band leader Stage analysis

Biblical Gift Stewardship involves honest analysis of where our gift(s) are currently developed and where our Next Steps in this process are to be found. From there we can form a plan about what aspects of our service we will focus on and in what order.

There are 2 goals for Band Leading:

  1. Personal Stewardship of Band Leading Gifts

  2. Providing Band Leading for Services

This survey will seek to ask questions about a broad range of aspects of personal gift stewardship and specific band leading skills. We are all on journey of gift discovery, development and stewardship in community.

We want to use it to serve you by identifying where your gifts are currently developed, support you in sustainable growth and to help you flourish as part of the Body of Christ.

Our gifts are not our identity. We can hold our gifts carefully as stewards while remembering that our value is as forgiven children of God, saved by Grace, not our works of service.

This survey is about both your current instrument specific gifting, and band leading gifts. This is because strong instrument specific skills help facilitate the development of band leading gifts. Often strengthening your instrumental skills enables your band leading to strengthen too.

Band Leading gifts include musical aspects, people oriented aspects, and spiritual aspects. These areas for development can develop simultaneously, separately and interactively. They often ‘build’ one on another in music ministry, with musical gifts developing first, then skills at leading others, and then into the ability to engage more and more with God. As your musical and personal gifts grow they tend to require less ‘brain space’ (as the skills are more internalised), and this in turn can provide capacity to give appropriate focus towards engaging with God while remaining aware of the community we are leading to authentically engage with God and each other.

But development does not always break down into such clear stages, so you may find your development pathway varies from the generalised Stages below. This is fine - please remember that the survey is simply a tool for conversations and more clearly identifiable areas to provide encouragement and training. Our gift stewardship, like our relationship with God, is based on Grace, and we don’t base our worth on our gifts levels or our service, but rather in being forgiven, adopted and loved children of God through Jesus.

With all that said, this survey assumes that stages of music ministry gift development often grow in this order:

PERSONAL GIFT DEVELOPMENT

  • Personal Gift Development - focus on own personal instrument/voice skills development

    and then,

    BAND LEADING DEVELOPMENT in STAGES

  • STAGE A - Primary Focus - Musical Preparation and Direction

  • STAGE B - Growing Focus on People, Culture and Developing Others

  • STAGE C - Focus on Engaging with God, Forming Others, Multiplying Leaders

These stages are closely related to 2 basic goals of Band Leading:

  1. Personal Stewardship of Band Leader gifts

  2. Providing Band Leading in Services

Goal 2 has three broad foci:

  • Music/Song Focus

  • People Focus

  • God and Leadership Development Focus