Part Time Worship Leaders (Tips for Small Gigs) Pt. 2

Last time I shared three out of my seven tips to make your part time worship ministry a success.  Today I want to share the last four tips with you which focus on planning, advertising/networking, and prayer.

Tip #4: Make one hour a day your “Ministry Hour.” If a person is a full time teacher, schools will often pay and encourage teachers to take classes that make them better teachers.  If you are a full time worship leader, you are able to spend more time learning tips, tricks, and honing your skills when your not at a gig.  However if a part time worship leader wants to better himself in his art, he has to find time to do so between leading worship, his full time job, and any other responsibilities he may have (family, friends, etc.)  These other responsibilities make time to “practice” considerably more difficult, that’s why I recommend scheduling just one hour a day and setting it aside to work on your ministry.  This one hour can be used to practice your music, advertise, prepare for an upcoming gig, or whatever you need to do to grow as a musician & leader!  But it is important to take that one hour and set it aside for your ministry just like you would set aside an hour for exercise, or an hour for prayer.  This hour might mean you have to make some sacrifices such as maybe your hour for ministry has to be first thing in the morning and that means getting up an hour earlier each day and going to bed an hour earlier each night, but regardless, find an hour each day and make sure you keep it!  Otherwise you may find that you don’t receive any new gigs, or you never get any better as a worship leader, and that is a road that leads to the end of your career.

Tip#5: Target small scale gigs. Every worship leader dreams of getting that huge gig where there are thousands of people attending, and all of them are pressing into the heart of God because of the work the Holy Spirit is doing through your music, and it’s a nice dream – but it may not be where God is calling you right now. Where part time worship leaders are needed and where their ministry thrives is on the parish or diocesan level: small things such as parish confirmation retreats, high school retreats, smaller youth rallies, or  weekly youth group meetings.  These are the gigs that are too small and the income is too low for a full timer to support his family, but still have enough people and enough of a paycheck to satisfy the part timer!  So if the goal is to aim for small scale gigs, then that leads us straight to the next sub-point which deals with advertising!

Tip#5a: Advertise on a small scale.  For me personally if I am going to do a gig I don’t really want to travel more that two hours one way at the most (and that is pushing it.) I want to be able to do the job and get back home at a reasonable hour, so I can do something else on my “off days” from Youth Ministry other than a gig.  Many part time worship leaders probably share a similar mentality (especially if they have families.) What this means is that while it is important to have a good website for yourself, you do not need to spend a lot of money on it each month.  There are plenty of free websites that are perfectly fine to use.  What you want to avoid, is paying a monthly fee to have your name listed on a national database, or paying a large amount of money to keep a website with all the bells and whistles that may not be necessary for your ministry.  DRE’s and other people who are looking for local worship leaders want some kind of “presence” online.  That being said, this could be your first impression to potential gigs so make sure you put your best foot forward!  So apart from a website, advertise through mediums that will attract the crowd you are looking for.  This can be done with a small mailing to local parishes in your deanery or diocese.  In addition, as youth ministers and such begin to hire you, after each gig, make sure you ask each person to write you a one paragraph reference saying how great you are, and put those references on your website.  DRE’s all know each other more or less, so seeing a reference for you from someone they know goes a long way.

Tip# 6: Be flexible on your price.  Not only can a part time worship leader charge less for his services, but he also has the ability to be flexible.  If you normally charge $500 for a gig, but a parish can’t afford that, a part time worship leader has the freedom to drop his price and work with a parish’s budget. The key to making sure you are being flexible, and not being taken advantage of, is to have a standard price for an event, and then also have a bottom out number.  A number that if a group can not pay that much you will walk away from a gig.  The way you arrive at that number is by considering two things: First what costs you have to cover from this gig, and second, what the least amount of profit you are willing to do the gig for.

Tip #7: Pray for your ministry every day, and get others to do so too, because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter how many tips you have, or how good your following is, if we don’t make our ministries Christ centered and rooted in prayer our ministries mean nothing. Hopefully as you practice implementing these tips you will find the money from your ministry, and your ministry itself going a long way as well.  Blessings on us all.

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