Musings On Worship Part 2: Resilience

Musings On Worship Part 2: Resilience

Catch-up on my endless musings on worship by reading the first post in this series here.

A worship team is quite a dynamic space both as an opportunity for leadership and as a reality for family. It is a very diverse kind of a team.

Considering that each team has "high" moments when everything seems to be working and "low" moments when so many things seem not to be working, resilience is one of those things every team needs to keep moving forward.

Resilience is that ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes. (Psychology Today.)

Bouncing back from bad experiences or moments in worship or failures in team activities may be what will make the difference between a successful team and a failing one. It may also be what determines whether a team maintains momentum or loses it. This is because - someone has said somewhere - life is mostly not about how we fall but about how we recover.

Here are my few observations on how resilience affects a team:

1. Resilience and tolerance go hand in hand 
Teams need community for growth, because teams - in and of themselves - are community; and wherever there is a community, conflict will be present. A resilient team is able to culture an environment where resolving conflict between its members as a community or as part of a community is simple and fast. Learning tolerating each other as members of a team in our diverse capabilities means being able to easily bear with one another, judging each other less and praying for one another more. (...with all humility and gentleness, with patience bearing with one another in love - Ephesians 4:2.)

2. Resilience helps in balancing between celebration and mourning 
The apostle James writes, Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise (James 5:13.) 
Practising resilience will help a team know how to celebrate its successes in moderation and pray over its mistakes more. This helps maintain a balance of emotions in the team.

3. Resilience helps keep team activities consistent
If people mourn too much after failure, they may end up forgetting doing what should be done for team growth. If the team keeps revisiting mistakes and failures without planning a way forward, ability to move forward and become better is limited. A resilient team understands that there is time for correcting mistakes and there should always be time to move on from the mistakes and keep track of its vision and goals. Goals can never be achieved if a team keeps revisiting its mistakes without meaningfully forging ahead.

4. A resilient team owns its mistakes 
One key advantage of resilience is self-evaluation and self-actualisation. A resilient team always says, "We know our mistakes, we can name them, but we are not giving up; we are moving on"
If a team is able to own its mistakes in its musicality, activities, social matters and spiritual aptness, it can remove from its eyes that cloud of gossip, false accusations and blaming one another and instead use that opportunity to move forward. It knows that one failure is not total failure but a chance to not repeat the same mistakes again. 

5. A resilient team depends more on the character and promises of God than on itself.
Psalms 121:1-2 says, "I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth."
The focus of a resilient team is looking unto God and what He says: looking to Him and looking ahead. Because vision and what a team focuses on are very critical to success, this team decides not to put its hope in strategy or experience or the skill of its members but on the Power of the Spirit of God. This helps it move further from the limited vision of man to seeing the big picture as God sees it.

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May the Lord help us build resilient teams for the glory of His Name.


Bonface Morris.