BONUS | The Funeral Behind "It Is Well"

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. 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

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. 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

The Hymns Fight Is Not About Hymns | What the Team Cannot See E5

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Heavily Involved, Last to Know | What the Team Cannot See E4

Nobody calls the booth a worship leader. Somebody at your church runs the stream, mixes the vocals, fires the lyrics, frames the shot. They arrive before the band and leave after the band. And they find out what the church decided from the bulletin, like a visitor. A tech wrote to me once, and I am giving you the shape of it rather than the exact words, that the hardest part of the role was not the hours or the gear. It was being heavily involved in everything and still outside the circle. The paid staff knows things on Tuesday. The booth finds out Sunday at seven a.m., when the service flow has already changed, the new song has no chart in the system, and the bridge repeats an extra time that nobody mentioned to the person running lyrics. And here is the other thing the same people tell me. They love the booth. One of them put it this way, and I have never forgotten it: I get to see the Spirit move through the whole church, from the booth. The booth has the only seat in the building that sees the entire room at once. The stage sees faces in the dark. The congregation sees the stage. The booth sees everything. The booth holds the widest view of worship in the building and the narrowest channel of information about it. That is the wound. Now look at what Paul does with it. When Paul describes the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12, he goes out of his way to talk about the parts that seem weaker. His word there is not a soft word. He says they are necessary, anankaia. Not appreciated. Not valued. Necessary. And God composed the body this way, on purpose, so that there would be no division, so that the members would have the same care for one another. A body does not just share honor. A body shares information. When your eye sees the curb, it tells your feet. Instantly. A body that does not pass information to its hands starts dropping things. And no one says the hands failed. The body failed. If you lead a team, this episode has a practical edge that costs you almost nothing. Whatever you know about Sunday, the booth knows it when the band knows it. The setlist change, the added element, the moment you might extend. Communication is how a team confesses what it believes about its members. And if you are the one in the booth, hear this from 1 Corinthians 12 before you hear anything from your church. The seat that sees the whole room was not an accident. God composed the body, and he put you where everything converges. The console is an instrument. The lyrics are an instrument. You are not adjacent to the worship. You are necessary to it. That has been true since before anyone remembered to tell you. A question to sit with today: who on my team finds out last, and what does that tell them about what we believe they are. Read the written version and get extra notes at ryanloche.substack.com. 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