His “undignified” approach was a private habit that took on public significance. His standard for public leadership was the secret place.
One Example of the Secret Applied
Matt Redman is a great example of this to me. Matt and Mike Pilavachi met to worship apart from the crowd for a long time. They put in many hours together, just worshipping Jesus away from the crowds, in Matt’s younger years.
The result? Two great worship influencers in our generation.
And God put His hand on Matt in our time, stirring greater intimacy and passion in his private life and public leadership. We sense it in his songs, and they have connected with a generation.
[Matt is a good friend, and though I don’t need to say it here, anyone who knows him sees this reality at work in him. His worship leadership has authority because of the Secret Place. He’s imperfect, but he lives this truth and we have all benefited from it.]
And he’s not the only example. Many with small and large communities to lead are known to God. He knows because He spends a lot of time with them.
I know we think we all get this, but as I watch our industry-driven worship experiences, I have to ask this of myself and my peers again and again.
How Does the Standard of the Secret Place Apply to Us?
Here it is, from the heart, as far as I can tell.
Worship leaders who primarily only lead when the band is behind them, and the stage is beneath them, lack an authority that, over time, others are purchasing in secret.
Yes, calling, musicianship and experience matter greatly. But it is all trumped by this one reality.
The hours spent in a place where no one is listening to us pour out our heart, except for God, make sense of the hour we spend on a stage on a Sunday morning when everyone is listening.
Every worship leader must proactively cultivate their secret life of worship on a daily and weekly basis.
[Some of my worship leader peers have decided they have “outgrown” this practice, associating it with their earliest days of passionate faith. But they’ve neglected it to their peril, and some I have seen lose their moorings—not only in worship and leadership, but in their faith overall. That is a loss that lasts forever, and is often passed down to generations.]
Our effectiveness as worship leaders utterly depends on us valuing and cultivating our secret life of worship.
Though we may not be perfect in our consistency, we must be constant in our quest to linger behind closed doors (with our instruments) with God alone.
There, real worship leaders are built.
That is the Secret I see at play in the most effective worship leaders on planet earth. I’d like to see it at play within each of us.