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All over the world it seems there are millions of small churches who have a praise and worship leader who is struggling to try and get their Sunday service worship happening. I get e-mails almost every day asking me for a device, tips and techniques that can help praise and worship leading in a small church situation. Many of these small churches don’t even have instruments, so if you are a praise and worship leader and a small church with little or no instruments, this article is for you.

Let me say from the outset that I do not view a small church as an inferior or less anointed example of what large churches are doing. In fact, I believe that a small church offers the unique opportunity to the praise and worship leader to build something beautiful and gentle, an opportunity which almost completely eludes the large church with the glitzy praise and worship leader and professional band!

For calling other pros and worship leader is to lead their congregations to a deeper and more real presence of the Lord. If you have no instruments available in your church, then you have a golden opportunity to use locals to achieve this end, rather than instrumentation. So if you have no competent musicians within your church, why not consider a vocal arrangement in parts and in harmonies, because my experience with vocal only arrangements is that they can be exploring the moving and quite haunting in their beauty. With just one or two voices you can create a wonderful atmosphere within your church, but by gently leading the people and making your vocalists sing words and phrases that are counter melodies, so that they are not singing the same as the congregation, you can create a masterpiece with just vocals.

Praise and worship leading is easy when you have a band of competent musicians behind you, and when you have world-class singers to support you, but true pros and worship leader called of God and anointed for the purpose can work with what ever is presented! Remember, your calling is not to produce wonderful music or record great albums, but your calling is to lead your people into a deeper experience of God in worship. Whether you have instruments, vocals, drums or whatever, your task as a praise and worship leader is to create the right atmosphere and to lead the people closer to God.

However, modern congregations being what they are, there is a clear advantage to having competent and adequate musicians to support your Praise and Worship Leading,. If you are at a small church and have the blessing of competent musicians and singers, and even in a small congregation you should be up to lead people into a wonderful presence of the Lord. If your congregation is small, my suggestion would be that you go for an acoustic, unplugged sound, so that you are not blasting the 20 or 30 people you have with massive amounts of rock music sound! I recommend keeping it simple, keeping it gentle, and keeping it real using acoustic instruments rather than overproduced, synthesized sound.

If you are without instruments, one of the best thing she can do is to teach yourself guitar. I have reviewed some of the guitar teachings available on the Internet, because this is the quickest, easiest and most enjoyable way to learn guitar. Even if you only learn 4 or 5 chords, that should be enough to lead powerful worship in your church and make you into the praise and worship leader you long to be.