Flogging a dead horse
How long do you stick with a new song before admitting it just doesn’t work?
Every Sunday at i61 the focus of our meeting is on the person there for the first time, it’s our outreach. We teach those who come to i61 (at i61 Discovery - see SteveO if you haven’t done it yet!) that Sundays are not for us, Sundays are for people who don’t know Jesus.
Because of this there are lots of amazing songs, some of my absolute favourites, that I just can’t do on a Sunday because they won’t work. I know they won’t work so I don’t even go there.
But, sometimes I come across a song that just seems so perfect, so amazingly right for our meeting, and it has a wonderful catchy chorus that I can’t get out of my head so I just know that it’s going to become a firm favourite and we’ll sing it week after week and no one will ever get bored of it.
Then we introduce it on a Sunday and it bombs. I don’t know what it is, but it just doesn’t connect.
What should we do? Should we stick with it for a while, it takes a while for a song to get into people, to grip them, right? Or is it possible to know straight away that it’s just not going to work and to stop flogging a dead horse and let the song die quietly as it gets lost in the songbook, destined to become that song that just gets skipped over week after week until eventually it’s dumped from the file altogether.
What do you do? If a song doesn’t work do you stick with it, or do you let it go immediately. Sometimes I keep going, but then when I finally accept the fact it doesn’t work I look at why I stuck with it so long and realise it’s probably a vanity thing, I found the song, I taught it to everyone, I love it and if I play it enough times I can make everyone else love it just as much as me!
What about you? I would love to hear from all you other worship leaders out there. Do you flog a dead horse or do you put it out to pasture in good time?
