Leading Worship–My Journey
• I have wanted to be a worship leader in a church for a long time. You know, the man who everyone wants to see on stage leading songs on Sunday mornings. Well, this is my journey—how it never really happened the way I envisioned.
• A little background will be helpful. I was raised in the Church of Christ, which does not use instrumental music in their worship. At 15 years old I began playing guitar but I never even thought of learning church music because of my upbringing. I played secular music; stuff like Eric Clapton, Crosby, Stills, & Nash, U2, and the Grateful Dead (the Dead is a story for another day).
• After graduating high school in 1989 I did a short stint in culinary school in Charleston, SC. A couple of years later I moved to Atlanta with my wife while she attended pharmacy school. She graduated in the spring of 1997. It was in this spring that God began working in my life in a new way. I experienced Him like I never did before. What I tasted of Him, I pursue to this day.
• Wandering into an Evangelical Free Church changed the course of my future for years to come. It was in corporate worship that I experienced the eternal and divine Presence. I decided that leading worship was what I was called to do: I wanted to help others experience what I had. After years of rarely playing my guitar, I picked it up once again to discover song after song flowing out of my heart to God. I became an instant expert.
• To prepare myself for leading worship I subjected myself to studying music at UTK. To spare the details, fast forward to the spring of 2003 and my graduation. I had become so hell bent on leading worship somewhere I thought it would be a good idea to move me and my young family out to Las Vegas Nevada to help start a church plant with a friend. It never happened.
• I have lead worship in a few churches on a volunteer basis and played on worship teams only to become frustrated with the whole idea. I simply got tired of the politics and eventually concluded that I could best serve my family by finding a different vocation. Enter the world of professional nursing. Nevertheless, the desire to lead has never left me and then I had a dream.
• In this dream I came to realize that my guitar was actually a fraud. It was made of Plexiglas, not wood. When I saw this I was devastated. All the years of investing time into something that was other than I believed overwhelmed me. Then, the guitar fell to pieces before my eyes. It was not repairable. The dream was much more detailed than this short description; however, I have surmised from it that I need to give up on the dream of leading worship for now and focus on my own life of worship.
