This comes from a book called Chasing Cool, and has nothing to do with worship leaders. It’s about how DJ’s create cool environments. But it might as well be written for worship leaders…

When I think back on all the evenings I spent behind turntables in front of every sort of crowd you could imagine, I realize I had the perfect vehicle to understand the factors that move people. Imagine looking out from the booth at an empty club that’s capable of holding two thousand people. You have two hours to pack the entire floor.

The only way to succeed in this environment is to be so connected to the audience that you become a part of it. You need to feed off their energy, and they yours. You need to tease them with new music and surprise them with classics like Click Rick’s “Mona Lisa.” You need to play certain hits in their entirety and cut other songs off short to keep people engaged. And you need to appeal to the broad spectrum of tastes in ever room. Your crowd really is like a focus group – only instead of a dozen disinterested strangers, gathered together to look at color samples for twenty-five bucks and a fruit-and-cheese tray, this crowd is passionately focused on a product that really means something to them.

This has been one of the best books that I’ve read in quite some time.  No matter your place of leadership, you need to read it.