Who is the ‘audience’, who is the ‘prompter’, and who is the ‘performer’ at your church?

For these times of isolation and then when you are able to meet together again, answering this question will have a profound effect on the posture your church takes as well as the approach to the use of music in any church situation.

Many mistakenly believe the ‘audience’ are the people gathered together. This is the source of most church music problems and frankly the source of most problems in churches to begin with. It fosters a consumer mindset in the church. The audience is God.

Almost always hand in hand with the above mistake is the answer of the question about who the performers are. The same mistake of thinking the congregants are the audience puts the singers and keyboardists and band as the performers. Wrong posture again. The performers are the collected congregants offering a simultaneous act of worship to God; their audience. This is really not a possibility in isolation. That is without serious dedicated spend on technology. None of the conferencing tools allow for this real time, usable quality, time aligned participation. Even Jamkazam, a platform dedicated to music doesn’t allow for it.

This is the most devastating thing about isolation and quarantine for Music use in churches that have learned these roles of God as the audience, congregants as the performers, and musicians and singers as the prompters.

So I will pose the question: what is the basic point of the desire to put a whole bunch of work into this? Be wary of any answer that involves the word ‘talent’.

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