The Southern Baptist Convention released a large-scale study on worship leaders in SBC churches last week, and while the results may be alarming, they should not be surprising.
Anyone who’s been paying attention for the last four decades should recognize the coming shortage of worship leaders. After all, the very definition of what it means to be a worship leader has been shifting dramatically.
I know this because in my former life I was caught in the transition. In the independent Baptist world I grew up in, we called them song directors. But as an adult, I was part of the move to band-driven worship that started in seeker-friendly churches and now has made its way even to small-town First Baptist churches. The one exception is that some Reformed churches are as traditional in their worship styles as liberal and Mainline churches, employing pipe organs and singing from hymnals.
Today, only 16% of SBC churches use organs in worship. In the post-war heyday of the SBC, it was every church’s aspiration to obtain an organ and organist for worship leadership. The advent of the praise band killed that pattern.
Also, the staffing model pushed out of Nashville was for every church to have a full-time or part-time minister of music — emphasis on the word “minister.” Today, churches are more likely to have a “worship leader” instead of a “minister.”
The new survey found only 14% of SBC churches have a job title called “minister of music,” while 25% employ a “worship leader.”
“Only 14% of SBC churches have a job title called ‘minister of music.’”
This shift is evident in the six SBC seminaries as well, where formerly thriving schools of church music are shadows of their former selves if existing at all. And what’s being taught there is significantly different than the curriculum 40 years ago.
It is no wonder, then, that one of the most concerning numbers for Southern Baptists in the report is the growing shortage of worship leaders.
“Nearly 1,900 SBC churches currently do not have a primary worship leader, and many struggle to find candidates for their vacancies,” the report says. “By 2040, SBC churches will need to identify, equip and train over 20,000 worship leaders.”
That’s not only because of the current shortage but because so many current church worship leaders will have retired by 2040.
These challenges are not unique to Southern Baptists. The same challenges are staring down most evangelical churches. And part of the confusion over how churches should respond has to do with churches of very different sizes having very different priorities, despite having virtually the same theology.
The rise of megachurch worship
Perhaps no other dynamic has influenced evangelical worship more than the rise of the megachurch. Hartford Institute for Religion Research defines megachurches as congregations that average more than 2,000 weekly attendees.
Most Southern Baptist churches are nowhere near that size. In the SBC survey, 47% of responses came from churches with fewer than 100 people, while 42% came from churches with between 100 and 499 in weekly attendance.
Based on these responses, it appears at least 89% of SBC churches have worship experiences that simply do not compare to the highly sensory aesthetic value megachurches provide.
In an essay titled “Leadership and Church Size Dynamics: How Strategy Changes with Growth,” the late cofounder of The Gospel Coalition Tim Keller wrote, “The larger the church, the higher its aesthetic bar must be.”
Josh Howerton of Lakepointe Church in Dallas puts it more crassly in a pastoral training video: “What he’s saying is in a smaller church when there might be 80 or 100 people there, Sally can get up and sing her solo. And even though Sally is terrible, it still likely is moving to people because they know Sally and they know her heart for the Lord.”
Does that mean smaller churches experience less transcendence? I don’t think so, as I explain in my forthcoming book, Weapons of Worship.
Megachurches with big budgets and limitless talent pools are driving the expectation today of what makes for “good” worship. Smaller and mid-size churches often try to imitate the megachurches while lacking the resources to do so.
Here’s another example: Worship Leader Research discovered that of all the songs written by evangelical churches between 2010 and 2020, only 38 titles made CCLI’s top 25 for the entire decade for songs most frequently sung in all churches. And of those 38 songs, 35 were written by just four megachurches — Bethel, Hillsong, Elevation and Passion.
Development of SBC worship leaders
Back to the issue of education which, given the dearth of seminary training for church musicians, now gets classified as “development.” The new SBC report highlights a lack of such development opportunities.
Consider these numbers:
- 23% of SBC churches have one or more people who have expressed a call to worship ministry or are currently being trained to become a worship leader.
- 51% of SBC churches report no identified development plan for training current and future worship leaders.
- 19% of all SBC churches report informal mentorship as the primary development method for worship leaders.
- Only 4% of churches report a structured development pipeline as their primary approach to identifying and training future worship leaders.
- In 70% of the churches whose primary worship leader will reach or exceed retirement age by 2040, not a single person has expressed a call to serve in worship leadership or is being trained to become a worship leader.
Kelsey Kramer McGinnis
In a video posted on social media, Christianity Today worship correspondent Kelsey Kramer McGinnis explains: “I think that this shortage has something to do with the fact that there isn’t much agreement about what kind of training is required to be a worship leader. So when we talk about healthy pipelines, when we talk about access to resources, there just is not widespread agreement about what those pipelines should be and what those resources should be.”
In the past, churches commonly expected worship leaders to have at least a bachelor’s degree in music and preferably a seminary master’s degree. Today, listing any such standards in a job listing could scare off candidates, McGinnis says.
But this in turn fuels part of the problem.
“When you have all these job descriptions for worship leaders where there’s no education required, now nobody knows what they should be pursuing in terms of education and training if they want to be a worship leader,” McGinnis said. “When I talk to educators who are trying to design useful programs for worship leaders, part of that conversation is always that even if you design a great program, if potential worship leaders are looking at investing in education and realizing they might not need it to get a job, they probably won’t go. But this also is meaning that you have more people entering the job of worship leader with less training than they probably need. And this could be contributing to the very quick burnout rate.”
According to SBC report, 53% of SBC worship leaders today rely on self-directed study. Just 24% have a bachelor’s degree in music, worship or ministry, while just 17% have a master’s degree. But those numbers are high compared to evangelical churches at large.
According to Worship Leader Research, just 11% of worship leaders nationwide have a bachelor’s degree in worship, while only 2.4% have a master’s degree. Worship Leader Research says evangelical worship leaders tend to acquire their expertise through “mentorship, YouTube tutorials, and trial and error.”
‘The purview of men’
As the SBC continues to debate how severely to limit women’s roles in church leadership, the role of worship leader in the local church often blurs the lines between pastoral roles and director roles.
Within the SBC, churches that have a female primary worship leader include:
- 39% of churches with up to 49 attendees
- 35% of churches with 50 to 99 attendees
- 21% of churches with 100 to 499 attendees
- 5% of churches with 500 or more attendees
“The larger the SBC church, the more likely the primary worship leader will be a man.”
The larger the SBC church, the more likely the primary worship leader will be a man. This is likely because, as Leah Payne explains in God Gave Rock & Roll to You, “Classifying congregational singing as a conduit to the truth of God elevated songwriting to the status of preaching, which was, for Neo-Reformed thinkers, the purview of men.”
That’s consistent with the pattern the SBC survey found. SBC churches that utilize worship leaders with “pastor” or “minister” in their job titles include:
- 17% with up to 49 attendees
- 23% with 50 to 99 attendees
- 54% with 100 to 499 attendees
- 84% with 500 or more attendees
The larger the church, the more likely they’re going to consider the role of the primary worship leader to be the role of a pastor. And that most often rules out women serving in such roles.
At the same time, Leah Payne reports that “worship songs written by women plummeted” during the first decade of the 21st century. “The fact that worship music was likely created in and for megachurches … meant that more music was being written and performed by music pastors, many of whom were white men who preferred rock music — a consistently white, male genre — and gravitated toward working with their white, male friends.”
Powerful worship or worshiping power
The SBC survey leaves some important questions unanswered. It tells us who is leading Southern Baptist worship, how they’re being trained and what resources they have. It does not tell us what theological and political visions those leaders embody.
That omission matters given how many Baptist pastors spoke at the Trump administration’s “Rededicate 250” worship rally on the National Mall this summer. And it matters because worship music shapes the theology of a church regardless of whether the person leading worship has any theological training.
Take the example of a dispute that arose several years ago over the popular worship song “In Christ Alone” written by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend. One line in the song says, “’Til on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied,” which adheres to the satisfaction theory of atonement.
That fits a Calvinist view of the atonement just fine, but it does not fit many other churches’ theological baseline.
In 2013, a 15-member committee of the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to exclude the song from a new hymnal after Townend and Getty refused permission to alter the controversial line to say, “the love of God was magnified.”
A worship leader with no theological training is ill-equipped to notice or care about such distinctions. The same is true of worship songs that glorify Christian nationalism or have been claimed by the Christian nationalist movement.
For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Christian nationalists defying stay-at-home orders set up sound systems to drown out Black Lives Matter protests, while singing the lyrics, “Sing a little louder in the presence of my enemies.” Or after all the theocratic proclamations from Trump officials and Christian ministers at Rededicate 250, the crowd of MAGA-hat-wearing Christians sang the lyrics, “Who could ever stop us?”
One of the most popular worship songs being sung today, written by the former Southern Baptist church Elevation Worship, includes the lyrics, “Praise is the water my enemies drown in.” But who are the enemies? And what does it mean to drown them?
What we sing in worship shapes who we become as Christians, especially regarding how we view or treat our neighbors.
So when the SBC talks about developing 20,000 worship leaders for the next generation of churches, they’re going to need more than a survey. If they want to have congregations that value the flourishing of men and women alike, they’re going to have to be willing to grapple more deeply with some of their embedded assumptions about church size, gender and transcendence. And if they want to shape congregations theologically, they’re going to have to find new ways to train worship leaders — regardless of what titles they carry.
If they don’t, the end result may feel like “powerful worship,” but could instead be the worship of power.
Rick Pidcock
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and is the author of a forthcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.