Andre Agassi - that utterly awesome tennis player who utterly hated tennis - was once asked what it was like to become a father. Considering the troubled relationship he’s experienced with his own dad, what did he think was most important thing facing a parent these days?
How are you going to define success? That - said Agassi - is the single biggest question facing parents today. It determines everything about how we bring our children up; what we choose to praise, what we choose to critique, what we cherish and what we punish.
The principle isn’t limited to tennis greats or first time parents. It’s applicable to every area of life, including worship leading.
What’s a win when you get up to lead on a Sunday? What are you aiming for? What do you hope to achieve?
Of course, we’re pretty much all going to agree that there’s only one answer to that: to lead people into the presence of God.
But what does that look like?
How can we tell when we’ve got them there?
What’s the definition of our having achieved it?
Is it the volume of the singers? The intensity on people’s faces? Is it the length of the applause or the quality of the silence? Is it the comments people make afterwards or just the intangible sense that things went well?
Or maybe, just maybe, we don’t get to judge it at all. And if that’s the case, why are we locked in a constant cycle of stylistic repetition?
As for the answers…that’s over to you.