I would like to begin with a word of appreciation for how Brittany Hurd’s essay focused on the corporate nature of congregational music. In her essay, Hurd argued that the congregation has a mutual responsibility to one another in congregational song. All the members of the church are called to lift their voices in praise and prayer to God. It is in this context, that the skilled lay musician bears a special vocational responsibility to serve their brothers and sisters in Christ by “helping the broader congregation to sing well and increasing in them both understanding and delight.” The lay musician accomplishes this goal by reinforcing the voice of the congregation but also finding ways to embellish the music to express the theological content of the church’s song in richer and more expressive ways. Such an act of service to the congregation requires the lay musician to cultivate pastoral sensitivity to the needs of the congregation as well as the humility to limit their musical contribution to that which best enables the congregation’s participation. To this, I offer a resounding AMEN.
My response builds on the foundation that Hurd offered. If Hurd envisioned the lay musician as an active and engaged trained singer who uses their skills to enhance the congregation’s worship, my response will expand on that by considering a different musician role in the congregation’s worshiping life—the lead musician.
Lead musicians in the church often belong to a strange class within the church hierarchy. They exist ambiguously between laity and clergy. In my own position as the Minister of Music at an Anglican church, I am not an ordained minister and I have no formal role in the church’s liturgical leadership. At the same time, I am a part of my church’s staff and, as the church’s primary instrumentalist and singer who leads a team of musicians, my position has both pastoral and liturgical components to it. Such a position as mine is not uncommon. Because congregational song both forms part of the liturgy and assists the congregations to indwell the liturgy, lead musicians—whether lay or ordained, paid or volunteer—play a significant role in the congregation’s corporate worship.
It is because the lead musician occupies this ambiguous but important space that reflection on how the lead musician provides leadership to the church’s worship is important.[1] In the actual leadership of congregational song, how can musicians use their skills and experience to enable the congregation to more fully realize, encounter, and respond to God’s presence within the Christian assembly? What kind of skills or awareness should lead musicians cultivate in their leadership? In short, how might church musicians reflect on their role as “worship leaders”?
Of course, such a question seems to be charting a course straight towards the worship wars which Hurd so deftly negotiated around. Discussion of the musician’s role as a liturgical leader can be a touchy subject. It is one of the frequently drawn lines that form a boundary in Hurd’s “wary détente” between advocates of “contemporary” and “traditional” worship.
For practitioners of “contemporary worship”, it is normative to envision the lead musician and/or the singers in the church’s music ministry as “worship leaders” (regardless of their ordination status). This reflects a recent historical evolution in how many churches understand the role of the church musician. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a network of independent Pentecostal pastors and teachers were enraptured by a new understanding of praise as the dwelling place of God’s presence (based on Psalm 22:3). As praise was so critical to the manifestation of God’s presence, these “Praise and Worship” Pentecostals devoted intense energy to searching out the meaning of true biblical praise. This would have important ramifications for the role of the song leader. Song leaders did not merely lead the music. Because songs themselves were expressions of praise and because God has promised to inhabit his people’s praise, song leaders were leading the congregation into the very presence of God. New nomenclature followed this new theological vision: lead musicians became “worship leaders.” As the Praise and Worship movement increasingly influenced a broad swathe of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, this concept of the lead musician as worship leader has become universal among a large cross-section of contemporary Christianity.
For ecclesial contexts that practice “traditional worship,” this concept of the lay musician as a worship leader has become a touchstone for a broader concern with the entire phenomenon of “contemporary worship.” The now familiar image of the contemporary worship leader— standing front and center in the church building where (in times past) the altar table had stood, wreathed in artificial smoke, and perhaps holding an electric guitar—engenders a sense of horror. Such an image is perceived as the very epitome of how popular culture has coopted the church’s liturgy. For others, such an image suggests the seeping influence of secular ideologies of narcissism or individualism in Christian worship.
By talking about the lead musician’s role as a worship leader, care needs to be taken to navigate these two positions. On the one hand, “contemporary worship” practitioners need to be more aware of the historically anomalous nature of the musician as worship leader. As Caleb Skogen reminds us in his response, the longstanding norm throughout Christian history is that the role of the liturgical presider resides with the presbyter/priest/pastor/ordained clergyperson. At the same time, I would encourage lead musicians in more traditional settings to realize the significance of their liturgical role. Fundamentally, congregational song is a liturgical act. Through song we attribute praise to God, we remember God’s mighty acts of salvation in Jesus Christ, we offer thanksgiving, and we pray for ourselves and for others. As the (apocryphal) Augustine quotation summarizes, “the one who sings prays twice.” Congregational song is prayer! It follows that in leading congregational song, musicians are leading congregational prayer.
Moreover, a longstanding theme of Christian spirituality is the fact that Christian prayer is both an interior and exterior activity. Of course, Christian prayer involves spoken (or sung) words, gestures, and other ritual actions that are all part of prayer. At the same time, prayer is more than the sum of these gestures and words. It also involves an inward orientation of the heart and the affections towards God. As John Chrysostom preached “You should not think of prayer as being a matter of words. It is a desire for God, an indescribable devotion, not of human origin, but the gift of God’s grace.” In congregational song, it is not just important that the congregation participates in the music as music, but that through those songs, they “lift their hearts up to the Lord” (as many communion liturgies begin). Good musical leadership has a role to play in helping to facilitate that inward disposition. Musicians shape how the congregation participates in those hymns and songs and how they indwell them as acts of prayer or praise.
Even if we are to be cautious about the role that musicians play in the liturgical assembly, we still need to carry out careful and robust reflection on how musicians provide liturgical leadership. They may have a qualitatively different role than a presbyter, but their leadership is still significant. Failure to reflect on their role does not eradicate their leadership. Instead, it means that the musician’s leadership risks being ineffective or malformational.
A helpful analogy is the role of a lector. The lector’s role is similar too but distinct from the preacher. Both proclaim the word of God but they do so in different modes. The lector’s role is undoubtedly smaller. Unlike the preacher they do not have the responsibility of interpreting and applying the scriptural text(s) to the lives of their congregation. However, the skill with which the lector proclaims the text still has a role in how the congregation attends to scripture and perceives it as God’s Word—living and powerful, authoritative and meaningful. Of course, it is possible for the lector to overamplify their role and dramatize the text in unhelpful ways, centering the lector rather than scripture. Its opposite extreme—a belief that the lector’s performance is entirely unimportant for the congregation’s attentiveness to what the Holy Spirit is speaking—is equally dangerous. Even a drab and monotone mumbling of the scripture passage interprets God’s Word for the congregation. It just does so in unfortunate ways.
What then might it mean for church musicians to attend seriously to their role as leaders of the congregation’s worship? To think about this question, I draw upon Kimberly Bracken Long’s helpful chapter on liturgical presidency in her book The Worshipping Body: The Art of Leading Worship (John Knox Press, 2009). This chapter offers good practical advice for those ministers charged with leading the congregation’s worship. However, I believe it also has good wisdom to offer lead musicians as well.
For Long, good liturgical leadership emerges from the heart—the center of a person’s being that encompasses “thought, feeling, and will” (111). When worship leadership proceeds from the heart, presiders are enabled to bring their holistic self to the act of leading worship. This ideal presider will lead the congregation’s worship “as a person of prayer who is committed to justice, abounding in compassion, and constantly seeking the will of God for the world, the church, and oneself” (111). For Long, this kind of presiding from the heart involves five essential practices: 1) learning the internal logic and rhythms of the service so that the liturgical text resides deep within the presider, 2) cultivating a deep well of personal prayer out of which the presider prays, 3) knowing and loving their congregation so that their liturgical presidency embodies hospitality and warmth, 4) being fully present to the liturgy so that their presidency can bring their best but authentic self into their leadership, and 5) allowing Christ to indwell you and nurture a vision of the coming kingdom of God so that liturgical presidency expresses the passionate conviction that the church’s assembly is deeply significant.
How might we translate these practices for the work of the lead musician in the congregation?
- Allow the words and music of the hymns and songs that your church sings to dwell deeply within you. When these words and songs are in constant circulation in your heart and mind as prayer, they will become more true for you as prayer when you lead them. Additionally, much like learning a piece of music by heart so that you can attend to the expressive elements of performance, dwelling on the songs and hymns will free you to guide the congregation into prayer through these songs more smoothly.
- Cultivate a knowledge and love of the congregation you serve—especially in how they respond in musical worship—so that your leadership can be hospitable and invitational. What songs and hymns will they sing with gusto and joy versus what songs are they less familiar with or will stretch their musical skills? Of course, it’s a good thing to ask your congregation to sing new or unfamiliar music. However, such an awareness should shape your musical leadership. You need to be attentive to the places where the congregation may need additional help to enter into that liturgical moment as an act of worship. Certain hymns and songs will need a word of explanation or contextualization so that the congregation can indwell them as worship. Verses may need repeating; the introduction may need lengthening; your vocal leadership may need to be clearer and simpler. Musical leadership needs to embody that same hospitality that liturgical presidency does, rooted in a genuine care for the congregation.
- Lead the music with passion and authenticity. In The Worshiping Body, Long navigates a tension between how presiders need to bring their authentic self to their leadership while also inhabiting the liturgy as a kind of actor who must bring gravity and a sense of awe to their presidency. Something similar may be said for lead musicians. We too must “lead with authenticity, bringing all of our strengths and weaknesses, idiosyncrasies and particularities, put forth as faithfully, humbly, and joyfully as we know how” (114). At the same time, our musical leadership participates in the liturgy’s drama. As lead musicians, we demonstrate the truth we proclaim in our hymnody by our embodiment of it. Through the passion with which we lead, we also implicitly invite the congregation to receive this gospel as true. We can encourage our congregations to pray and praise with faith that God hears. Just as Long cautions presiders that this kind of passion must not be manufactured but comes about by a continual self-abandonment to Christ, so also our leadership needs to be energized by “the vision of Christ’s return and his promise to be at work in our midst, here and now” (115). Leading music with passion and authenticity is not just a projection that we put forth on a Sunday but must be rooted in a life of prayer, empowered by the Holy Spirit’s work within us.
Of course, each of these practices will look different for different leaders and in different contexts. I hope that these thoughts though will start a reflection on the liturgical aspects of what lead musicians—lay and ordained—bring to the church’s worship. Ultimately, lead musicians work in harmony alongside musically-trained members of the congregation to encourage all of God’s people to sing well and through singing, to love God with all of their heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Jonathan Ottaway, Th.D., is a liturgical scholar and musician. He earned a Th.D. in liturgical studies from Duke University in 2022 and teaches as an adjunct professor in worship and church history for Duke University (Course of Study Program), Asbury Theological Seminary, and World Mission University. He is currently writing a book on pentecostal-charismatic worship and the 24/7 worship movement. He also serves as the Minister of Music at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Chapel Hill, NC.
[1] My response passes over the significant question of song choice. This is not because this topic is unimportant. Instead, its importance means that there is already a good body of practical advice available to help musicians shape and assess their congregation’s diet of musical prayer and praise.
I would like to begin with a word of appreciation for how Brittany Hurd’s essay focused on the corporate nature of congregational music. In her essay, Hurd argued that the congregation has a mutual responsibility to one another in congregational song. All the members of the church are called to lift their voices in praise and prayer to God. It is in this context, that the skilled lay musician bears a special vocational responsibility to serve their brothers and sisters in Christ by “helping the broader congregation to sing well and increasing in them both understanding and delight.” The lay musician accomplishes this goal by reinforcing the voice of the congregation but also finding ways to embellish the music to express the theological content of the church’s song in richer and more expressive ways. Such an act of service to the congregation requires the lay musician to cultivate pastoral sensitivity to the needs of the congregation as well as the humility to limit their musical contribution to that which best enables the congregation’s participation. To this, I offer a resounding AMEN.
My response builds on the foundation that Hurd offered. If Hurd envisioned the lay musician as an active and engaged trained singer who uses their skills to enhance the congregation’s worship, my response will expand on that by considering a different musician role in the congregation’s worshiping life—the lead musician.
Lead musicians in the church often belong to a strange class within the church hierarchy. They exist ambiguously between laity and clergy. In my own position as the Minister of Music at an Anglican church, I am not an ordained minister and I have no formal role in the church’s liturgical leadership. At the same time, I am a part of my church’s staff and, as the church’s primary instrumentalist and singer who leads a team of musicians, my position has both pastoral and liturgical components to it. Such a position as mine is not uncommon. Because congregational song both forms part of the liturgy and assists the congregations to indwell the liturgy, lead musicians—whether lay or ordained, paid or volunteer—play a significant role in the congregation’s corporate worship.
It is because the lead musician occupies this ambiguous but important space that reflection on how the lead musician provides leadership to the church’s worship is important.[1] In the actual leadership of congregational song, how can musicians use their skills and experience to enable the congregation to more fully realize, encounter, and respond to God’s presence within the Christian assembly? What kind of skills or awareness should lead musicians cultivate in their leadership? In short, how might church musicians reflect on their role as “worship leaders”?
Of course, such a question seems to be charting a course straight towards the worship wars which Hurd so deftly negotiated around. Discussion of the musician’s role as a liturgical leader can be a touchy subject. It is one of the frequently drawn lines that form a boundary in Hurd’s “wary détente” between advocates of “contemporary” and “traditional” worship.
For practitioners of “contemporary worship”, it is normative to envision the lead musician and/or the singers in the church’s music ministry as “worship leaders” (regardless of their ordination status). This reflects a recent historical evolution in how many churches understand the role of the church musician. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a network of independent Pentecostal pastors and teachers were enraptured by a new understanding of praise as the dwelling place of God’s presence (based on Psalm 22:3). As praise was so critical to the manifestation of God’s presence, these “Praise and Worship” Pentecostals devoted intense energy to searching out the meaning of true biblical praise. This would have important ramifications for the role of the song leader. Song leaders did not merely lead the music. Because songs themselves were expressions of praise and because God has promised to inhabit his people’s praise, song leaders were leading the congregation into the very presence of God. New nomenclature followed this new theological vision: lead musicians became “worship leaders.” As the Praise and Worship movement increasingly influenced a broad swathe of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, this concept of the lead musician as worship leader has become universal among a large cross-section of contemporary Christianity.
For ecclesial contexts that practice “traditional worship,” this concept of the lay musician as a worship leader has become a touchstone for a broader concern with the entire phenomenon of “contemporary worship.” The now familiar image of the contemporary worship leader— standing front and center in the church building where (in times past) the altar table had stood, wreathed in artificial smoke, and perhaps holding an electric guitar—engenders a sense of horror. Such an image is perceived as the very epitome of how popular culture has coopted the church’s liturgy. For others, such an image suggests the seeping influence of secular ideologies of narcissism or individualism in Christian worship.
By talking about the lead musician’s role as a worship leader, care needs to be taken to navigate these two positions. On the one hand, “contemporary worship” practitioners need to be more aware of the historically anomalous nature of the musician as worship leader. As Caleb Skogen reminds us in his response, the longstanding norm throughout Christian history is that the role of the liturgical presider resides with the presbyter/priest/pastor/ordained clergyperson. At the same time, I would encourage lead musicians in more traditional settings to realize the significance of their liturgical role. Fundamentally, congregational song is a liturgical act. Through song we attribute praise to God, we remember God’s mighty acts of salvation in Jesus Christ, we offer thanksgiving, and we pray for ourselves and for others. As the (apocryphal) Augustine quotation summarizes, “the one who sings prays twice.” Congregational song is prayer! It follows that in leading congregational song, musicians are leading congregational prayer.
Moreover, a longstanding theme of Christian spirituality is the fact that Christian prayer is both an interior and exterior activity. Of course, Christian prayer involves spoken (or sung) words, gestures, and other ritual actions that are all part of prayer. At the same time, prayer is more than the sum of these gestures and words. It also involves an inward orientation of the heart and the affections towards God. As John Chrysostom preached “You should not think of prayer as being a matter of words. It is a desire for God, an indescribable devotion, not of human origin, but the gift of God's grace.” In congregational song, it is not just important that the congregation participates in the music as music, but that through those songs, they “lift their hearts up to the Lord” (as many communion liturgies begin). Good musical leadership has a role to play in helping to facilitate that inward disposition. Musicians shape how the congregation participates in those hymns and songs and how they indwell them as acts of prayer or praise.
Even if we are to be cautious about the role that musicians play in the liturgical assembly, we still need to carry out careful and robust reflection on how musicians provide liturgical leadership. They may have a qualitatively different role than a presbyter, but their leadership is still significant. Failure to reflect on their role does not eradicate their leadership. Instead, it means that the musician’s leadership risks being ineffective or malformational.
A helpful analogy is the role of a lector. The lector’s role is similar too but distinct from the preacher. Both proclaim the word of God but they do so in different modes. The lector’s role is undoubtedly smaller. Unlike the preacher they do not have the responsibility of interpreting and applying the scriptural text(s) to the lives of their congregation. However, the skill with which the lector proclaims the text still has a role in how the congregation attends to scripture and perceives it as God’s Word—living and powerful, authoritative and meaningful. Of course, it is possible for the lector to overamplify their role and dramatize the text in unhelpful ways, centering the lector rather than scripture. Its opposite extreme—a belief that the lector’s performance is entirely unimportant for the congregation’s attentiveness to what the Holy Spirit is speaking—is equally dangerous. Even a drab and monotone mumbling of the scripture passage interprets God’s Word for the congregation. It just does so in unfortunate ways.
What then might it mean for church musicians to attend seriously to their role as leaders of the congregation’s worship? To think about this question, I draw upon Kimberly Bracken Long’s helpful chapter on liturgical presidency in her book The Worshipping Body: The Art of Leading Worship (John Knox Press, 2009). This chapter offers good practical advice for those ministers charged with leading the congregation’s worship. However, I believe it also has good wisdom to offer lead musicians as well.
For Long, good liturgical leadership emerges from the heart—the center of a person’s being that encompasses “thought, feeling, and will” (111). When worship leadership proceeds from the heart, presiders are enabled to bring their holistic self to the act of leading worship. This ideal presider will lead the congregation’s worship “as a person of prayer who is committed to justice, abounding in compassion, and constantly seeking the will of God for the world, the church, and oneself” (111). For Long, this kind of presiding from the heart involves five essential practices: 1) learning the internal logic and rhythms of the service so that the liturgical text resides deep within the presider, 2) cultivating a deep well of personal prayer out of which the presider prays, 3) knowing and loving their congregation so that their liturgical presidency embodies hospitality and warmth, 4) being fully present to the liturgy so that their presidency can bring their best but authentic self into their leadership, and 5) allowing Christ to indwell you and nurture a vision of the coming kingdom of God so that liturgical presidency expresses the passionate conviction that the church’s assembly is deeply significant.
How might we translate these practices for the work of the lead musician in the congregation?
- Allow the words and music of the hymns and songs that your church sings to dwell deeply within you. When these words and songs are in constant circulation in your heart and mind as prayer, they will become more true for you as prayer when you lead them. Additionally, much like learning a piece of music by heart so that you can attend to the expressive elements of performance, dwelling on the songs and hymns will free you to guide the congregation into prayer through these songs more smoothly.
- Cultivate a knowledge and love of the congregation you serve—especially in how they respond in musical worship—so that your leadership can be hospitable and invitational. What songs and hymns will they sing with gusto and joy versus what songs are they less familiar with or will stretch their musical skills? Of course, it’s a good thing to ask your congregation to sing new or unfamiliar music. However, such an awareness should shape your musical leadership. You need to be attentive to the places where the congregation may need additional help to enter into that liturgical moment as an act of worship. Certain hymns and songs will need a word of explanation or contextualization so that the congregation can indwell them as worship. Verses may need repeating; the introduction may need lengthening; your vocal leadership may need to be clearer and simpler. Musical leadership needs to embody that same hospitality that liturgical presidency does, rooted in a genuine care for the congregation.
- Lead the music with passion and authenticity. In The Worshiping Body, Long navigates a tension between how presiders need to bring their authentic self to their leadership while also inhabiting the liturgy as a kind of actor who must bring gravity and a sense of awe to their presidency. Something similar may be said for lead musicians. We too must “lead with authenticity, bringing all of our strengths and weaknesses, idiosyncrasies and particularities, put forth as faithfully, humbly, and joyfully as we know how” (114). At the same time, our musical leadership participates in the liturgy’s drama. As lead musicians, we demonstrate the truth we proclaim in our hymnody by our embodiment of it. Through the passion with which we lead, we also implicitly invite the congregation to receive this gospel as true. We can encourage our congregations to pray and praise with faith that God hears. Just as Long cautions presiders that this kind of passion must not be manufactured but comes about by a continual self-abandonment to Christ, so also our leadership needs to be energized by “the vision of Christ’s return and his promise to be at work in our midst, here and now” (115). Leading music with passion and authenticity is not just a projection that we put forth on a Sunday but must be rooted in a life of prayer, empowered by the Holy Spirit’s work within us.
Of course, each of these practices will look different for different leaders and in different contexts. I hope that these thoughts though will start a reflection on the liturgical aspects of what lead musicians—lay and ordained—bring to the church’s worship. Ultimately, lead musicians work in harmony alongside musically-trained members of the congregation to encourage all of God’s people to sing well and through singing, to love God with all of their heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Jonathan Ottaway, Th.D., is a liturgical scholar and musician. He earned a Th.D. in liturgical studies from Duke University in 2022 and teaches as an adjunct professor in worship and church history for Duke University (Course of Study Program), Asbury Theological Seminary, and World Mission University. He is currently writing a book on pentecostal-charismatic worship and the 24/7 worship movement. He also serves as the Minister of Music at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Chapel Hill, NC.
[1] My response passes over the significant question of song choice. This is not because this topic is unimportant. Instead, its importance means that there is already a good body of practical advice available to help musicians shape and assess their congregation’s diet of musical prayer and praise.
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