Leading Worship For Eleven

She tunes up at the front and looks out while she is doing it, and she knows the number before she plays a note.

Eleven this morning. Nine last week because of the weather.

And there is a feeling that arrives at that exact moment, every single time, before the first line, and it has been arriving for about three years.

The feeling says: this is practice for something else.

She fights it. She leads properly, she means every word she sings, and nobody in that room has the faintest idea that anything is going on. If you asked any of the eleven they would tell you she is completely present and completely sincere, and they would be right about the second one.

Here is what she has never said to anybody, because there is no way to say it that is not an insult to eleven people who came out on a wet Sunday morning.

She has been treating them as a smaller version of something.

Not deliberately, and not in a way that shows. But underneath the whole thing, week after week, there has been a room she is waiting for, and this one has been quietly filed as what happens while she waits.

And they are not a rehearsal. They are the people who came.

One of them walks forty minutes each way. One of them has not sung in public since her husband died and sings in that room. They are not a preliminary version of a congregation. They are a congregation, and she has been leading them for three years with one eye on a door.

If you have been fighting that feeling before the first line, come and take a chair. Nobody in this half circle is waiting for anything.

Who is singing in the middle of the room

There is a verse where God is described in the middle of His people, and the surprising thing is what He is doing there.

The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

In the midst of thee.

Not over. Not toward. In the middle of the group, present, and the verse does not attach a single condition about how many people the middle has around it.

And then the thing He is doing. He will joy over thee with singing.

The singing in that verse is His. That is worth sitting with for a leader. There is a voice in that room that is not any of the eleven and is not yours, and it is not waiting for better acoustics.

You are leading in a room God is already in the middle of, singing. Zephaniah 3:17 puts the Lord in the midst and gives Him the singing rather than assigning it to the crowd, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that image of God rejoicing over His people with a song, which means the room you tune up in has never been short of a voice.

What the feeling is actually made of

Now the sentence that arrives before the first line, because it should be examined rather than simply resisted.

This is practice for something else.

That is a claim about time. It says the real thing is later, and this is the preparation, and preparation is by definition not the thing.

But look at what is actually happening in that hour. Somebody who has not sung since her husband died is singing. A man who walks forty minutes each way is there. Whatever is happening to those people is happening now, in that room, and it will not be redone better in a fuller one.

You have been putting the real thing in the future when it has been occurring in front of you every week. Zephaniah 3:17 has God in the midst in the present tense with no future condition attached, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named through Scripture as the one at work in a gathering rather than in a plan for one, which means the hour you have been treating as preparation has been the hour itself for three years.

Nothing here is against a bigger room

Let us be plain, because a woman who loves worship and hopes for more people will hear a rebuke coming and it is not coming.

Wanting more people is not worldly. Hoping the room fills is not a failure of contentment. Some of the best rooms anybody has ever sung in hold thousands, and there is nothing in this article against any of them.

You are permitted to hope for more and to be entirely present in eleven, and Scripture never makes those alternatives. Acts 2:47 says the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved, and the adding is put in God's hands rather than in anybody's technique, and it is the same Spirit who had just been poured out on a group of about a hundred and twenty, which means the growth is not yours to produce and the room is not yours to discount while you wait.