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What Your Worship Leader Isn’t Telling You

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Formed in the Image of Your Habits

LIVE  •  with Justin Whitmel Earley

Justin Whitmel Earley has captured our attention with a deeply sobering yet hopeful message about spiritual formation. His books, The Common Rule (2019) and Habits of the Household  (2021), are timely tools helping us create life-giving rhythms in our personal lives, families and congregations. Justin’s work also encourages us to pay attention to those habits that are spiritually deformational. Lead With Inspiration spoke with him, discussing his journey of creating “Gospel liturgies” to displace deformational habits. His advice may surprise you.

We Can’t Think Ourselves into a Relationship with God!

Justin, a missionary who became an acquisition and merger attorney, shared his transition from the mission field to the board room. It’s a cautionary tale about how “the architecture of habits converted a missionary to a nervous, medicated lawyer in a very short time.” His story invites us to consider that we can wholeheartedly pursue a divine calling and suffer from self-inflicted mental and physical challenges. 

When our daily rhythms and patterns reflect the culture of the world around us, it will produce the same results. What else should we expect if we’re using a broken system? This makes sense, especially when we examine the typical approach to connecting with God; the prevalent paradigm is “withdrawing” to get away with God, and it includes quiet time, conferences, retreats, sabbaticals, etc. However, Jesus’ “Follow me” is also found in the daily doing of things. These patterns and rhythms—habits—are far more spiritual than we realize.

Habits have a significant impact on our soul, and it’s not just spiritual; it’s also scientific. Justin noted that the scientific community acknowledges that “many of our habits come from our lower-order brain. Science and spirituality agree, and the church has known for a long time: When your head goes one way and your habits go another way, your heart will follow your habits.…You can’t think yourself into a relationship with God.”

Justin hit us with a powerful question: “What spiritual things are happening when we don’t think anything spiritual is happening?”

The Small, Ordinary Ways We Try to Be God

There’s a profound biblical reality here that we ignore at great consequence. We are image bearers, and as Justin put it, “We are always worshiping. There is no on/off switch! Our habits only obscure what we worship.” Because of this, we can easily create deformational liturgies through our habits, many of which are lower-brain functions. They shape us in ways we would never consciously choose. It’s what happened to Justin when he left the mission field to follow God’s call to be a lawyer. His habits were unhealthy, and the results were not exclusive to his temporal body; they impacted his eternal soul. 

Psalm 115:4-8 warns of this: 

Their idols are silver and gold,

    the work of human hands.

They have mouths, but do not speak;

    eyes, but do not see.

They have ears, but do not hear;

    noses, but do not smell.

They have hands, but do not feel;

    feet, but do not walk;

    and they do not make a sound in their throat.

Those who make them become like them;

    so do all who trust in them. (ESV)

Justin equates this biblical truth to our current situation: 

“The liturgy of how you swipe your smartphone creates a type of person who has trouble holding on to attention and presence. That’s not the kind of person who can pray. That’s something to pay attention to! The deformational liturgy of paying attention to the most recent email, text message or meme tends to make us believe that the most recent occurrence is the most important. That’s not the kind of person who looks back over the history of the Church and sees the greater story of what God is doing. 

“Modern technological liturgies are deformational, and that’s really where I want to see our habit of attention to go; to see that we are being formed in the idols of urgency or thinking that we can be omnipresent through our technology or omnipotent through the way we control our technology, and omniscient through the information we can gain through our technology.

“Those are all ways we try to be God in small, ordinary ways throughout the day, and it’s unsurprising to me that we have an epidemic of mental illness. When a human being tries to be the omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient God, it’s no wonder they start to fall apart.…

“That’s not just bad for your soul. It’s bad for your body and your brain. It’s not surprising that we see people with anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts in droves because that’s exactly what you would expect if we continue in these patterns.…We need to change the system of habits that we have. It’s an urgent matter.” 

Justin points out, “We are all adolescents regarding technology. We need to mature in how we use it and be wise to put it in its place.”  

And here comes Justin’s next question: “How do we order our lives for the formation of our souls?”

Change Requires Community

Let’s look at the definition of the word “habit.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “a settled tendency or usual manner of behavior, an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary.” Now, for our purposes, replace the word “behavior” with “worship,” and we’re talking about liturgy. Think of this as a small “l” liturgy separate from the public worship associated with the celebration of sacraments. Focus on the rhythms and patterns of our lives outside of Sunday. With this in mind, how do we form our souls through Gospel liturgies? 

The short answer is together! This is not a matter of an individual acquiring and applying information. What’s needed is communal accountability. We need each other to change. Thankfully for pastors and ministry leaders, the “other” doesn’t have to be you, making this highly scalable no matter the size of your congregation. Even better, your congregation already has built-in communal accountability groups.…They’re called families! 

Justin believes that “doing this in small groups is one of the most powerful change agents out there.” And “this” is using Habits of the Household to zero in on the patterns of worship in daily life that take place Monday through Saturday. Establishing Gospel liturgies in your home and rejecting deformational patterns is one of the best ways to save our families from the dysfunctional cultural and technological patterns of behavior corrupting our souls, minds and bodies. 

Justin Whitmel Earley is a lawyer, author and speaker from Richmond, Virginia. Most of all, he is a husband to Lauren and a father to his four sons—Whit, Asher, Coulter and Shep. But he also graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in English literature before spending four years in Shanghai, China, teaching and writing. Justin got his law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center, and he now runs his own business law practice under the Earley Legal Group, www.earleylegalgroup.com. You can find out more about him and his books, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction and Habits of theHousehold: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms, by visiting his website, https://www.justinwhitmelearley.com/. 


Order your copy of Habits of the Household for a total of 40% off with a special Lead With Inspiration discount code: HABITS10.

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What Your Worship Leader Isn't Telling You

EXECUTE  •  with Dave Helmuth

Praise and worship in the context of Sunday morning is a significant portion of the visible ministry that takes place. When the musical portion of a church service goes well, it can focus the mind and heart on God and create receptivity to hear His Word. This supports the work and teaching of the pastor. With that in mind, Lead With Inspiration asked Dave Helmuth to discuss the relationship between pastors and worship leaders. Dave has coached worship leaders for 20 years, and his insights will equip and encourage you to lead with inspiration. Here are two things from Dave that your worship leader isn’t telling you but needs you to know.

#1 This Is Not a Utilitarian Relationship 

Worship is important! From Jericho to David’s Tabernacle to Paul and Silas in prison, worship is a conduit of transformation and heavenly power. Biblical examples highlight the potential to impact the spiritual and physical world. That’s the kind of worship we were created for and what we can aspire to during a church service. 

Dave is convinced there’s a direct correlation between the quality of worship during a service and the depth of the relationship between the worship leader and the pastor. Relationships are the currency of heaven. Without approaching the altar within a relational context, we drift into a religious event production with musicians instead of worshipers and motivational speakers instead of shepherds. Dave shared, “I’ve found that most working relationships between a worship leader and a pastor fail because they never had a relationship in the first place.”

One worship leader described a meeting with his pastor to Dave by saying, “I could have been a toaster.” This pastor talked at him without consideration for who he was. This example is extreme, but you get the point. We chose this article to follow an article from our last issue, Positioned for Courage, featuring Banning Liebscher, about the importance of understanding the team members you are leading. Perhaps the pastor did what he did because a sincere relationship was absent, or he didn’t know his worship leader well enough to communicate effectively. 

Disclaimer: Dave is not advocating for pastors to make their worship leader their best friend. He encourages pastors to invest in their relationship with their worship leader. How important is praise and worship on Sunday? The relationship with your worship leader is equally important. A good guide for pastors is to invest in the relationship to the degree that they value the ministry of praise in worship. This will influence not only the church culture but also the dynamic and depth of the church service. Dave also invites pastors to consider leadership structures that align with how they value worship. The impact of openness, transparency and, most important, fondness on the pastor–worship leader relationship cannot be overstated.

#2 You tell me what songs to sing, but how would you feel if I told you what Scripture to preach?

We’re pretty sure every pastor reading this has an answer to this question, but let’s unpack this.…It’s not about song selection! Your worship leader has a God-given calling to engage people through the language of music. A seasoned worship leader is a master of communicating through the beautiful and complex lexicon of sound. In the same way a pastor knows what portions of scripture, metaphors and illustrations to use for the desired result, a worship leader understands how the right song can make all the difference in how a congregation connects with God. All too often, disagreements over song choices come down to a single word or phrase, and your worship leader often recognizes that the inherent quality of a song is not negated by one questionable word.  

Here are a few things a pastor can do to acknowledge and empower their worship leader:

1) Clearly communicate what their authority and responsibilities are in their role. 

2) Honor and defer to their gift and ability to minister through the language of music.

3) Clarify what success looks like so everyone serving can recognize a win. 

Every Sunday morning, you’re going to war! The church is destined to prevail against the gates of hell (Matt. 16:18), but we are imperfect, and there will be conflict along the way. As you go to battle, your worship leader is at your shoulder. Your relationship and their role are not utilitarian. Both of you are called and gifted by God, and you need each other to proclaim the gospel of the Kingdom. God wants to use both of your gifts, teaching and worship, to rescue souls, disciple believers into maturity and bring the atmosphere of heaven to earth. 

For more on this topic, check out Dave’s newsletter and blog: Worship Fertilizer.

Dave Helmuth spends his life walking alongside worship leaders, building relationships that strengthen the Church and helping leaders, worship teams and churches be the best versions of themselves. Now living in the mountains of Costa Rica, he leads Ad Lib Music, adlibmusic.com, the U.S.-based worship coaching organization he pioneered in 2002. He, his wife and six children host missional retreats for worship teams on the 25-acre goat farm where they live. Dave is also an author, and each week, thousands of readers receive something they lovingly call the Worship Fertilizer, an email designed to encourage the hearts and equip the hands of worship teams.

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