From Performance to Participation

I joined First Baptist Church Powell as Worship Pastor in December 2019, during a senior-leadership transition. Three months later the pandemic suspended in-person gatherings and removed most of the routines the organization had relied on.

The role carried real scope, and it grew. I supervised three employees, led a volunteer system of more than 65 people, and worked with senior leadership, elders, staff, and volunteer leaders. As the work developed my role expanded from Worship Pastor to Pastor of Liturgy, adding responsibility for learning, communication, team leadership, planning, and systems.

I helped lead this change with others. The outcomes belong to that shared effort, not to me alone.

The presenting question was about worship style. I did not think that was the real one.

Watching how the gathering actually worked, I saw that attention, responsibility, and perceived value had concentrated on the stage. Over time the congregation had been positioned as an audience — not by anyone’s decision, but by an accumulation of small ones.

That changed what kind of problem this was. If the issue were preference, a new format would have solved it. If it were knowledge, teaching would have. It was neither. Expectations, roles, shared understanding, the weekly workflow, and the room itself all quietly reinforced sitting still and watching. Changing the format alone would have altered the surface and left the pattern intact.

Shared structure and expectations

With the Senior Pastor, I helped develop a stable seven-part weekly structure. It gave each week a logic independent of the sermon topic, gave leaders common language for planning, and gave everyone else a way to understand where they fit and how they could take part.

I also proposed reducing unnecessary platform emphasis and increasing meaningful forms of congregational participation. Those decisions affected real roles and real people, so I made the reasoning public rather than presenting the changes as personal preference.

Communication, coaching, and leader development

I designed communication that taught rather than announced. I used several channels and repeated the message deliberately, because people encountered the change at different moments and arrived with different questions.

Capability mattered more than information. I established recurring leadership-development meetings, structured the weekly rehearsal so practice happened close to performance, and coached staff and volunteers directly. Then I handed the teaching to other leaders. A change that depends on one interpreter has a single point of failure, and this one needed to outlast me.

Systems and environment

I standardized planning and production workflows, introduced shared tools, and moved support closer to the moment of performance, so that repeatable work stopped consuming the attention that judgment needed.

The environment turned out to matter as much as the workflow. A proposal to upgrade the sound system prompted a larger question, and I raised it: new technology in the existing room would reinforce the stage-focused pattern we were trying to change. I recommended addressing the room first, and helped carry that direction into leadership discussions, design decisions, congregational communication, and fundraising.

The most useful evidence is what continued after I left in September 2023. The shared weekly structure remained in use. Leaders and volunteers kept carrying the work. The renovation direction continued. And participants increasingly described practices like responsive readings and prayer as meaningful in themselves rather than as additions to a service.

Those observations came through continued practice and stakeholder feedback rather than a formal before-and-after study, and I would treat them as evidence of adoption rather than as measured outcomes.

What the experience gave me is a set of capabilities I still use the same way: finding the real barrier rather than the stated one, clarifying what people are actually expected to do, explaining why a change is worth making, developing leaders who can teach it without me, creating room to practice, aligning tools and workflow with the behavior, and reinforcing it long enough that other people can carry it.