Anju Ebanks

Last week I led worship in a lovely church in Battersea.  The congregation were lovely and there was a real sense of community.  I was leading worship and John Ryeland was speaking so the emphasis was healing, healing and more healing. 

As I led worship, you could feel, hear and sense the power with which the Holy Spirit was ministering to members of the congregation.  It is such a privilege to be involved with worship in this way.

John spoke really well, he is very funny and has a wonderful ability to win over his listeners, in fact I think he has us all eating out of his hand very quickly.  John and I have been exploring prophetic singing, he says lets sing about this and I say ok (I really appreciate his direction).  Once John had taught us about healing he invited me to sing prophetically, the team moved around ministering to people. 

The congregation were clearly moved and many of them received healing from the Lord.  We listened to many testimonies about what the Lord had done.  One lady said that she had met so powerfully with the Lord that she knew she would never be the same again,  another lady said that she had felt full of fear but no longer felt fearful and that the Lord had calmed her fears and another lady said that she felt the Lord had healed a long term condition that she had been suffering from.

In the words of my pastors woo hoo!

I like your comments, it raises for me the whole question of preparation for worship.  In most churches the time spent in worship, is actually similar to, if not longer than the time given to the teaching.  We probably expect our teachers to have spent time in preparation, both in prayer and at their desks.  Given the importance we place on worship, is it unreasonable to expect those who lead worship to be giving any less time to their particular calling?  Of course, every worship leader wants to reserve the right to flow into spontaneity, but I wonder if it is actually the hard work of preparation and the skills that we learn and practice that actually release a whole new breadth of expressive abilities that can be drawn upon in the times of spontaneity.

John Ryeland, Director, The Christian Healing Mission

I worked with an amazing band for this conference. I had prepped for the conference weeks in advance and had sent out intial set lists along with my thoughts about arrangements etc. By doing this I gave the band lots of time to listen to their parts and do their own preparation, which they did.

Once I had chord charts I sent them out too. We only had one rehearsal, we had twenty songs to run, so it could have been quite a pressured time.

The band had all done their homework, they had listened to the songs and taken note of the things I had communicated to them. They were aware of their parts even with songs that they had never played and because of their professionalism the rehearsal was very productive. There were no points at which we had to stop to work out parts etc we generally top and tailed the songs and worked on links.

Finally, I had made sure that I had a set of chord charts for every song for the rehearsal, this makes everyones life easier, as everyone can make notes on their copies and we all have a general structure for each song.

The conference was a complete success, everybody loved the band.

1. Prepare well in advance (you can modify set lists as you go)
2. Decide on keys
3. List reference songs for the band to listen to
4. Make notes next to each song on the list
3. Have final set lists and charts for every member of the band for the rehearsal