What is Your Goal as a Church Piano Player?

“Our ultimate goal, as church piano players, is to use our gift of playing music, to help facilitate worship that is pleasing to God”

So what are your goals as a church piano player?

This will be different for each of us, but there will also be many goals that are common to all church piano players. These would be things like being able to play to a higher level, playing with greater expression, learning how to embellish songs creatively, developing better technique and style, or simply serving your church in a significant and fruitful way.

The Goal Above All Goals

None of these goals are bad. However, let me take a moment to remind us all of the goal above all goals, in our role as church piano players. You’ve probably guessed it already, but here goes…

Our ultimate goal, as church piano players, is to use our gift of playing music, to help facilitate worship that is pleasing to God.

This means worship that is conducted in spirit and in truth, in a way that encourages His people to meet with Him, in a way that motivates His people to lift their voices in joyful praise, in a way that teaches them of His goodness and greatness, and in a way that helps them to have well-prepared hearts to listen and respond to the preaching of God’s Word.

That is what it really means, to “play better and bless your church”, which is the aim of all my online courses for church piano players.

Listen to those words again, and let them really sink in: Our ultimate goal, as church piano players, is to use our gift of playing music, to help facilitate worship that is pleasing to God.

Asking the Right Questions

To put this another way, and coming from a different angle, think about all the things that people sometimes say after a worship service like, “The worship sounded great”, “I loved the third song you did”, “There were no problems with the sound system praise God”, “Everyone really seemed to be worshipping with all their hearts this morning”. All of these statements may be sincere, and valid, but let us not forget the one question that should always be on our minds, following a time of corporate worship and that is this…

“Was God pleased with our worship?”

At the end of the day, that’s all that really matters isn’t it?

The great thing is, it’s possible to please God with our worship, even if the sound system breaks down, when the words on the screen stop working, or if we don’t sing any of our favourite songs. It's important to keep these things in our minds.

As we play the piano in our church, we can sometimes consume ourselves with thoughts like “How am I doing?”, “Did I play that well enough?”, “Did people like the songs I chose?”. This can eclipse any God-focused thinking, such as, “Lord, I hope this is pleasing to you”.

So it’s certainly not about pleasing ourselves. It’s not even about the congregation being pleased or blessed on just a personal level. Rather, above all these things, all that really matters at the end of the service, is whether God was pleased with our worship.

A Principle To Reflect Upon

Let me finish this post with a practical encouragement that can help us achieve that desired goal of pleasing God in our worship. It's a principle that I came up with, to help me stay on track in my thinking as I lead worship from the piano. Here it is...

Minimum distraction = maximum (potential) worship

The idea behind this principle is that the more we remove distracting hindrances to worship (and there are many), the more people potential there is, for people to wholeheartedly engage in worship.


I put the word “potential” in there, to make the point that we can never make another person worship We can only facilitate. True worship occurs between the worshipper and God, at a heart level, as the mind is informed by God’s truth.

The distractions will be different for each context, but a few distractions we may be able to remove would be such things as: ineffective intros (causing congregation to not know when to come in), too many new/unknown songs in one set, bad timing, instrument/s too loud, instrument/s too quiet, focusing too much on playing a fancy intro, or playing in such a flamboyant way everyone is drawn to your music rather than the words of the song. I'm sure you can think of plenty more.

So let us be committed to minimizing distraction, and seeking God's pleasure above all else, as we play for and/or lead the congregation in our church in worship. I think John the Baptist would encourage us to do the same - after all, it was him who said these words...

"He must increase, but I must decrease." [John 3:30 ESV]

[Return to The Church Piano Player Website]

This blog post was written by pastor and pianist Kris Baines, from The Church Piano Player. Kris lives in the UK with his family, having recently moved back New Zealand where he worked as a pastor for the past 26 years (also leading worship/worship teams). Kris has also spent over 35 years writing, recording, and performing music and is now bringing all that combined experience together to help equip church piano/keyboard players.

Check out the church piano player website for more information on online courses by Kris Baines.

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