Is It OK to Call Us “Worship Leaders”? (Podcast) - a podcast by NLW International

Joining Dwayne in this podcast is special guest, Grant Norsworthy. To access Grant’s free training resources and his coaching opportunities, go here.

Text from Worship Q&A Podcast:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Worship Q&A Podcast. I’m Dwayne Moore. We try to answer questions that worship leaders are asking.

We’ve got a question today that we’re asking. Is it okay to call ourselves worship leaders? What does that even mean, in context of serving in a church? Well, I got the guy that’s gonna help us get to the root of that. His name is Grant Norsworthy. He’s a speaker, instructor and award-winning musician.

[Introductions and non-scripted chat]

Here’s the question we’re asked sometimes, Grant. And that is, worship’s such a big word, is it okay to call one a worship leader? What would you suggest, if someone’s looking to craft a title for themselves? What would you suggest, and how does that play into the word worship?

Grant: Yeah, thank you. Well, I’ve thought a lot about this. And speaking on an audio podcast, you can’t see me doing that funny thing with our fingers to show quotation marks. It’s a little bit harder to communicate. It’s such a useful thing. But Sonic Flood was known as being a worship band, singing worship songs. And we were trying to give people a worship experience, quote-unquote.

And I came out of my three years in Sonic Flood impressed with this. Ah, singing songs of praise of God. Getting a group of people singing a prayer to God. Getting a group of people encouraging each other to follow Jesus with more intentionality. Having a group of people sing truth from Scripture. This is a beautiful thing. This is more powerful than I realized. This gathering of believers, and singing praises to God, is more important than I’d realized, at any point in my life. And it’s perhaps even more important than any of us realize right now.

However, the second thing I came out of Sonic Flood impressed with, was that the act of singing songs to God, in and of itself, is not worship. I don’t see the word “worship” used in Scripture–the way we use it in our culture today.

Dwayne: How do you see it used, can I ask that, in Scripture?

Grant: Well, very simply, I think we’ve gotta realize that it’s only in the last, maybe, 50 years. The word “worship” started getting used as an adjective. Worship band, worship leader, worship pastor, worship Spotify playlist. That’s very recent. Before that, it was a noun, and the noun usually meant an event. Sunday morning, we have worship. It’s this thing that happens at this time, in this building, and it’s these activities. But originally, the word “worship” was only a verb. It’s a doing word. In fact, the word “worship” wasn’t said like we say it today.

And it meant, “worth,” it was actually said like this: “worth-ship.” To ascribe value to God.

And I’ll tell you what. We could take it to this degree, too. We ascribe value to all sorts of things, all the time. What proportion of our worth-shopping is for God? We use the language worship right now to mean, usually, a gathering of believers singing praises to God. To some people, worship is a subset of the CCM music industry. And that’s if you listen to the way we speak. And the Scripture tells that the way we speak is important. So is it okay to call yourself a worship leader? That’s the point.

Dwayne: You think that we’re un-teaching something that we’d need to be teaching, by calling ourselves a worship leader?

Grant: Yeah.

Dwayne: And how so?

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