Spontaneous Worship

...isn't so spontaneous.

There's a perception that Spirit-led, free-flow, spontaneous worship is the opposite of highly structured, carefully planned, well-practised worship. While there's a nugget of truth in there, I disagree with that idea. (Note: I'm using "worship" to refer to musical worship only in this case.)

In my experience, I find that spontaneous worship actually requires more practice than regular worship. Getting a band to play together and follow the Holy Spirit's leading is more difficult than following sheet music and the worship leader. And yes, spontaneous worship does in fact require a fair amount of planning.

A skilled musician and singer can, by themselves, lead spontaneously quite easily if they have practised it enough. Even so, they must be aware of chord progressions that they can easily use because the same four chords for twenty minutes won't cut it. The act of choosing where to go in the song is also difficult as the only instrumentalist because they are simultaneously trying to pay attention to any prophetic messages that may be ready or whatnot.

Once you throw in a full band and then spontaneous worship becomes increasingly complicated. If the leader changes keys or chord progressions, how is this communicated to the other band members? While the worship leader may take the majority of the responsibility to "follow the Spirit" when the times comes, the other band members also have this right/responsibility, so how do they exchange leadership roles? Do all members need to be able to play by ear, and how do you accomodate those that cannot play that way?

In the end, the answer to these questions is practice, practice and more practice.

The hardest part of "spontaneous" practice is not, as you might expect, having the Spirit lead. The Holy Spirit is always ready to go places and He isn't just waiting for the "official" worship service. Rather, the hard part is getting people to feel confident about their roles during spontaneous worship. The majority of people I meet are too inexperienced with free-flow stuff so when that time comes, they tend to back or stop playing entirely. That's like cutting out half of the band and then it's not surprising when spontaneous music doesn't seem to have the impact of a planned song. (I could go on about this topic, and maybe I will in another post later.)

Now, spontaneous worship can actually take many forms. The most common version is to use the same set of songs, chord charts and lyrics for a regular worship set. The difference is that these usually come with a plan for the beginning, middle and end. Spontaneous worship will intentionally leave spots where the worship can wander but if the Holy Spirit doesn't do something in those times then you move on. This style is like the Psalms, in which there are "Selah" moments that are actually planned points of spontaneous music.

There are other forms. Some start from nothing, perhaps during ministry and prayer time, and they gradually develop into full-fledged songs. Some follow the Harp and Bowl model, which switches back and forth from reading passages from the Bible and praying to musical responses to those passages and prayers. There are different ways to practice each of these approaches.

I could go on about spontaneous worship, but my main point is that "spontaneous" does require practice and may in fact require more practice than a regular worship set. That being said, I sometimes find it easier to do with other musicians that I often play with. For example, I can usually have a full-on worship sessions with no practice whatsoever with Arial Terry because we have played together for so long. As far as my personal preferences go, I usually like spontaneous worship a lot more but I still regard it as only one aspect of musical worship. It's a great expression towards God but it's not inherently better than other forms of worship.

Caveat: Andrea, my conversation with you recently did inspire this post but this isn't a response to our conversation, it's just a copy of ideas that I've had percolating for a long time. :)