I really don’t know what to say to myself about this. Am I angry? Am I worried? Am I just tired and wary because of all the ways I’ve been crapped on and abused?

That last part is actually a quote from my pastor when we met last night over an explosion of chocolate - when we first met a year ago, I appeared to be someone who had been used and abused by other churches. Some of that’s true and some of it’s not. The church, overall, is a beautiful and wonderful thing. I truly believe that and it angers me when I hear people say otherwise. The real difficulty is some of the individuals who unknowingly crap all over you.

For the most part, these individuals mean well and in many cases they don’t realize they are even doing it. They just want to help in their own way and don’t see that what they say or do is tearing you down. Some of them do realize it, and they’re doing it to make them feel better about themselves. As it goes with basic fundamentals of humanity, people are often left thinking about themselves and their own feelings and everyone else be damned. This is why some of us get cussed out in the back right before we’re stepping out on stage to lead a worship set on a beautiful Sunday morning — then half the congregation wants to know why the worship felt “weird” that morning. Too bad you can’t give them an honest answer.

Looking back over the last twenty years of my life, I can’t help but wonder if maybe I was doing it wrong. I wasn’t the one who wanted to lead the big Sunday morning worship services — I let the worship leaders with “groupies” handle those. And when we’d have meetings, these young, noobie worship leaders would look at me like I was crazy because I wanted the Sunday night services.

Tell you what. Have your flashy Sunday morning services with your swanky sets and your latest and greatest songs that all the kids want to hear. Give me the Sunday evening and weeknight services. Guess why? Because the majority of people who show up to the Sunday night and weeknight services are there for one reason and one reason alone: to experience God. Sunday mornings are more of a mixed bag, plus you get the people who haven’t spent any time with God during the week, and completely expect you to jump start them and give them their dose of weekly spirituality. From a spiritual standpoint, it’s harder to do, like pulling a heavy sack up a mountain. No thanks. Give me the less glamorous sessions instead.

Let me say this now: I will never be the “favorite worship leader” in the church. And if I ever get to that point where I am, I will turn this farking car right around. The reason for that is simple: I do not lead worship for anyone’s enjoyment. What comes out of a worship set is a product of what the Spirit of God is doing at that moment and if you don’t like it, tough. You can try to lead your own worship set and manufacture sentiments on your own — plenty of people do it, preying upon people’s emotions. That’s not my gig. In my opinion, there’s nothing worse than cruising through a worship set at mach 10, then suddenly realizing God made a left turn about two verses and a chorus ago. You can keep going if you want, but the rest of the worship service won’t be as good. My suggestion is that you suck it up, go back, and make the left turn.

A few years ago I ended up leading worship in a church that, for some odd reason, started worrying too much about the latest and greatest worship sets. They really wanted younger sounding sets that really rocked.

I have no problem with that. Really. Except at that one point, when everyone became too worried about writing their own songs and being generally too awesome for words.

The guy who took over worship started having meetings with me about this, because basically I’m me: The more adamant you get about asking everyone to act retardedly, the more adamant I’m going to become about not doing it. And you’ll be mad. But I’ll keep doing it. With a smile. The worship dude kept meeting with me and he would say how he wished I would do younger, more thrashing type sets because “that’s what the kids want!” but then he’d turn right around in the same breath and say he can’t figure out how I can get corporate worship to happen the way I do. “Everyone is really worshiping God - how do you do that?”

I’m not retarded?

Here’s a hint: It’s not manufactured crap. I’m not here to play on people’s emotions. There are plenty of churches who will do that and I don’t go to them.

Then I ended up at another start-up church, where I was the sole worship leader of every single service and home group for a couple of years. I won’t lie, it’s a lonely place to be. It’s also draining and inconvenient, because your whole existence as a church leader is about being inconvenienced and crapped on because everyone has an opinion and those who don’t need to suck up all of your time because they want you to mentor them. It’s tiring. So I got married, moved to the middle of nowhere, and stopped going to church for about a year and a half.

After so many years of going through this, I’m tired and stressed and angry because I’m tired of being the black sheep. But I hate bad worship, and it bothers me that I’m just sitting in the back when I know I can do something to fix things. Every church service makes me more and more angry because I’m watching noobs make stupid noob decisions. It’s not their fault — a lot of us get thrown into worship because we’re often the only one who can play an instrument or sing. Sometimes we can’t even do one of those well, and yet we’re handed a microphone and expected to lead worship. We learn through trial and error, mostly error, and for some of us it’s harder to figure out than most. I’ve had 20 years of trial and error, so last night, my pastor finally came out and told me how everything was going and basically begged for help. I felt bad, so I offered to help.

I don’t know how I feel about it. I can’t promise to know everything there is to know, even with all of my experience. I can’t promise to be able to fix everything, because worship is such a strange thing. A person can know all there is to know about it, but then miss what God is doing. This spells disaster for a worship set. Everyone has a time or two when they’re just having an “off night,” so to speak. The same is with worship. I could jump into this and it could be a disaster.

I think I’m just tired of being the one swimming upstream.