Alrighty—I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I wanted to write about music ministry, the marketplace, and meaningful church membership, but I wasn’t ready to release it yet.

After spending more time praying, thinking, writing, and revising, I’ve been able to gather my thoughts on how we can cultivate a healthy ethic for music ministry in our local churches.

Here, I’ll be making this case:

Meaningful church membership requires almost exclusive service to your local church—and this is especially true for musicians.

First off, we need to distinguish between ethics and morals. “Morals” are the values we hold, and “ethics” are how we live out those values. You can also view them as “motivations” vs. “actions.”

In the case of musicians serving at either one or several churches, the act of serving reveals the morals fueling their ethics.

Another distinction that I want to add is that if a person acts out of accordance with what I’m advocating for (a rightly aligned moral + ethic resulting in near-exclusive service to a local church), that does NOT make them inherently immoral.

What I’m seeking to counsel is:

Generally, I am not in favor of dividing one's attention between several different faith communities. Instead, I’m leaning more and more into a conviction that has been growing over the years: Meaningful participation in a local church requires more than simply showing up for a service or performing a particular ministry function.

A Christian's commitment to a local church involves relationships, responsibilities, worship, service, accountability, and a willingness to share in the ordinary burdens and joys of a particular body of believers. If our attention is continually divided, we may be present in many places while becoming meaningfully committed to none of them.

My work through Worship Strategies creates an obvious tension with this principle. I work with several churches all the time, so how is that not a double standard? The distinction, for me, is between working with multiple churches and belonging to multiple churches. I can provide professional services to several churches without considering myself a member of each one. But that distinction requires boundaries.

For instance, when it comes to leading and planning worship services, I give exclusive attention to my home church. This is partly because I am on staff there, but an even greater consideration is that I am an active member of that church.

At the end of the day, it's about belonging to a covenant community: I've committed myself to a specific group of people, and they've committed themselves to me. I am not merely showing up to sing songs and listen to a sermon with people who happen to be there.

That changes the way I think about ministry altogether.

Instead of asking the question:

"I have musical gifts. Where can I use them?"

It should be:

"Where am I committed, and how can my gifts serve the people to whom I am committed?"

In other words, belonging should come before serving in significant ministry. Our gifts are given for the building up of Christ's body, but that doesn't mean we should continually search for a particular body in which those gifts can be used most impressively, comfortably, or satisfactorily. In fact, considering a church primarily according to what I can do is a generally disordered way of thinking about ministry!

To that end, a person's musical ability does not automatically determine where they ought to serve. A disordered view of giftedness ends up producing a sense of entitlement, rather than humility through assuming responsibility within a faith community.

This is why, if I have a volunteer who shows a pattern of serving at our church one Sunday and then another church the next, I am more apt to counsel them to commit to a single church. If that church happens to be one other than my home church, then I am willing to let them go.

There is disappointment in that, but I would rather hold true to the principle that people need to be plugged into the right places so they can do effective work within those places, rather than circulating among churches through a series of duties that never develop into genuine commitment.

There is also a biblical principle that helps illustrate this. In Matthew 6:24, Jesus is specifically talking about serving God and money when He says that no one can serve two masters. I don't mean to suggest that Jesus was directly addressing multiple church ministries (and I definitely don’t want to conflate “the love of money” into this discussion), but the principle still stands and is useful: divided service creates competing demands. A servant may be capable of working hard for two masters, but eventually those masters' expectations compete. The problem isn't necessarily unwillingness to work; his attention and allegiance are divided.

Likewise, someone may technically be capable of serving two churches. The question isn't simply whether the schedule can be made to work. The better question is whether dividing one's ministry attention allows that person to become meaningfully invested in either congregation. There is a difference between being able to perform a task in multiple places and being committed to the people among whom you perform that task.

This is where the modern church recruiting model begins to create a problem.

Music directors are constantly looking for volunteers, and as expectations rise—higher production values, more capable musicians, larger teams, more complicated arrangements—the pressure to find "top talent" increases. Churches naturally want capable people who can prepare well and contribute to the quality of the service.

On the other side, capable musicians naturally want environments that provide artistic expression, smooth preparation, and excitement about how things are arranged and programmed. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to use your gifts well. But those desires can gradually turn church service into a search for the best available opportunity. Instead of asking, "Where am I needed?" we ask, "Where will my gifts be most appreciated?" The same can be said of asking, "Where will I have the best experience?" instead of asking, "Where am I committed?"

At that point, church ministry begins to resemble a marketplace, and then this happens:

Both sides begin evaluating one another according to what they can offer. The musician offers talent in exchange for an environment that satisfies him; the church offers an attractive ministry environment in exchange for the musician's talent. Something important has been lost: The musician is no longer primarily serving a body of believers to which he belongs.

And this creates a cycle of consolidation.

A church with more talented musicians can produce a more polished musical experience. That experience attracts more talented musicians, which makes the ministry even more capable, which makes the church more attractive to still more musicians.

Meanwhile, smaller congregations can lose some of their most capable volunteers. Their worship ministries become harder to sustain, which makes them less attractive to musicians, which leaves them with fewer musicians.

This resembles what happens when rural communities slowly dry up in favor of urban expansion. Talent, resources, and opportunity move toward larger centers, making those centers increasingly capable while making smaller communities increasingly difficult to sustain.

The same thing can happen within the church.

None of this means that having an experience and environment of excellence is wrong. Churches should prepare well. Musicians should practice. Worship leaders should lead thoughtfully. Technical teams should work competently. But excellence is not the same thing as faithfulness.

Production quality should not become the primary measure of whether a church is worth serving. A church with fewer musicians, simpler arrangements, or less sophisticated technology may nevertheless be the place where a Christian ought to serve.

So I think the ethic is fairly simple:

There are certainly legitimate reasons to serve outside one's home congregation—professional obligations, specialized ministry, temporary needs, or unusual circumstances. The distinction is between occasional or specialized service outside one's church and a pattern of distributing one's primary ministry commitment among several churches.

The local church is a covenant community, not merely a weekly event. Music ministry should therefore be an expression of that commitment rather than an option to be exercised within a marketplace of “who’s best” and “who has the best.”

So, consider that we should not serve simply where our musical gifts can make the greatest impact (which ultimately fuels self-satisfaction and pride), but where we have committed ourselves to love, serve, and build up the body of Christ.

Be blessed 👊✌️