Name the People Who Actually Showed Up | Philippians 4:15-16

I Serve at Your Pleasure

Your pastor went quiet and you wrote the whole story. The budget meeting you were not in. The new org chart somebody mentioned at coffee. The ending where you are replaced and the church does fine without you. None of it happened anywhere but in you, and you have been carrying it like a forecast. If you have been in worship ministry long enough, you have a version of this. The senior pastor's tone in a text feels off, and inside of an hour, you have built a whole movie out of it. Some of this comes from real history. Some of you have been at a church that ended badly, and the body learned a fired-soon filter that the new church cannot turn off. New pastor is not the old pastor, and you know that. The filter still runs. Paul says it is a very small thing that he should be judged by them. He is not minimizing them. He is putting their assessment in its place. He is not even justifying himself by his own opinion of himself. He says, I do not judge my own self. The Lord judges me. That is not a weapon you wave at your pastor. It is the opposite move. Paul is saying my standing does not move when your opinion moves, so I can hear what you say without my identity being at stake in your sentence. An executive pastor named Ed put it this way. He said, I used to tell my bosses, I serve at your pleasure. If for some reason I am not meeting expectations, I do not need to be there anyway. That is not passive-aggressive. He means it. He is saying my faithfulness is not contingent on whether I keep this job. I can do this work free, not afraid. The next time your pastor goes quiet and you start writing the story, notice you are doing it. Name the filter. Ask the question instead of feeding the script. Hey, I want to make sure I am not reading into this. Anything I need to know? Most of the time the answer will be, no, I have just been buried. And the script in your head will deflate. The work it takes to ask is small. The freedom on the other side is real. Serve up the chain like the Lord is your judge. Bring the concern. Make the case. Let go of the outcome. You can be honest without auditioning. You can disagree without spiraling. You can hold real respect for your pastor without making him your jury. A question to sit with today: what story about my pastor am I treating as fact? Read the written version and get extra notes at ryanloche.substack.com.

Perfect, Establish, Strengthen, Settle | Before the Doors Open

You did not sleep enough this week. There was something. There always is. The hard conversation. The thing that came in late on Tuesday. The volunteer who left without telling anyone. The Sunday last week that you have not quite let yourself feel yet. The thing at home that you have been holding alone for a few months now. You are leading today on top of that. And the room cannot see it. Hear what Peter says, near the end of his first letter. Chapter five, verses ten and eleven. May the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you. To him be the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen. Read those four verbs again. Perfect. Establish. Strengthen. Settle. That is what the God of all grace is doing in the worship leader who has not slept enough. He is not waiting until you feel better to begin the work. He is doing it now, inside the suffering. And notice the phrase after you have suffered a little while. Peter does not pretend the suffering is not happening. He names it. And he refuses to call it the end of the story. For the FILO whose hands are tired. For the vocalist whose voice is rough. For the parent who got three hours of sleep because the youngest was up. For the worship leader still carrying last Sunday in their body. The God of all grace is at work in you while you lead. So let me speak it. May the God of all grace meet you this morning where the suffering is still uncatalogued. May he perfect what is incomplete in you. Establish what is shaking. Strengthen what is tired. Settle what has been disturbed. May the little while of suffering not have the final word over you. And may his glory and power outlast the hard week. Go. The room is waiting. But more importantly, Jesus is already in it. I will see you tomorrow.

BONUS | The Funeral Behind "It Is Well"

Most of us have sung "It Is Well With My Soul" without knowing what it cost the man who wrote it. Horatio Spafford lost his fortune in the Great Chicago Fire, then lost his four daughters when the Ville du Havre went down in the Atlantic in 1873. His wife's telegram read "Saved alone." He wrote the hymn on the crossing to meet her, over the water where they drowned. But that is where most tellings stop, and Spafford's life did not stop there. This is the fuller, truer story: the son he buried, the church he left, the complicated colony he founded in Jerusalem, and underneath all of it, the question that matters most for anyone who leads a room in worship. Not why the song still moves us. What the song actually formed, in him, and in everyone who has sung it since. This is a special long-form episode, the audio of the first in a new monthly worship documentary series. If you would rather watch the visual version, it is on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/RwNs9DZO3Wk Worship that holds in the dark is formed long before the dark arrives. Mentioned in this episode: If you've enjoyed this devotional, would you please leave a rating and a review? You can keep up with everything at ryanloche.substack.com

Keeping the Peace Is Not Making Peace | What the Team Cannot See E7

If you have been keeping the peace on your team for years and the conflict keeps coming back, that is not peace. That is a payment plan. Most of the worship leaders I know are conflict-averse. They got into this work because they love music and they love people and they love Jesus, in some order, and they did not get into it because they love hard conversations. So when the hard conversation comes for them, the instinct is to soften it. Delay it. Reframe it. Move the meeting to next week. Send a text that says we should talk and then never schedule the talk. The result is a team that feels okay this week and is going to be sitting on top of the same crack next month. There is a survey answer that has stayed with me. Almost six hundred worship leaders. One of them wrote that the hardest part of ministry is managing conflict and confrontation, because she shies away from confrontation. She is naming the wound and the avoidance in the same breath. That is most of you. It is most of me. Look at the verb in Ephesians 4:15. Speaking truth in love. In Greek that is one word, aletheuo. To truth it. Truth is the active verb. Love is the manner you do it in. The thing most of us call peacekeeping keeps the manner and drops the substance. We are gentle. We are warm. We do not say the thing. That is not the verb Paul gives us. The verb is to truth, and to truth in love. So here is what most of our peacekeeping actually is. It is choosing the manner over the substance every time, week after week, until the team learns that nobody on the team is going to say anything hard out loud. And what looks like a healthy room is a room that has been quietly anesthetized. I have a story from inside the Planning Center version of this. A team member texted me once. The text said, am I okay? I am not scheduled for two months. The peacekeeping answer was a hedge. Oh, you are fine, do not worry about it, we just had a lot of people for that stretch. The truthing-in-love answer is shorter and harder. One hundred percent no. If you were not okay, I would tell you. Here is what was going on with the schedule. That second answer is two sentences. It took me years to learn how to write them in under thirty seconds. But hear what they do. They tell her she is okay. They tell her she would know if she were not. They give her the missing information. And they free her up to stop checking the schedule for hidden meaning for the next month. Clarity is kindness. Vagueness, dressed up as nice, is unkindness with a smile on. Paul says, putting away falsehood, speak truth each one with his neighbor. For we are members of one another. The reason to truth in love on a worship team is not strategy. It is anatomy. You are members of one another. A body that lies to itself about what is hurting does not stay a body for long. And then, be angry, and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your wrath. Paul is being pastoral here, not idealistic. He is not saying you will never get angry on a team. He is saying when you do, do not let the sun set on it, because nighttime anger is what fuels parking-lot conversations the next morning. Hard things go quicker the same day. I am not telling you to be brutal. I am not telling you to volunteer hard conversations you do not actually need to have. I am telling you to stop calling it peace when what you mean is delay. The team that never says hard things is not at peace. It is anesthetized. And anesthesia is a tool you use briefly so you can do the surgery. It is not a way to live. A question to sit with today: what truth have I traded away to keep this week quiet. Read the written version and get extra notes at ryanloche.substack.com.

What They Say in the Parking Lot | What the Team Cannot See E6

Somebody on your team complains about you to everyone except you. You already know who. James already knows why. It is week two of this season, and we are moving from the wounds you can name out loud to the wounds nobody says out loud, and this is the first one. The text from the band member that copies one other person. The conversation in the parking lot that ends when you walk over. The story you finally hear two months later from somebody who thought you knew. By the time it gets back to you, it does not feel like information. It feels like a knife you cannot tell whether to thank or pull out. James 4:1 starts a layer underneath the gossip. Wars and fightings come from your pleasures that war in your members. That word for pleasures is hedonon. It is the root of our word hedonism. James is not talking about a craving for chocolate cake. He is talking about desires battling each other inside one person. The person wanted the song picked. The person wanted the solo. The person wanted the schedule changed. The person wanted to be consulted. The person wanted somebody to notice they were carrying more than their share. The desire did not get a vote in the room where the decision was made. So the desire went to find a vote somewhere else. And the parking lot is where desires go to vote. Most of the time the person talking about you is not malicious. They are wounded. They are also, somewhere underneath the wound, ambitious. Hurt and want sit close together in the human chest. When the want does not get heard inside the team, it stops asking to be heard and starts campaigning to be heard. You know this is true because you have done it. I have done it. The conversation you had with your spouse about your senior pastor. The drive home where you ran the script of what you should have said. The text to the friend in another ministry that ended in a sigh emoji. Three moves when you are the one being talked about. First, remember you cannot stop it. You can be the most generous, the most accessible, the most pastoral leader your team has ever had, and somebody will still talk about you in the parking lot. Jesus had this. Paul had this. You will have this. Second, refuse to run your own parking-lot campaign about them. They talked. You talk. You tell your version to two trusted people, and now there is a small fire on the other side of the building too. James calls that war. Triangulated speech is how churches catch fire from the inside. Third, carry it to the face, not to the lobby. If something is bad enough that you would say it in the parking lot, it is worth saying in the kitchen at home with the person. Not as an attack. As a question. James 4:2 finishes the thought. You do not have, because you do not ask. The cure for the parking-lot conversation is asking. Hard, slow, in person. And one more thing. Sometimes you are the one talking. The way back is not to scrub it from the record. The way back is to go to the person you talked about, before they hear it secondhand, and tell them yourself. That is also asking. That is also peace. A question to sit with today: what conversation am I having about someone that I have not had with them. Read the written version and get extra notes at ryanloche.substack.com.