31 Days of Worship - Planning Helps

This week, I want to share with you how we as a church get ready for our worship services each week. This is by no means an in depth look, because I don't have an in depth knowledge of everything the music department (at our church we call it the magnification department) does.

But if you help with your worship services, maybe something I share will help you get more streamlined in how you prepare, saving you time, and in some cases, your sanity. Heh.

The first website I would recommend is Planning Center (I apologize for the small size of these screen shots...they are as big as I could get them). I don't think we could function as a worship team without it...at least not as fluidly as we do now. I can't tell you all you'll be able to do on Planning Center because honestly, I don't know. What I do know is you will be able to list the songs you do with the arrangements, lyrics, keys, when you've done them in the past, any notes on them (like "Key of G on cd but we do key of E"), and a ton more stuff. Everything you need to know about that song can be loaded onto Planning Center. Then, once you have the songs loaded into your library, you can choose them for each service and make notes on that particular service like, "Jae leads," or, "Jodi and Cindy duet."Once you get your songs loaded, you can then add the people who will be involved with this service. I get an email each time I'm asked to serve and it lets me accept or decline that particular day.This way the administrators know exactly who will be available. Once you accept or decline, the administrator (in our case, Fay) gets a notification. If you've declined it will give you the opportunity to tell why (I had to decline for Christmas morning because I'm going to my sister's...Fay knew the minute she got the notification email so she can plan to replace me).

There is so much more to Planning Center than I'm sharing here because there is just SO MUCH on there. My advice if you are interested is to go to their video tutorial page to learn more.

Frequency Worship is another planning site that has chord charts, instructional videos of top worship songs, and a blog that has articles relevant to today's worship leaders (it was created by Chris Tomlin, so I KNOW it's good. hee hee. CT is one of my all time favorite worship leaders). Song Discovery is another website that has new songs, free downloads, helpful articles, and more.

I encourage you to explore these websites if you want to make the building of your worship services more streamlined. If you want to know what all is out there for today's worship leader, they will be invaluable to you.

If you've never used anything like this before, just do some research and see if they might be of help to you or your church.