FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is the Antioch Worship Leadership Podcast?

The Antioch Podcast’s tagline is “Leading Worship Diversely Together”, which is a great way to summarize the topics our podcast covers. This is a podcast of conversations about:

• Worship Leadership (e.g. worship leading skills, leadership development, theology of worship etc.)
• The Unique Aspects of Worship Leadership in Ethnically-Diverse Congregations (e.g. non-expert stance, new standards of excellence, musical homes, inclusive decision-making power etc.)
• Ethnic Diversity Within the Church (e.g. history of racism, histories and personal stories, building common origin-stories of the church)
• Worshiping Together as One Diverse Body (e.g. discussions of current songs, music, art forms etc. which are relevant to ethnically-diverse congregations)
• Congregational Unity Forged Through a Commitment to Biblical Justice (e.g. The core belief that if one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers with it.)

Who is on the podcast?

There are two kinds of podcast interviews that we create:

• Cast Interviews. A circle of regular “cast members” composed of worship leaders from the Madison Church campuses regularly gather around the microphones to discuss topics related to worship leadership. You might want to think of these episodes as “One Topic: Many Speakers.”
• Expert Interviews. We also record interviews with various writers, thinkers, theologians and worship leaders from both inside and outside of Madison Church whose thoughts, ideas, and wisdom has relevance with worship leaders in ethnically diverse congregations. You may think of these interviews as “One Speaker: Many Topics.”

Who is your target audience for the podcast?

There are two audiences we have in mind for every podcast. The primary audience is worship leaders at Madison Church. This podcast was initially created to help both novice and experienced worship leaders share their “best practices” for leading worship in the ethnically diverse congregations that make up Madison Church. The secondary audience, which is considerably larger, are other worship leaders outside of Madison Church who similarly want to grow in their skill and knowledge of how to lead worship well in their ethnically-diverse congregations as well.

Why have a podcast for worship leaders in ethnically diverse congregations? Isn’t worship leadership the same everywhere?

Every congregation certainly is unique, and knowing your congregation is an important part of tailoring worship designs to help each congregation uniquely experience and understand God more fully. However, many mono-ethnic congregations have shared understandings about what “excellence” is because of their shared cultural values. In multi-ethnic congregations, there are not as many shared cultural norms around appropriate use of time, volume of music, style of music, language of worship, ways of making decisions, interaction styles with authority figures, conflict resolution, what “following the Holy Spirit” means, uses of prayer, disclosure of personal information, and history of interactions with dominant ethnic groups … among others. Because there is not a common standard of excellence, worship leaders in diverse church settings need to develop skill sets that goes beyond what any worship leadership conference or training does when it comes from a mono-ethnic viewpoint. Most of the materials available on worship do so from a white-normative viewpoint, which is not generally applicable in a multi-ethnic setting.