My Worship-Leading Story

Through a blog I read, called The Esther Project by @lexikate, I discovered another blog called Beautiful Noise by @tamipants who is starting a new Facebook group and a blog for female worship leaders, which she has dubbed WorshipChicks. I decided I would join the dialogue by sharing about my own journey into worship leading.

For me, it started at the ripe old age of probably 5 or 6 years old when my mom began to teach me to play piano. She was an accomplished pianist by the time she was a young teenager who often played in her church, played for weddings and who went touring with the choir from her Bible College in her late teens. I grew up watching her play on worship teams and though she rarely ever sang on stage, I learned to harmonize by standing next to her in services and listening to her sing alto or even tenor.

However, my first experiences with music weren’t necessarily all positive. I can clearly remember a time when I was being forced to practice piano and I broke down in tears, wailing loudly that I hated piano and I wanted to quit!! I don’t know how my parents convinced me to keep going, but somehow they managed to get me over that crisis and I took piano lessons until the end of high school and completed my Grade 8 Royal Conservatory exam. While I had grown to somewhat appreciate the ability to play piano, understand some theory, and read sheet music, I was mostly frustrated by my inability to transfer these skills into worshiping God, since I had no understanding of how to “play by ear” or play from chord charts, like most church music is written (if you’re not playing from a hymnal or purchased sheet music from a Christian CD). So, after graduating, I stopped taking lessons and I almost completely stopped playing piano for a couple years.

As for singing, as a child, I hated it!! I remember being exceedingly frustrated that all of the songs sung in church seemed to be out of my range, so I would just stand there and refuse to sing. Until the day when, after years of standing next to my mom and listening to her harmonize and trying to sing along with her, something finally clicked and I was able to figure out the harmonies for myself. From that moment on, I learned to love singing and worship became so much more enjoyable for me. However, I was still incredibly insecure about my voice, which is nothing to write home about, and I was (and still am) envious of other female singers who could sing so much better than me, so I never sought to be involved in singing from the stage in church.

Yet, for all my frustrations and insecurities, I believe that worship is something that God had placed in my spirit from a young age and I would often sing when by myself (especially outside), writing songs and creating melodies and lyrics that were only for His ears. These times were a great outlet for me in expressing things to God that somehow wouldn’t have seemed to come out right in regular speech. For a time, when I was a teenager, I also found expression in worship through the avenues of tambourine, dance, ribbons, flags, etc. which all became an extension of my heart, communicating deep things to the Lord in partnership with and in response to the music and the words of the songs being sung.

Then, I would say I had a few significant breakthroughs while attending a discipleship training school called Tehillah Master’s Commission in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, which I was in for 2 years. In my first year (2000-2001), I took the plunge and agreed to become involved in the worship team when we went on various ministry trips, participating as a “back-up singer”, usually singing alto. This was something I had never done before and which was quite scary, but also exhilarating! I struggled with pride about being on stage and LOTS of fear of man and wondering what everyone thought of me, but still the Lord used me, even in my weakness and failings. When we were planning our big missions trip to Mexico at the end of my first year, our leaders were going to pick somebody to lead the worship team at one of the Sunday services that we were going to do. They started by asking if there was anybody who really didn’t want to do it. I was the only one to raise my hand. I was thinking, Are you kidding me? Me, worship-lead? As if! That’s terrifying! I’ve never done that before & I certainly don’t want to now! I’m definitely not good enough & I’m definitely not as good as the other singers on our team! My leaders looked at each other, then at the team, and then said, “Hmmmm…Jacquie, you were exactly the one that we were thinking of asking to do it. Why don’t you want to?” I was completely shocked! Why did they want me?? I blurted out my insecurities and how I wasn’t good enough, and yet somehow that was their confirmation that I was exactly the person who should do it! Ahhhh!!! My poor worship team! I had no idea what I was doing! I remember picking my songs and asking my piano player if she could transpose the songs to different keys so I could sing them, which she didn’t really know how to do, and trying to communicate with my team where I was going, but not knowing how, and feeling so incredibly inadequate. Yet, that experience was incredibly good for me and I believe that God anointed my weak offering of worship and that hearts were touched, in spite of me!

After that, I still wasn’t very involved in worship or worship-leading, but during my second year at TMC (2001-2002), I received what I believe to have been a significant prophetic word in my life. There was a man with a very accurate and at times, heart-piercing prophetic gift who was spending some time with our team to minister to us, and when it came to my turn, he spoke several things that encouraged and exhorted me, yet there was one thing that he said that made virtually no sense to me at the time. He told me that I would be involved in “harp and bowl”. Harp and bowl?? Some of you may be just as confused as I was! At the time, I had some vague idea that it had something to do with intercession, but I honestly didn’t think too much about it for years after that and just put it on the shelf. It wasn’t until, I believe some time in 2005, shortly after I had married the man of my dreams, that I was introduced to the International House of Prayer in Kansas City and learned about their model for prayer and worship, which they called “harp and bowl”. My husband and I started listening to their prayer room, which had been going 24/7 for about 6 years at the time, and we fell in love! Soon, we ordered their manuals on harp and bowl and began to discover what this was all about.

The idea of harp and bowl is found in Revelation 5:7-9, which says, “He (Jesus) came and took the scroll from the right hand of him who sat on the throne. And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song…” Essentially, in it’s simplest form, harp and bowl is the combination of worship (the harp) and intercession (the bowls of incense), with the added element of the “new song” or what could also be called “prophetic singing”, “spontaneous singing”, etc. which is also talked about in Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16. At the time, my husband and I had recently been asked to head up the prayer ministry for the young adult service at our church, and we instantly knew that this was something we wanted to incorporate. When I look back on that time period, I sometimes laugh thinking of what others must have thought of us! We were both ammature musicians and singers who barely knew what we were doing, with no worship-leading experience, but just a burning desire to pray and worship God. In our small pre-service prayer meetings, with the few people that joined us, my husband would play his guitar & I would sit besides him and we would sing a couple songs, sing in the Spirit, and then we’d pray and sing spontaneously from those prayers – just the 2 of us! Then, others would add their prayers and we would sing from what they prayed, and they all probably had no idea what was going on or why we were doing what we were doing – lol. Again, I feel like the Lord really loved and enjoyed it, honored it, listened & responded and blessed it – in spite of us! During that time, I would occasionally accompany my husband on the piano, but most of the time, it was sort of a disaster, since we didn’t know how to work very well together yet and because I was still very poor at playing from chord sheets, and even when I knew the chords and didn’t mess up, it was sort of just me plunking on the keys and probably didn’t sound too pretty! I attempted a couple piano lessons for some help with this, which helped a little bit, but my progress was minimal.

After being married for just over a year, we came to a fork in the road where there were many options being laid before us in regards to careers and ministry. After much prayer, it became clear that prayer & worship, in the context of a house of prayer, was what we had been made for and what we wanted to do forever! Fortunately for us, a house of prayer had just recently been started in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, which was actually where I had lived before moving to Calgary. We decided to pack it all up & moved to join Sanctuary House of Prayer in September of 2006. Since it was a very small ministry, just about anyone and everyone with any kind of musical ability was allowed on stage to lead these prayer and worship sets – including us! Within a matter of a couple weeks, we were recruited to lead a devotional set together where we both played our instruments and sang songs as well as sang spontaneously from various passages of scripture, with the help of a prayer leader. At times we felt like we had been thrown into deep water, without knowing how to swim, and that we were just told to kick our feet and flail our arms, hoping that we would somehow stay afloat! Yet, the Lord used it to help us grow and develop as worship leaders in a unique way that wouldn’t have been possible just anywhere. There was plenty of room and grace for us to make mistakes and sing an off-key note and lose our way amongst this community of people who just loved God and eagerly welcomed us into their midst with open and accepting arms. While I still struggled with my fear of man issues and insecurities, it felt like a safe place to learn and grow.

My husband and I have now been worship-leading here in varying degrees of involvement and different kinds of roles for almost 3 years. We’ve had moments of frustration, angst, humiliation – you name it – but through it all, we still know that we are where we’re supposed to be, we love it, and we wouldn’t want to be doing anything else! Though we have grown significantly in our abilities to play our instruments and in the area of prophetic singing, every time I go up on that stage, I leave feeling so grateful that it is the Lord who has chosen to bless and accept my weak offerings to Him. I still have a long way to go in my development as a worship leader, but one thing I’ve learned is that He loves it every step of the way – from the time I was a little girl singing as I walked down the country roads up until now, as a young woman of almost 28 years as I sing songs about Jesus to my own child.