Room For Improvement

One of the challenges of being a musician (whether you play an instrument or are a vocalist) is to continually improve at what you do. Many times we get to a certain level of musicianship and stay there. Never trying to improve and really master our craft. Some examples...1. You sang in choir in high school, had some vocal training there but haven't done much with it since then. Or maybe you just like to sing to the radio but haven't ever thought about learning how to sing correctly or sing a part. 2. You learned a few chords on a guitar or learned some tab off of the internet but haven't ever really thought about the notes you're playing or how to best play your instrument as a part of a group. I could go on and on and probably all of us would fit into one category or another. Mine is that I get stuck in a rut just strumming away at the songs we play and never really learn anything else on the guitar. My point is that most of us tend to plateau as musicians. We get to a point where we can get by as a member of a church praise team and never think about getting any better. I have a couple of gripes with that. 1. We expect the best, not just average, from other people. If we're out to eat, we expect quality service. If we go to a concert or download a song, we expect it to be the best quality. If you have kids in school, you expect their teachers to do their best, to get better at what they do and provide a quality education. We expect a lot from other people. We expect people to grow and improve. It just seems natural then to expect the same from ourselves in whatever we are involved in. In this case, music. 2. Putting our best foot forward honors God. Colossians 3:23 says..."Whatever you do, work at it will all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men..." Our goal is for God to be honored and glorified through the music. That, in itself, should be enough to make us want to be at our best for Him. With those things in mind...shouldn't we then expect and work toward a high level of musicianship in the praise team? The answer is yes...we should and we will. I've been at New Life for just over four months now and have been observing a few things. One of them being that we have good music. We struggle through a song here and there but for the most part we have pretty good music. This is something that was established long before my time here. A lot of work has been put into making sure that when we come to worship, we have a quality atmosphere in which to do so. So, we could just stay where we're at. We could hold this course and get comfy for a long time. The problem is that we have the potential to have GREAT music week in and week out but we're not living up to that potential week in and week out. This isn't meant to criticize, just to challenge us all (that includes yours truly) to get better at what we do. So, here's what we're going to do about it. Starting this summer we're going to have periodic training clinics for each part in the praise team. Throughout the summer we'll have specific clinics (other than practice on Thursdays) for drummers, guitar players, keyboard players, bass players, vocalists, and auxilary percussion (congas, etc.). The purpose of these clinics is to give us an intensive, focused time to work on improving our skill level. I'm very excited about the potential I see here at New Life. God has brought this group of people together to accomplish a great purpose through music. We want to do that to the best of our ability. All of us, no matter how long we've been playing/singing or how much training we've had, have lots of room for improvement. I'm going to challenge all of us to step it up a notch (maybe even two or three notches) and begin to work on being better musicians. Let's not rest in being good enough. If you've hit a plateau, start praying for God to give you a fresh passion for being a part of this ministry. You'll be hearing more soon about this summer. Here is a great video related to this subject. I'm not saying (as in the title of the video) that my worship team won't practice, because we're just starting this conversation on improvement. It's just good content for all of us to think about. I encourage you to look up some of the scriptures that he references and study them.