Simply Worship: A Conversation with John Barnett

You’ve been around the Vineyard leading worship a lot lately. Have you noticed any themes? Have you had any sense of what God’s doing, both in worship and also in the churches?

I do, as a matter of fact. We started about three or four years ago, but the root of it lies with John Wimber. He taught us writers and worship leaders a lot of things. I’m not totally sure he spelled out how to grow old in this thing, though. It seemed like the common thought was that you get to a certain age, and then you pass the work on, and you disappear or something.

I thought, “That’s probably not the right way to go about it.” So a few years ago, my wife Marie and I were praying about it and said, “Well, why not — let’s send some emails out, contact some people, see if they would want to have a night of worship, some training maybe.” We thought we would train people in some of the worship ideas we had developed.

It was actually really hard to do. For one, cold-calling isn’t exactly my forte. I had never done anything like that before. You feel a bit like a goofball emailing people you don’t know. You get everything from no response at all to a simple “not interested.”

And then every now and again, you’ll get someone that says, “Hey, yeah! We’d love for you to come!”

So our training started out simply and grew slowly. We would just stop at these churches. As we did it more and more, hanging out with all these younger leaders, I was expecting them all to have skinny jeans and the “hair thing” going, etc. The big lights. Worship rock. But I found out that’s not really the case. There are some really good young folks out there in the Vineyard that love the Vineyard. What really surprised me was, they really wanted to know about the history of Vineyard worship and what we were all about.

So we’ve enjoyed ourselves immensely. We just want to give back to the movement that has given so much to us over the years. What we end up telling the younger worship leaders is that Marie and I have played a small part in the history of the Vineyard, but the history is still being written — and if they want to, they can continue to write it themselves. At place after place we’ve visited, they want to do it. And I tell them it’s worth giving their lives to. It’s worth it.

Another thing I tell them is this analogy of passing the torch. I tell them my torch is old and beat up and patched, and I only have a tiny flame on it. I tell them, “I’m not here to pass the torch to you, but what I would love to do is to light your torches so you can go and write the history with the gifts God has given you.”

God has given these young people a unique gift package. It isn’t about sounding like how we sounded in 1985. Music has changed, obviously. The industry has changed. But instead, we want them to go and write the history with the DNA of what Vineyard worship is about in the way that they choose to express it.

There might be more than one answer to this, but how would you define what you are handing off in terms of Vineyard worship? Of course, our DNA is not opposed to other streams, but what has been unique about the way that the Vineyard approaches worshipping and music?

The essence of Vineyard worship is like this: As musicians and songwriters and everything else, God has gifted us individually. But that gift was for a reason. And that reason is for two things: to bless Him, and to bless his church in order to bless Him. [bctt tweet=”Musicians are called to be matchmakers between the bride and the bridegroom and then get out of the way.” quote=”Musicians are called to be matchmakers between the bride and the bridegroom and then get out of the way.”]

It’s not about us. We’re vessels that contain this gifting, but this gifting needs to belong to him. There’s all kinds of streams, all kinds of thought about worship, especially over the last 20 years. The essence of ours is this crazy simplicity; it almost defies all the rhetoric we’ve collectively created around worship. Instead it’s this real simple relationship. A Vineyard focus is that you love God, you love your family, and you love your church. Then the worship comes out of those relationships.

Something that’s interesting is because of information overload, because of the whole worship industry now, young worship leaders have this idea of what it means to be “successful” that the older leaders never had. When I started in 1982 or ’83, we’d hear a new song and we didn’t know who wrote it. There were no names on things, no struggling to make the right connections with people, no pressures like that. No Facebook. It was simpler.

I recognized that musical ability is a gift, but if I spend it on me, it’s useless and invalid. If I spend it on God and give it back to God, only then can the gift be fulfilled for the purpose that it was given in the first place. This is important to pass down to the young worship leaders that may or may not fully grasp this idea: that the gift is for giving, not for receiving. Of course, some of us receive things, but the culture can often get in the way of the simple exchange — the simplicity in the music, the giving of the gift to God and others.

It’s not that the songs need to be simple in their construction; it’s that the relationship is simple. That’s important.

Over the last 30 years, how have you maintained that sense of simplicity while watching the music industry, even the worship industry, change? How did you resist getting sucked into distractions?

I think we did get sucked into it for awhile there, for better or worse. We were the top dogs into the field for a time, and we got sucked in. As the digital music industry exploded and then after John Wimber passed away, we realized we actually didn’t have the exposure that we thought we had. We really didn’t have a way to compete as the industry changed and larger players took hold.

Since we realized a few years back that we couldn’t compete anymore from a market share perspective, we decided to simply document the music coming out of our church and try to win our own family back. If we can at least get the Vineyard people to sing our songs, we’ll be doing really well.

As I’ve been traveling over the last several years, we’ve seen this undercurrent of relationship occurring between worship leaders over the internet and during conferences. They’re sharing their hearts, sharing their songs. The worship community within our movement in the U.S. is better than I’ve ever seen it, and I’ve been at it over 30 years. It’s stronger, healthier, more loving, more a sense of moving in the same direction than I’ve ever seen.

So on the one hand, we’ve sort of crashed and burned on the market scene. Maybe we’re the “has-beens” of worship music. But, on the other hand, we have this internal community that is growing. The ground is so fertile right now.

From my standpoint, I think God is on the move in the Vineyard. There’s something richer and deeper than controlling the market or ruling the airwaves. The intimacy is here, and it’s growing.

Over the years in my experience, my relationship with God grows. But it’s up and down, and that’s reflected in worship. Worship is hard. Sometimes you go to sing and worship, but you don’t feel it. To what degree do you just “do it anyway”? How do you battle that idea of being disingenuous or going through the motions, especially as a worship leader?

That’s a really tough question. I’m 57, going on 58. I’ve been playing guitar since I was 8, so I can play worship songs without even thinking about it. I could be thinking about my lawn mower and playing a worship song. Even now, in a worship set, I’ll have a moment where I’m totally engaged, and then I’ll have a moment where I’m thinking about my lawn mower. I have to check myself.

If you think about it from a pastoring perspective, there’s the preparation, the research, the praying, the writing, practicing the delivery. Then you go and you give the sermon. The same is true for the worship leader. On the one hand, yes, you are worshipping, but on the other, you are serving. You are serving the body. You are helping them worship. Maybe I’ve rationalized my role to excuse myself in some cases, but I think it’s true. I’m doing it for them. Sometimes it gets old, sometimes it gets repetitious, but God is faithful.

I remember years ago when we first started, Marie would step out and sing spontaneous songs in church. She was really good at it. And I remember afterward she would say to me, “What did you think about that? Do you think it was God? Did I do okay? Should I have done that?” This went on for a while.

I remember one Sunday afternoon when she asked me that, I said, “You can’t ask me that again. It’s an offering. You take it to the altar, you leave it there, and you walk away. From there it’s up to God to deal with it.”

As a worship leader, we present ourselves the best way we can. It’s different in every church. I’ve been in churches where they play for 45 minutes and others where they have the standard 22-minute set. God is big enough to work in any case. I like the longer set myself because it gives me a chance to enter in.

The hard thing as a worship leader is that when you’re in the congregation, you hear everything. You hear if a snare is late. You hear if a guitar messes up. The hardest thing is to get that out of your mind. Over the years though, I’ve learned that when I can’t connect, I’ve had to learn to not sweat it.

It goes back to the idea you said before about simplicity, that it’s about God. It’s not about your emotions.

That’s the key. It’s not, “I don’t feel like I worshipped. Everyone else had their hands up.” I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten done with a worship set and thought it was just awful, but then had someone come up to me and tell me God showed up and spoke to them. It totally reveals the truth: that it’s all about the Holy Spirit, and we are just going along with it.

Sermons are the same way.

Amen. You can think what you want to think, that you just went through a message and sounded horrible, but it connects.

Artists are a unique group of people. How do leaders that aren’t worship leaders love them really well? How should other leaders help their artistic colleagues grow?

We’re often some of the most insecure people on the planet! We always want affirmation, but I would say giving us the affirmation to appease us isn’t the answer. The answer pastorally is to help us get to a place where we don’t need the affirmation.

It took me a long time, a lot of years, to get to a place where I didn’t need affirmation. And I’m still working on it! For a songwriter that pours his or her heart into writing a song, if you don’t like that song, then they will process that as, “You don’t like me.” That’s hard to work through, to separate yourself from your work when it’s that intimate.

Generally, as worship leaders, we really want to please our pastors. We want to do what they want, for the affirmation but also because we don’t want to get in trouble. If the clock goes over a few minutes on Sunday, there might be trouble come staff meeting time. Sometimes senior pastors will project their anxieties, worries or insecurities onto their staff, including the worship leader. I’ve seen this blow up many times. Someone will leave, and then the next blow-out will happen, and it’s a saga of destruction.

As worship leaders, we understand our junk, our shortcomings, our anxieties. And pastors understand their own junk too. Ideally they can all just get to a place together where they say, “We’re here to do this thing together. We have different gifts. Sometimes the gifts match perfectly, and sometimes they are oil and water.” It’s a relational thing that has to be worked through