I can’t tell you how many times some College kid shows up and he’s playing bass that day and he’s rolled out of bed and forgot to put his deodorant on, and he feels all insecure.

Speaker 2It’s more so, like hotel, sort of toiletry items of things and then just stuff that people are like, oh, I got a headache. Well, we have like that. It’s like the littlest thing. But when you can look at a volunteer and they go, oh, my gosh, man. I forgot to put on deodorant, we go, hey, no worries. It seems sort of embarrassing, but at the same time for you to be able to meet the smallest little need and people are leaving and it’s raining. If you have ponchos, if you have it’s like, the littlest thing can we think of any little thing that is literally an act of pastoral care to people.

Speaker 2It’s raining outside. Do you have a poncho we can put over someone’s baby carrier because they came to sing that morning and they brought their baby with them. You know what I’m saying? It’s the little things.

Speaker 1And you just keep that in the green room or somewhere, and if someone needs it, they take it.

Speaker 2Yes. Totally. Yeah.

Speaker 1That’s so cool. I haven’t heard of that. And I really like that. So you’re in the Atlanta area, which is a big city. I’m in the Los Angeles area, which is ridiculous traffic and 25 million people crammed in here and concrete everywhere, and everyone’s crazy busy and it’s hard to drive 1 mile because it’s like it takes an hour. But here’s the question. Relationally. Do you feel like your volunteers? I’m sure your pastors are texting them and encouraging them one on one. But do you feel like your volunteers are connected to each other?

Speaker 1Like in my team? For my main sanctuary team, we have probably 35 to 40 volunteers, and there are a couple of groups within that group that hang out together outside of Church, but not really as much as I would think, because if the Church is a family, the family of God, you would think that we would be all up in each other’s business at each other’s homes. And our Church just hasn’t really, ever been able to accomplish that. And part of me blames the busyness of La, but maybe it’s just poor leadership from our Church or from me to cultivate that sort of, like intimate, connectedness outside of Church services.

Speaker 1How have you guys fostered that? Have you fostered that what’s it like for you guys.

Speaker 2We definitely take advantage of that on Sunday mornings in the downtime. One of our campuses is really great at. That is our Buford campus, and it’s just a little community here in Gwyneth. I’ll walk in there because I’ll go visit campuses from time to time, and I’ll walk in and there’s like four people playing Mario Kart on the TV in the green room, and there’s like a whole settlers of Katan game going on on the table. They’re just really good at maximizing their downtime. So they all attend the 09:00 a.m. Service together.

Speaker 2And we have quite a few teams. We don’t enforce that because we do have somebody’s family maybe come into 11:00 a.m. Service instead of 09:00 a.m. Service or whatever. We don’t really care. But a lot of teams do choose to sit in service together so that they’re not split up. And then campuses who have two or three services during those other services, they’re gaming and they’re eating lunch or whatever, and they’re just enjoying each other. Some of those relationships happen naturally. Sometimes I think we have too high of an expectation for that to happen within the team when people have different affinities or they’re at different stages of life, I think that’s one of the reasons why I love that.

Speaker 2Now, in our process, people get connected to the Church before they get connected to the team, because if they get connected to the team before they get connected to the Church, then if they don’t find that community within the team, they may not ever find it. But if they get connected to the Church first and then to the team, then they may find it outside of the team. And I’m totally okay with that, as long as they have connection in the body of Christ. So if a bass player is 55 years old and he has adult children and there’s another guy on the team who is a vocalist and plays acoustic guitar and he’s 23 and isn’t married, I don’t really expect those guys to hang out much, right.

Speaker 2But if this 55 year old base player guy is hanging out with, if he’s not connected to the Church at all, I’m concerned. Yeah, but I do love. I think that’s why those intentional things the parties that we have during the summer, like the outings that we do with, like, drums and bass and keys and guitars and vocals, whatever. It’s really fun for those guys because bass players never get to hang out because there’s only one of them on the platform, right? Guitar players hang out all the time, and vocalists hang out all the time.

Speaker 2But keys and drums and bass, typically, there’s only one of those people at a time, and they never get to talk, shop and talk gear. So it’s really cool to see that happening on those outings and things. So I do sense a little bit of that. And our worship pastors, they do usually one or two times in the fall and one or two times in the spring. I just heard one of our worship pastors is having everybody over for, like, a big pool party at one of their volunteers houses.

Speaker 2They do a lot of that. But I also would say, like in an encouraging way, like, don’t have too high of an expectation for people to get everything that they need in terms of their life in the body of Christ from just within their service team, you know what I’m saying?

Speaker 1I think that’s such a great distinction when you said, I want them to get connected in the Church first before the team. I think distinguishing those two things is so helpful because that’s exactly what I’ve been experiencing. You’re right. Our Church doesn’t have small groups, and so we do have the 55 or 60 year old woman singer, and then we have the 22 year old singer, and they don’t hang out outside of Church. And like you said, that’s probably not an okay thing. As long as when they are in the room together, they’re still fellowshipping.

Speaker 1But yeah, man, that was such a helpful distinction for me just to think of it that way and to not have too high of an expectation for it. We do have that community within our team and a couple of ideas that you shared about having some games. Like, we have a hangout room in between for our production and our worship team. And then our worship team kind of has a little backstage area where they hang out, too. But in that production worship room, we have chess, we have Uno, we have food, and then we do a mid in between services.

Speaker 1We do a Bible study, not a Bible study, but like a discussion of the pastor’s sermon with some discussion questions. And so we’re working to build that community. I think the thing that I see lacking is the out of Church community. I see all the young people hanging out together, and then all the old people are all busy with their jobs and taking their kids to sports, and so they don’t really hang out.

Speaker 2Now.

Speaker 1One question I do have is communicating with your team. Do you guys have a specific platform that you use to communicate in group communication, or is it just all through text and email? How do you guys kind of foster that just connectedness to the team through digital communication?

Speaker 2Yes. Obviously, we use Planning Center for service communication stuff. I think all of our worship pastors kind of use a different form. We never really instituted a formal thing. A lot of them use slack. A lot of people rely on text messages. I think that’s just so common for people and asking people to download WhatsApp or group me or something else is just like, I think people under 30, 35, 40 even be like, yeah, no problem. But sometimes the older people in your team may just go like, another app, and you got to set an account up.

Speaker 2And it’s like, I got to log in. Text messaging is like, the simplest thing ever. People just engage with it literally all day.

Speaker 1So I have a story about that. Can I share? Yeah.

Speaker 2Come on, dude.

Speaker 1When I first got here four years ago, we had a bunch of teams completely disconnected from each other, like men’s Ministry, women’s Ministry, marriage, kids, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2All of us.

Speaker 1So we put everybody into this giant app called Band. And then you can create subgroups in band. And it works great for a while. But slowly, people started disengaging with it. And just this week, we switched from sending our set notes through band. It was kind of our way to contact the team and remind them, even though they get the planning center reminder, it was kind of like, I hope you guys are doing well, blah, blah, blah, praying for you guys if you need anything. But then also like, hey, check the set notes in planning center and practice, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1So we used to send it through band, and less and less people were reading the messages. So just this week we switched over to texting and immediately everybody’s replying and chatting with each other. And I’m like, good, we should have just kept it simple all this time. Like, oh, well, you have to fail to learn well.

Speaker 2And I think there’s bonuses to that sort of thing. I’m in a group right now with some guys from overseas because we’re doing a little event together in a few weeks, and we had to use WhatsApp because of texting services. Just weren’t. I get it. There’s like, some reasons for those apps and slack is really good. Like, we use that for production, support and stuff on Sunday mornings. But again, it’s so easy. We have a rhythm. And depending on the campus, it’s a little different. But usually every Monday or Tuesday, a campus will text that team for the week and go, hey, guys, here’s the group chat for the week.

Speaker 2They’ll label it like Sunday, whatever the date. And hey, it’s so and so’s birthday. Tell him his birthday. We’re going to have cupcakes this week. Oh, here’s a little meme. Here’s a thing. It becomes like that week’s conversation piece, and then it’s gone. So we do the weekly tech groups just for those teams. And then a lot of our worship pastors have, like, a drum group, a base group or a backline group or a frontline group. Or however, they want to delineate that there’s different levels of annoying when it comes to group chat.

Speaker 2And so I think our worship pastors have to know what’s the level of annoying my team can handle. You put, like, your whole team at a group chat, like, 50 people. You got that 19 year old kid who’s going to post a meme like, every 30 seconds in there and then somebody’s going to leave the chat and get mad because it’s annoying because they have a real job. So you have to kind of be wise with it.

Speaker 1Yeah, it’s hard, but it’s important that we do just, like, keep in touch with our people.

Speaker 2Totally.

Speaker 1I’m sure you would say this as well, but to any of the listeners listening, if the only time you text people is when you need them to play, that’s a problem. Yeah, because I have a few young people on my team who serve at some other churches that are friends. Like, my friends are the worship pastors there. And so my team will go serve there occasionally. And they’ll tell me, like, the only time they ever text me is when they want me to play. And they’re just like, I just feel like I’m being used and that is not a good way to invest or care for people.

Speaker 2Totally.

Speaker 1I’d love to hear just any other ways that you guys are investing in your team that you can think of, whether it’s spiritually or musically or maybe even there are ideas of things that you want to try that you haven’t yet tried anything comes to mind. I think.

Speaker 2We’Re always trying to figure out how to disciple volunteers. The gear things great. The hangs are great. The community is great, but we’re always trying to figure out how do we help you walk more closely with Jesus? It’s not our ministry’s job to discipline. We have a discipleship spiritual growth like Department here at Twelve Spoon. It’s not our job, but we also go like, okay, well, our discipleship pathway is called The Rhythms of a Disciple. And there’s a book that one of our guys wrote called Foundations that we use in there, and it’s about the five rhythms of a disciple.

Speaker 2We just go like, okay, well, what’s our interaction with that? That’s something because foundations and the five rhythms are something that came up right in the beginning of the Pandemic season. I think what is our relationship with that? Is it a goal now for us to get all of our volunteers to make sure everybody’s participating over the next? I don’t know. Call it two years. Can we get all of our worship musicians and vocalists and production volunteers? Can we get all of them to participate in a foundations group in the next two to three years?

Speaker 2That’s something that is kind of on our hearts right now. We also probably two years before the Pandemic was the last time we had every volunteer from every campus in a room together. We haven’t done that in a really long time. That’s something that we’re thinking about. If you’re multi site, we want people to have campus connections, which you said something a little while ago that made me think of this, like one of the ways that we make sure that people are being cared for well and not just called when they’re needed to serve.

Speaker 2And things like that, I would say five years ago, we had musicians were not dedicated to a campus. They were just a part of Twelve Stone, and some of them served at all eight campuses at the time, some of them only served at three. Some of them only served at one. We eventually made everyone pick a campus because what was happening was they were very connected to the worship Ministry, but not to the Church. And that was where that language came from. I shared with you a little while ago.

Speaker 2We want to make sure that people are being passed, cared for that a pastor knows what’s going on in their life. If a family member passes away or they’re struggling as a parent or they lose a job. And how can we pray for you? How can we come alongside you? I can’t tell you how many times it’s been like somebody lost a job and somebody on the worship team was able to go, oh, man, I know exactly what you’re gifted at. I can help you find this teaching job opened up.

Speaker 2She’d be perfect for that. Just the connection because people are known within the body of Christ. That was a huge turning point in our Ministry, making people go like, hey, you only play at the Buford campus or the Hamilton Mill campus or the Lawrenceville campus, not because we wanted to limit people, but because we wanted to know people and pastor people. That was a huge turning point for us. But we are looking forward to and hopefully we’re trying to figure out, how can we get everybody in the same room again?

Speaker 2Because I know there’s probably tons of these people who haven’t seen each other in two years. Now that seven years ago, maybe they served at a campus together or something, and we would love to see that happen.

Speaker 1Yeah, that’s good. This has been really helpful for me personally, and I’m sure the listeners, too. Any final final closing words to the worship leaders listening.

Speaker 2Man, it’s my 21st year in Ministry. I would just really encourage you to take care of your soul. You should never be embarrassed as a worship pastor, worship leader to lose your passion for God’s Word or the Holy Spirit or the Church. Sometimes that just happens, and if you feel embarrassed about it, you won’t talk about it. And if you won’t talk about it, it’ll never heal. And you’ll trick yourself into thinking that it’s healing. If you start to lose faith or lose passion, find somebody that you can talk to, take care of yourself.

Speaker 2Be honest about the condition of your soul and your passion for the Church and God’s Word and the Holy Spirit and the gospel and talk to people when you feel like your passion is waning a little bit. We’ve got to understand that we can’t sustain this on our own. We were meant to go through seasons of doubt. God welcomes that in our relationship with him and that should empower you and excite you. It shouldn’t make you feel less. Talk to somebody if you feel that way and let the Holy Spirit rejuvenate that in you over time so that you continue to do Ministry with honesty and integrity and true passion.

Speaker 2So don’t be afraid of that. That’s what I would give you.

Speaker 1That’s really good. Thank you, Lee. We’ll have you back in the future.

Speaker 2Awesome. Thanks, Alex. All right.

Speaker 1That’s it for today. I hope you were helped by this episode. If you were, please send it along to other people that you serve with or to any other worship leaders that you know that might be helped by it. And be sure to try some of these tactics Lee lays out in this episode. And also, if you want to go deeper, check out my team building course at Worship ministrytraining. Comhorses and I will see you next month for another helpful episode. God bless.