Either you’ve watched it happen from the congregation, or you’ve experienced it first-hand while on stage. Every now and then, they happen… they are WORSHIP DISASTER MOMENTS!
As worship leaders it’s crucial that we’re equipped to deal with them in a cool, calm and pre-thought manner, so I hope this blog post is helpful!
You forget a lyric
This happens to me every now and then… my best advice is to have a lyric projection screen on stage that you can see at all times, even if you think you know the words really well. Sometimes our brains randomly seem to switch off, and a well known song lyric suddenly might disappear from your memory!
I personally am not a fan of music stands as I think they create a physical barrier between the leader and the congregation as they usually obscure half of the person’s body… and because when you’ve memorised music you can enter into the moment of leading and worshipping, in a whole different way (although I know learning music by heart is really challennging for some people, so I know it’s not always easy).
If no screen is available for you, then I’d advise putting lyric sheets on the floor and glancing down at them in a moment of emergency!
If you forget a lyric, just smile about it and the congregation will see that you can laugh at yourself. If you look stressed or panic, they’ll feel uncomfortable. Crack a joke about it at the end of the song, and use the opportunity to show them you know your limitations, and that we all struggle in different ways. It can actually be a real bonding moment for the worship leader and the crowd! On ocassions I’ve even made a joke out of it during the song…substituting the missing lyric with words like “la, la, la I really should know the words to this song!!” which always makes people laugh and breaks the awkwardness of the moment 
You break a guitar string
If you lead on guitar, this is always a dreaded moment. The biggest way to prevent this being a major problem, is to ALWAYS have a spare guitar on stage, within an arm’s reach of where you are singing. I always have two guitars with me when I lead worship, both soundchecked and tuned, in case I break a string. Also, make sure you have a guitar-savvy friend sidestage, who when/if you break a string, will walk on and take your broken stringed axe, and restring it for you sidestage. That way if double disaster strikes, and you break a string on your back-up guitar, you’ll have the original guitar fully strung again and ready to use!
So… if I break a string, my way of handling it is to try and play the song until the end, if possible. But often a broken string will either muffle your other strings as it flaps about, or will throw the tuning of your whole guitar out as the pressure changes on the neck of the instrument. If I can’t make it to the end of the song, I would:
(a) signal to the rest of the band to keep playing, while I continue singing, and quickly remove the guitar and grab the spare guitar I always have next to me sitting in it’s stand. Hopefully I’ll switch guitars fast and be strumming again within 30 seconds!
(b) I’ll drop the song down to a more mellow instrumental moment, and have another instrument carry that quiet section, like the keyboard player. I’ll signal to them to keep playing, and I’ll switch my broken stringed guitar for my spare guitar as quick as I can. If I need to step away from the mic for longer than the pause between lyric lines, I’ll say to the crowd “you sing the chorus… just your voices”, and I’ll back away from the mic, switch guitars, then come back in ready for another section of the song.
The power goes out!
This has happened to me several times (what are the chances of that?!). It’s been amazing every time. Unless your venue is running a generator, suddenly all the sound drops out and all you have is your acoustic instrument and your voice, which is initially quite awkward in the moment!
For me, it’s been a very powerful moment of worship each time, as the dedication of the worshippers is so apparent when they just keep singing at the top of their lungs. In moments like this, I’ll go to the very front of the stage, so that I’m as close to the people as possible. It’s important to be visible to them, as they’ll have trouble picking out your vocal above their own crowd vocal, so don’t stand down into the crowd as they need to see your lips moving to know which line you’re singing. Choose songs that work without much instrumentation… I usually go for Here I Am To Worship, I Exalt Thee and Amazing Grace! (Also, if all the lights go out with the power, it’s worth keeping a few flashlights on stage for moments like these!)
Your keyboard malfunctions!
Using a keyboard in worship has many potential distasters as you can easily press the wrong button at the wrong moment! If you haven’t seen this video of Martin Smith’s moment of keyboard malfunction, check it out below!…He’s a good friend and every time i see this I just want to give the guy a hug! He handles it so well!
The best way to handle moments like these are just how Martin did… laugh about it, admit it was you, and move on! Like I said earlier, it can really bond a crowd to the worship leader, as everyone messes up and it’s helpful to see that the ‘Pros’ mess up too! If your keyboard is freaking out, always just hit the OFF switch… reboot it and see if that fixes the problem.
You ran over time and someone appears on stage to shut you down!
If you accidentally go way longer than your allocated time, you might find someone from church appears on stage to help bring your set to an end! The best way to avoid this being embarassing is tot KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN a decent amount, so you are always aware of what’s going on in the room and among your leadership team.
I’ll always know where my pastors are sitting, and keep looking at them and the stage manager, throughout the whole set, as sometimes the schedule needs to change and they may need to tell us worship leaders about it.
This can also happen if an ‘emergency annoucement’ needs to be made, like someone’s car alarm is going off, someone’s left their lights on, or a child is sick and needs to be collected instantly from child care. Keep looking for anyone trying to get your attention, otherwise it’s awkward to open your eyes when you feel a hand on your shoulder!
Your capo is on the wrong fret
This is easily done. You thought you put your capo on the 3rd fret, but you accidentially put it on the 4th. The band clicks in and you are horribly out of tune. Yikes! The only way to fix this, in my experience, is just to admit you’ve had a trainwreck and re-start the song! Throw in a smile and a joke, and just start it over! If this happens to you one, I can say from my own painful time that you take a LOT more care about which fret your capo is on from then onwards!!
Your stage/ear monitors disappears or changes
This has happened to me lots, mainly because I’ve never travelled with my own sound engineer, so I typically use a different sound guy/girl at every event/church I play at. Often your monitor mix will suddenly change, and you can’t hear what you need to hear anymore! Or, on ocassions, all sound goes from your monitors and you just have none at all! This may seem like an ‘emergency’ situation, but to be honest I’d advise you to expect this to happen a lot in your music ministry and be ready to accept it. Sound systems are funny things, and often no one can explain why your mix suddenly changed beyond recognition, or why your pack died. (One small thing to make sure is that the batteries on all in-ear packs are changed regularly, as that’s a common cause of monitoring failing).
If you really can’t keep going in the set without your monitor mix, then bring the song to an end and lead something acoustic and mellow, so that you can hear your vocal and insrument through the front of house speakers.
A great way to communicate with the soundesk, is to get everyone to pray, asking them to bow their heads and shut their eyes… then when no one can see you, wave like a madman at the soundesk and let them know through your panicked gesticulations, that you have NO MONITORS! I’ve done that before…
You sing horribly out of tune for one note or a section of a song
This can seem very embarassing for us as musicians, as we are painfully aware when we hit a bad note! But in all honesty, non-musical people often don’t even notice. What seems awful to us can be barely noticeable to them. So don’t despair…ask a very honest, non-musician for feedback after the set, and often you’ll find out that no one even knew you were out of tune If you are struggling consistently with going out of tune, consider using in-ear monitors as you will be able to hear your own vocal much more clearly, above the noise of the band. Consider vocal coaching too. But remember that non-musicians don’t hear vocals in the same way musicians do…so relax
The Fire Alarm Goes Off!
This has happened to me before… I remember it well! The fire alarm wasn’t as loud as the band in my monitors, so someone had to come on stage and shout at me to stop playing! I’ve also been in a situation where I was leading in a big tent, and a sudden lighening storm blew up and we needed to evacuate. Again, I was unaware as I had my in-ears in, so someone had to rush on stage and grab my hand to pull me down, as we were standing on a metal stage that would have conducted any lightening bolts!
In situations like this, you just need to stop and get out of the venue! You could take an acoustic guitar with you though. Then when you are assembled outside, or wherever you are needing to shelter, you could continue with acoustic worship. I remember Tim Hughes once led worship outside St Paul’s cathedral, for all the people who couldn’t fit into the venue and were disappointed not to get into the service… he went out of the church, into the street, grabbed a megaphone and started singing through it. The crowd outside joined in and loved it!
Your guitar is badly out of tune
If this happens, I’ll wait til the end of the song, then I’ll pray and tune at the same time.People usually close their eyes tp pray, so it gives you a moment to look down at your tuner, which still being able to speak into the mic as you pray.
This takes some multi-tasking practice…but it’s something I couldn’t get by without! Get a tuner that tunes silently, like the BOSS TU2, which enables you to tune by flashing lights, while the guitar is muted. If you can’t fix the tuning, even after trying, have a spare guitar on stage that’s pre-tuned and just grab that during a prayer and switch to that instrument.
Your pastor/service leader motions for you to ‘just keep going’
This happens a lot in more spontaneous kids of church services. The person in overseeing the meeting will catch the eye of the worship leader and do a ‘one more song’ or ‘just keep going!’ motion with their hands, and the worship leader is left with the potential of a worship disaster! I’ve seen it many times (and done it years ago), when you planned a set list, then get asked to ‘carry on’, you are suddenly off the beaten track, and without any clue of what to play next! If your pastor tells you to keeo going for a long time, you are really up a gum tree as you have suddenly got lots of unexpected time to fill!
The way to avoid this disaster, is to have LOTS of songs up your sleeve, that you and your band know and have rehearsed. Have them written out on a list on the floor, if that helps. Always over-plan how many songs are in your set, incase of a scenario like this! Have 4 or 5 ‘go to songs’ that you will always do in this kind of moment…some fast and some slow, so you are equipped for whatever tempo and mood of song is required. Have plenty of fast songs up your sleeve for the end of a meeting, as usually people like to go out celebrating… so always be ready for the ‘and as we close, the band will come up and lead us in a final song!’ that many pastors throw in without telling us in advance! Also, for communion, sometimes it can take longer than expected for every present to receive the bread and wine if your venue is large… so always have double the amount of communion music ready, just in case. Don’t bore people to death by repeating the verses of When I Survey twenty times because you only prepared one communion song that week!!
The arrangement of the song goes badly wrong
A common worship disaster is simply when the worship leader and the band play different things during a song – like, the worship leader wants to go into the verse, but the band go into the chorus. The way to avoid this is:
(a) have substantial rehearsal times, where you clearly describe and practice the arrangement of the songs. Some people think arrangements quench the spontenaity of the Holy Spirit. I think the opposite – the Holy Spirit inspires the brains and gifts that He has placed inside us, and helps us come up with good arrangements in advance! Choosing a good arrangement for each song is part of our responsibility as worship leaders. Sure, if you feel ‘led’ you can steer away from the planned arrangement, but typically the Holy Spirit is very capable at showing us a good plan for a song before we get to church, when we are preparing at home
(b) have clear and well communicated signals that tell the band if you are going off the arrangement. I have a few involving tapps my feet or lifting up the headstock of my guitar, to signal that i’m going into a chorus, or building the song up, or dropping the song down etc. Make up some signals that feel natural to you, and teach them to your band. They can’t read your mind… don’t think they’ll just ‘know’ you are going to repeat a chorus if you haven’t given them a clear signal!
The kind of signals you can give depend on how you lead. If you lead on vocals only, you have both hands free to signal with. Darelen Zschech leads this way and has hand signals for her band, letting them know what section of the song she is going to next. If you are a keyboard player, it’s trickier as you are using both hands and can’t move your instrument, like you can when you lift or drop the headstock of your guitar. Find what works for you!
Crashing and burning in Intro’s or Outro’s
It seems like the two moments in songs where ‘worship disasters’ most usually happen are the Intro or the Outro of a song. Once you’re in the thick of a song, usually it carries itself along musically. But just like taking off or landing in a jet plane, it’s the getting up in the air and coming down, that provide the biggest chance for disaster! So…spend extra time rehearsing the way you and the band will start and end each song.
Decide exactly WHO will start each song and in what way. Otherwise there’ll be an awkward moment as you all look round at each other, trying to recall who starts that particular song. Have a setlist for everyone, and have each band member make a note of who starts which song, so everyone remembers!
The same with Outros… plan a definite ending so that everyone knows what chord you’ll end on, and how you’ll finish. Fast songs are especially important to have a planned ending for, as sometimes they can feel like a horse running away from you, as the tempo drives along, and just like a runaway horse, they can be hard for a worship leader to catch and stop, if you don’t have a plan!
Tempos
A common worship disaster is when a song gets started at a wrong tempo. Either it’s so fast that everyone has to ‘rap’ the lyrics to fit them in! Or it’s so slow that it drags like a funeral dirge! The way to avoid this disaster is to use a click track. You can either run this just to your own ears through headphones, if you don’t use ear-monitors, or just to your drummer’s headphones. If you have an in-ear monitor systerm, then simply have your drummer bring a metronome or drum machine, and wire it into the system, so you can plan each song’s tempo, and hear the clicks of the click track counting you into the song, making sure you start it at exactly the right pace.
Not knowing the plan for the service
Another common problem is when worship leaders aren’t really clued in to what the structure of the service is….so maybe you finish your set of songs, but have no idea who to hand over to, or what’s coming next, or whether to seat the congregation or leave them standing…you look across the stage for anyone to come on and no one does… It’s a frequent scene in many churches!
The way to fix this, is to make sure you get briefed by the person running the service, and find out what the whole meeting looks like – what comes before your set, and directly after it. Who you hand over to, and who will be on stage right before you. Transitions are important for worship leaders – we need to be on stage when needed, and not have long pauses where we straggle on, because we weren’t really paying attention to when we needed to be ready.
I like to minimise the pauses by coming onstage and getting my guitar on and tuned while the person before me is finishing up their piece… so for example, I’ll walk on during someone’s prayer right before the worship set… or if the church are showing a video before worship, I’ll sneak on during the video and tune up, so that when the thing before sung worship is over, I’m already on stage ready to lead, without the awkward pause of me and the band walking on stage, plugging in etc.
Final thoughts
As people who are consistently up in front of people, using musical equipment, we are bound to often do embarassing things! The question is really, HOW we handle it. Are we willing to be ‘a fool for Christ’ and look a bit silly once in a while? I think it’s a good test of our character.
There are no end to the crazy things that can happen…. I’ve had a backing singer suddenly run off stage mid-song and start throwing up backstage… I’ve seen worship leaders with a desperate urge to use to bathroom have to excuse themelves mid-set for a minute or two… I’ve seen moment’s like Martin Smith’s where you just have to laugh and carry on….I’ve led worship in all manner of weird places, and seem to have more unfortunate stories than most. I’ll start doing some video blogs, where I’ll share these crazy stories from the road, just to put a smile on your faces!
Have you had any ‘worship disaster moments’? How did you handle them?! Any advice for us that you learned from the experience??!
Vicky
