It’s an age old question if you create a worship experience for any age group. Are they engaging? Is worship happening in the worship experience that we have worked so hard to create. When you look around the room do do you sense people are going for it? It’s really hard to figure it out since worship is a matter of the heart and an offering to God not the worship leaders on stage.
When you are evaluating any environment stop trying to gauge “worship” and start looking for how people are engaging with the environment. Trying to guess what people are thinking or feeling is tricky and can be a trap for any worship leader or speaker. Here are a few things we try to remember as we evaluate the experience…
- Just because they are not singing does not mean they are not engaging // Maybe it’s a new song. Maybe the crowd is full of people who don’t like to sing. When it comes to men, middle schoolers, and pre-teen boys singing can’t be the only measure for how the day went. You can’t see what is going on in the head or heart of someone in the crowd.
- The experience is much bigger than the songs selected // Engagement is not just dependent on singing the right songs…the entire service is a movement. The welcome matters, announcements matter, the message matters, and yes the songs are a big deal. Every element of the service will either help or hurt the engagement factor.
- If we want people to engage they deserve us to bring our best // Every week matters and gives us a chance to connect with people on a heart level. If we want people to engage in our services we better give them our best and strive for consistency!
- Less distraction leads to more engagement // Work every week to eliminate anything in the service that is a distraction. We are all human so things will go wrong! Excellence not perfection is the goal.
- Laughter matters // Laughter allows people to let their guard down. Give people a chance to laugh and I promise they will engage on a different level. We always need to be careful to not take ourselves so serious.
- Listen to feedback but put it in perspective // One complaint is not the feeling of the entire room. One compliment is not the experience of the entire room. Feedback and social media response to your gathering is important to listen to but make sure and keep it in perspective!
