Today I wrote a little bit about Jr. High worship in my weekly Stuck newsletter (which you can sign up to receive in the menu to the right). I’m working to get all my thoughts put together on this and will make a more complete blog post in the near future. In the meantime, here’s a bit from the newsletter.
As we’ve been working on this, one of the things that I have been wrestling with is our approach to musical worship. Over the past couple of years we’ve been blessed to have Starfield and Jackson Waters leading worship at our events, and they’ve both done an amazing job. Despite their being amazing musicians and leaders, there have been times that I felt that the students just weren’t “connecting” in worship. At our DRIVE event, I spoke with my friend and general session speaker April Diaz about this. We talked about the differences between leading adults in worship and leading junior high students. After our talk, I decided to email some junior high ministry friends to get their thoughts. As we traded emails back and forth, a lot of similar themes came up.
–It’s less about song selection and more about leading the students in a way that’s appropriate. For middle school students, this may mean that we make more suggestions in worship. We may have to tell them it’s ok to raise their hands or to just sit and pray while others sing. They will respond in worship, but they need a leader who can walk them through it without being condescending.
–Whenever possible, use songs that pull their lyrics from Scripture.
–Give students room to grow into worship. Allow them a place to expand their horizons and to go beyond the surface if they choose to. Remember, modeling in worship is important. Students will not often go where they are not led.
–Don’t assume too much. While we don’t want to be condescending to our students, we also don’t want to make the mistake of assuming too much either.
A lot of the ideas above reinforce the notion that worship with junior high students is less about song selection and more about leadership and appropriate modeling of worship by adults. That is something that we are acutely aware of and are working to understand on a deeper level as we prepare for Stuck’s 2008 events.
My friend Kurt Johnston has posted some on this topic, and there are excellent thoughts back and forth in the comments section too. Check it out.
UPDATE: It looks like Marko has posted a great breakdown of our emails on his blog too.
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