Dear Pastor,

It is obvious to most of us that you enjoy leading the congregational worship time.  You put a lot of effort into learning new songs, and rehearsing with the band.  The PA sounds really good with those new subwoofers, by the way.  The light show is dazzling, and the fog machine was a real nice touch.  Your guitar solo’s are really smoking too!   I want you to know that we do appreciate you and all you do for us.  Most of us pray for you on a regular basis.

On Sunday mornings, you are always excited to lead us.  It must be a bit of a shock to you that most of us are not as excited about singing as you are.  You probably can’t see us, because of the bright lights in your eyes, but I sit in the back row. I often look around to observe the congregation and usually most of us are not singing.  But it isn’t because we don’t like you or God, or because you can’t sing very good.  Far from it.  We do love God and you are a fantastic musician!  A couple of us were discussing this lack of singing yesterday, and we thought you might want to know why this happens.  Just in case you do, I would like to share our thoughts with you.

First, we are not very good singers, and actually we don’t normally spend a lot of time doing it.  Don’t get us wrong, we don’t mind singing to the Lord!  It is just that it is hard for us to sing for 35-45 minutes.  The only time we do, is on Sunday’s.  Perhaps if you only had us sing for a shorter time, we would do better.

Secondly, a lot of the songs we sing don’t really make sense.   I am sure you read the lyrics of these songs and they must make sense to you.  But we don’t have an extensive background in the language of worship arts, so many of these songs are hard for us to understand.  When you combine this with the fact we are not naturally the singing type, you might understand better why we don’t sing as much as you.

Third, sometimes it seems like we are being entertained, even though this is probably not your aim.  It does feel like we are at a concert, with all the lights, fog and the killer sound system.  The worship band acts very similar to the bands we see at a concert.  We don’t normally sing when we go see Brad Paisley or Aerosmith.  Why would we sing at your concert?   Perhaps subconsciously we feel like we are at a concert and not a worship service so we act accordingly?  That is just an uneducated guess.

Maybe if we had other elements in our worship service like communion or corporate prayer or a public reading of scripture, it might help us realize we are at a worship service.  I know we don’t want to have a cross in the building because it may offend the non-Christians who might come, but it could help set the tone for those of us who are present and are already believers.  This is just a suggestion on our part, but if you designed the service for the Christ followers who are actually there, I think we might see more participation.

Well, there you have it.  Thanks for listening to my thoughts pastor.  A few others may add their thoughts on this subject in our comment section.   I hope you find this helpful.

Sincerely,

The Congregation