Creating and maintaining a spirit of unity among people from a wide range of backgrounds is a common challenge that most worship leaders today will face. And while you could spend an entire month of seminars going over the subject, I think the answer isn’t as complicated as some might think. Take a look at scripture and you’ll see that we already have a map.
Galatians 3:28 tell us that in this kingdom, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus. To me, this is a roadmap of what our churches and worship teams should look like; people from all walks of life celebrating together, enjoying the freedom that we have because of the great price that Jesus paid many years ago.
But there’s a challenge in this. It's human nature to need to feel accepted, and we tend to feel more accepted by those we have most in common with. This becomes specifically evident in our worship teams when we feel like we have to conform to a certain genre, to sound a certain way in order to belong. So we start to build our teams to sound like other artists or groups within that genre. We become covers bands when instead we ought to remember that we’re all a divinely created original.
For me, one of the things that makes Covenant Worship and Covenant Church so special is that it's made up of people from all types of backgrounds; young and old, male and female, black and white, people that just want to celebrate Jesus and learn how to be more like Him. Maintaining this diversity within our worship team requires that we take an almost daily assessment of the types of songs we're writing and singing as well as which singers and musicians we've scheduled or not scheduled lately. It requires maturity within a team to function in a diverse group.
For example, I'm 27 and my boss, David Binion, is 51, yet we write songs together all the time. We come from two different worlds of music so it’s not always easy, but we've learned to glean from that instead of despise it. We’ve learned to learn from our differences.
God has graciously allowed all of us to participate in His master plan to restore humanity. Through scripture He has clearly commanded us to be disciples to all nations. So let's fight the urge to be comfortable among our own, and instead let’s accept this great commission to expand His kingdom — in all its diversity and originality.