This guy's idea of stress is picking out funeral hymns... Really?
Did you see this article from CNN/Money Magazine? It rated Worship Leaders (or Music Ministry Directors) #5 for stress, combined with low pay… Apparently, the median annual income is just over $40K (less than I made selling The Sprockets) and 67% of the people surveyed that have the job find it stressful.
In fairness, Senior Pastors made the list at #10… So did Social Workers (#1), Probation Officers (#3), Substance Abuse Counselors (#13) and High School Teachers (#15)…
Interestingly, many of the professions on the list are “helping” professions (Family Counselors) and several are creatives (TV Producers and Commercial Photographers)…
Almost all of these professions (including Event Planner) are things that I’ve heard kids and students express an interest in “being when they grow up.” Which partly accounts for the “pays badly” part of the equation.
But what’s so hard about being a Worship Leader? The write up in the Money article was kinda lame… Something about the stress of picking out songs for funerals…
Really? That’s all you’ve got?
So, I’ve compiled my own list of stresses from more than 20 years of being and being close to Worship Pastors…
1. Controversy… Worship style in a church is the most divisive and controversial element of church life, so long as the staff is only sleeping with their designated spouses. I’ve seen people walk out as soon as the music started… or as soon as the drums started playing… or as soon as the song was by David Crowder… or as soon as the song was a hymn… And as far as “helping a church accept a more contemporary style” as I’ve heard it euphemistically said… forget it… People will break fellowship with the church and blame you.
2. Changing paradigms… When I studied worship in college, I learned to “conduct” or as one pastor described it years later, “wave down the seagulls from on high.” Sacred music majors studied voice, piano, choral directing and handbells… I haven’t seen handbells in a church since I graduated and two years ago a pastor told me that I had been removed from consideration for a position because I didn’t play guitar…
3. Creative stigmata… Most people think of creatives as flighty, unstable and irrational… Mostly because we are… I attended a church where the Worship Pastor had a PhD in theology but was never allowed to preach in the Pastor’s absence because he’d just “babble on about singing.” He eventually went on to be the pastor of a larger church…
4. Working with creatives… We’re all self-aware enough to admit that this is stressful, right?
5. Premature and enforced “retirement”… I recently heard Ed Stetzer talking about churches that he knew that forced their worship pastors into senior adult ministry positions because they had become “too old” and “couldn’t keep up” with the changing musical preferences of their congregations… And nobody will commit to an exact, chronological age for that…
6. Pressure to perform… I was on staff in a church (thankfully, I was NOT the worship leader) that met every Monday to talk about what went wrong with the Sunday service… brutal.
7. Pressure to create… A pastor that I worked with handed me a collection of (bad) original songs and asked me to create an Easter cantata… I once had to make an “Olympic flame” for Vacation Bible School with a $5 budget… Oh, and can you write a worship song for my sermon series on Leviticus? Then if you miss a deadline or the leadership doesn’t “like” what you’ve created… See #6…
So, what about it? What makes your worship ministry job stressful?
But what’s so hard about being a Worship Leader? The write up in the Money article was kinda lame… Something about the stress of picking out songs for funerals…
Really? That’s all you’ve got?
VERY well said Tim! People just don’t get what it’s like to be in that position.