I have never completely understood the passage in Ezekiel 1 that describes the worship activity in heaven, but at least there is one group of familiar players in the passage. There are worship leaders (the living creatures, what an analogy for us!). They could be Choir Directors, Music ministers, Ministers of the Arts, Music Pastors, or what ever title your particular church or domination uses.

I don’t understand all the activity in this chapter, but the behavior of these ‘Worship Leaders’ has always challenged me, as we can learn from how they do what they do around the throne. There are four qualities that we can glean from the passage, and then from there go to how to cultivate those qualities in our ministry.

The first quality of a great music ministry is DIVERSITY. The living creatures had four faces…

Ezek 1:10-11
Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a man, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle.

You can’t just have one approach and be effective. Jesus calls us to be fishers of men. If you only want to catch one kind of fish, then use just one kind of bait. However, if we want to catch a lot of fish, we have to be varied in our approach, depending on the setting.

First we have to be diverse in the MINISTERS. We have a choir, but even if you have a worship team, this point applies. There is a story in the Old Testament in Genesis 30 that our Pastor has taught from for years. Jacob in the passage makes a deal with his uncle Laban to keep all the striped and speckled sheep that were born. He then creates streaked, speckled, and spotted branches (by peeling away the bark) that he places where the sheep came to drink. These sheep then had offspring that were streaked, speckled, and spotted. The point…WHAT YOUR CHURCH SEES FROM THE PLATFORM IS WHAT IT WILL BECOME!

Now, some ministries only want to be one way…in New York, there are many churches that only want one type of people, or one age of people, or one socio-ethnic stata of people. However, this is very much unlike Jesus, who loved the WHOLE world! In Queens, we have over 140 languages spoken, and it to my knowlege is the most diverse are in the United States, and only topped in the world by London and Toronto. We would not be very effective if we only were going for one type of person.

So, we need to be varied in the people we have in the ministry…we need old, young, varied races, all different, so everyone will see that who comes and be able to identify. This also means as the leader, you’ve got to be able to draw a varied group. In your area, this variance could just be age, or it could just be income level, depending, but it just can’t be everyone the same. It can be, but you will be cheating yourself out of a greater blessing.

Next time we’ll talk about a second area of diversity…the MUSIC.

Pastor Steven Carey
Music Director
Christ Tabernacle Choir