Today’s post is part of a series of posts called “The Hour Before” – I was thrilled to be asked by Rob Rash to write a post for this series. You can get a full list of links to these posts by checking out the series here - http://robrash.us/blog-series/the-hour-before/ 

What does the hour before I come to lead worship normally look like?

I’ve always tried to be really helpful and concrete on this blog, giving you information that could be helpful and encouraging you to do the same. We could have a big discussion about how our worship leading starts in our prayer closet, with our family, in our offices – and all of that is true.

For the sake of this post, let me tell you what the 60 minutes leading up to 9:00 on a Sunday morning looks like at my church. Of course this changes depending on how scatter-brained I am that day and how many loose ends I did or didn’t tie up. But, ideally, it goes like this:

8:00
We’re 30 minutes in to our morning rehearsal. Our band has already practiced for two hours on Thursday night so we come back at 7:30 to get warmed up, get energized, go over some last minute notes. This is a great opportunity to pray together as a team, encourage one another and just get our energy level up a little bit – it’s nice to have the blood flowing already when the 9:00 crowd comes in!

8:30
Soundcheck is done. We try to have a quiet stage at 8:30. The last thing we do here is a quick soundcheck on our pastor’s headset mic. At 8:30 we start our announcement slide pre-roll and pre-service music off CD.

8:35
We call this our “8:30″ check-in but it usually happens a few minutes later. We gather all of our volunteers involved in our main service – worship team, tech, anyone doing announcements or a Q&A, ushers, greets, welcome centre – if someone is involved in our main service, they come to this check-in meeting. We do a quick info hit, recap the morning, give them a heads up if there’s something unique they need to know. We thank them for serving and encourage them to do their role well and then we pray, asking God to show up. We can sing, play, greet, speak, usher all we want but if we’re not lifting Jesus high and expecting the Spirit to show up in our midst, we’re wasting our time.

8:40
For the next 15 minutes I try to say good morning to people already in the auditorium. We don’t have a green room and I encourage our band to be having conversations with the people they’ll be leading that morning. I do a last quick look at the stage to make sure there’s no guitar cases to put away.

8:55
Our band comes to play a few minutes of instrumental music. Usually this is an upbeat song that we’re doing later in the morning. We normally have a “host” come and welcome people to start our morning so I’ll watch the clock and give that person a nod right around 9:01 once it’s time to get going.

So in a nutshell the hour before our first service (we have an identical service at 11:00) is mostly practice, prayer and preparation.