Love and the art of feeding sheep

Today the worship team I'm not, as well as worship teams from several other churches, received worship training from Andy Piercy (www.andypiercy.com). He's an interesting character, an original Christian who was also a rocker, who toured with Queen (a fact I think is really cool) 10 years before any of us in the Christian bubble were debating whether that kind of thing was "going secular" and "selling out."

Among many excellent points one stood out that seems so intuitive and correct I'm amazed that tonight's the first night I thought about it. Towards the end of the presentation he spoke of the shepherding role of a worship leader, siting Jesus' final command to the future leader of his church (John 21). To be a shepherd as Christ, Andy reminded us, we need to love our congregation. It's easy to think of it as serving, or worse, performing for a congregation. Love eliminates any need to perform and ignites the desire to serve.

I've led worship for a relatively long time, and leading worship in small group settings is one thing I can say I do well. Andy's challenge will enrich all of this. While working in the ministry, it was easier to remember to love those I was evangelizing. There's no other logical reason to walk up to strangers and try to challenge their beliefs, much less try to win them over to yours. The only other reason would be out of a self-righteous love for your own beliefs (rather than the object of your beliefs) and that has always had disastrous results. God's love for me enabled me to love him, to worship him and lead others to do the same. God's command and the completion of worship is to love these others as well.