One Percent of Your Worship

I would encourage every worship leader to let worship leading on stage be one percent of the worship that happens with you during the week. Don’t let that be everything or close to everything. Have a life of worship far beyond and outside that one space.

Pat Barrett

Great quote from this month’s interview with Pat Barrett in Worship Musician magazine (www.worshipmusician.com). The interview looks back a little at Pat Barrett’s long career, before focussing mainly on his new album Act Justly, Love Mercy, Walk Humbly.

The quote above speaks for itself, and I won’t add much more, except to make the perhaps obvious point that it looks to be inspired by Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:6 “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

Others have expressed it as our Sunday morning worship being the tip of the iceberg. Not in coldness of course, but in the sense that it is the small visible part of our worship, while the large majority of our worship is unseen other than by the Lord.

Barrett is saying this is particularly important for worship leaders, because they are so prominent or visible in our public worship times together. Jesus is so clear that our worship, our prayer, our giving, our whole spiritual life really, is a thing of the heart, and what is seen in public must simply be an overflow of that heart worship, or it risks falling into the sort of hypocrisy practised by the Pharisees.