For the past year, I have been assisting the Worship Team at my church with logistics, scheduling, and team management. In essence, I'm an interim-band director as we are currently without a dedicated Worship Leader or Worship Pastor.
For most services, and most special events, we can pull a full or half band together without much issue. We always have a vocalist or two and enough instrumentalists to fill out the set (we also use tracks, so instrumentally we can always fill it out more). However, Good Friday was looking like no one would be available except for me and our primary drummer.
In a bit of a panic, I personally reached out to everyone on our team to check if they really "weren't available" or just needed a service off. I was coming up a bit short (it didn't help that most of our team was already scheduled for Easter).
Luckily, after a bit of begging, I was able to get one of our talented multi-instrumental and vocal members to join me (thank you, Kenny!!). However, he was also going to be leading most of the Easter set (two services on Sunday, two songs for him each service), and didn't want to over work him, either. We wanted to run Good Friday as a worship music-style set, so we compromised and split the set in half.
I have never, ever, sang any sort of lead vocal in front of our church congregation (and until recently, not really even in other settings); there were only two other times I had a mic to be "backup" (i.e. mixed below being audible). I mean, the usual setup for vocalists is to spend a couple months on backup before leading one or two songs and then finally getting in the usual rotation. However, I felt the push that this needed to be done; God likes to push us out of comfort zones, right?
So Good Friday comes around, we do our pre-service run-through, it's the three guys on stage with our two Pastors coming in-and-out for the occasional scripture reading and to lead communion; our run-through went well.
Service starts, and I just let it all go. I give everything I have to God, and let the Spirit take over whenever and wherever. Was I the next breakthrough worship vocalist? Hardly. Did the Spirit move through the congregation and ignite a night of worship? Definitely and without-a-doubt.
There was even a moment where I asked the entire congregation to break their own comfort zones, and just lift their hands to worship our Lord and Savior. Hands went up so fast, anyone in that room could tell the Spirit was breaking barriers. (As an aside, that may have caused my adrenaline to spike and I totally could not find the melody of the final chorus of our last song :P).
My point on sharing this is that God can use us in ways that we might not expect, or honestly, might be fearful of without His help. Walls will be knocked down, chains will be broken, and we will have the power of God pushing us through when we are willing to put our pride, fear, or whatever else is blocking us, and carry out His will.
Does it always have to be on a microphone? No. That just happened to be my wall that had to be kicked down.
Maybe it's something different for you.
Note: I originally shared a version of this on a Facebook group I'm a part of. If you're a worship leader in any capacity, I highly recommend checking it out: Worship Leaders + on Facebook.