Expanding Worship Lab: A New Phase for the Youth Worship Ministry Resourcing and Training
Starting from a simple idea suggested during a routine board meeting, the faculty and students of Baylor's Church Music Program launched Worship Lab in 2015 as a summer camp for high school students to gain the skills necessary to lead their congregations in worship. After three successful years of hosting the event, the team at Baylor was given an opportunity to join a cohort of university's and other organizations that were partnering to create new youth initiatives through a coordinated grant funded effort. Since 2019, this expanded funding has allowed more students to attend each summer and has throughout the years brought teams of Baylor students and staff into local churches to host workshops and converse with high school students. The project's main focus has been to equip and empower young people to live and lead fuller lives through ministry leadership.
Fast-forward to today and the Dunn Center has been awarded a second grant to continue exploring youth participation in worship in the local church. During this new project, the research team is working to assess and develop youth leadership models that when applied fully or in smaller, appropriate contexts, will increase the overall productivity and longevity of youth worship teams. The CCMS project is titled the Worship Lab Initiative (WLI) and seeks to identify and introduce scalable worship leadership models into the local church through observations, assessment, and implementation.
How does this new Worship Lab Initiative expand on the Building Bridges to the Future project?
The previous grant focused on getting students to Worship Lab in the summer. While we learned about their local contexts on the last grant, our new grant expands our focus to the local church. The Worship Lab Initiative is a project still designed to equip students at our Worship Lab Summer Camp but also endeavors to learn about local church contexts to create youth worship ministry models that can be used in various contexts.
What are the dreams you all have for the newly visioned church partnerships?
These new partnerships involve a more profound commitment from our team at Baylor. Our WLI team visits regularly with our church partners. With our model partners, we are learning about what makes their ministry work in order to package it with scalable elements for use in other churches. With our growth partners, we are learning about their strengths and areas of growth to identify which model's elements would help them thrive. While we have seen and gotten to know our partner church's students, we will now see them more regularly and create more meaningful relationships with those churches. The Baylor Dunn CCMS will become a place that is recognized not just for its excellence in research but also for its care for people, specifically youth.
How do you anticipate shaping your observations into working models?
Our observations help us understand what is working well in our model partner churches. We are identifying various aspects of the structure, including who is given leadership, what rehearsals look like, and what students are encouraged to do while leading. We currently have four model church partners who all engage with their youth in different ways. Having four different models gives us more options when discerning with our growth partners which model would best suit their context.
How are Baylor Church Music students involved in the research?
We have two graduate associates who are working on the project: Kyle Berry and Madison Emmons. The four team members, including Chason Disheroon and Dr. Shannan Baker, visit regularly with our church partners to observe and learn. Our students are gaining experience in research skills and critical thinking when consolidating their observations into an understandable format for Dr. Baker to read later. In addition to the two graduate students on the project, many students are involved with leading our Worship Lab Summer camp. Many of these students are in our new worship ensemble, the 40 Collective. These students gain knowledge and skills throughout the year that they can apply when being camp counselors in the summer.
There is still much to be learned and observed through local student ministries and the team at Baylor is eagerly and enthusiastically engaged to pursue this research to produce meaningful resources that support students, youth leaders, and their churches.