WORSHIP TEAM
PLAN BETTER SERVICES IN LESS TIME | Jon Nicol
Picture this. A brand new, 20-something and the demands of the team don’t allow you worship ministry systems in this column.
worship leader, sitting in his freshly (and ever to spend hours on planning services. Whether Systems, simply put, are your or your team’s
so “hipsterishly”) decorated office, planning his you’re full-time, part-time, or volunteer, the way of getting something done. The way you
first Sunday worship service for the church who requirements of your week-after-week ministry plan your worship services is a system. And like
obviously recognizes mad talent when they eat up much of your discretionary time. It any system, we can make it better and more
see it. becomes just another “get-it-done” thing. efficient.
Taylor 314 in hand…
Planning Center Online open on
his Macbook…
Essential oil diffuser wafting it’s light,
So I want to give you five tactics that will help
Whether you’re
TACTIC #1:
full-time,
USE SERVICE & SET TEMPLATES
fragrant steam… part-time, or
His song list pulled up in Google Docs… volunteer, the
His Bible and journal sitting just to the left
of his Venti Caramel Macchiato
from Starbucks…
…mmmm, perfect.
He’ll spend the rest of the afternoon (and most
of the next day) meticulously crafting the kind of
worship set that will probably later be described
as “life-changing.” Nay, Kingdom-altering.
Yeah, so you and I both know how this ends.
Sometime, probably from six to nine weeks,
this young gun will be smacked with the reality
you plan your services better and in less time.
You probably already do this and don’t realize
it. As stewards of the weekly worship service,
we don’t have the congregation’s best interest
at heart when we randomly change up our
requirements
service order every week. So create one or two
templates of your standard service orders. You
of your week-
can even create those in PCO Services, so it’s
all laid out for you next time you plan.
after-week
ministry eat up
much of your
And while we don’t have space for details
here, the flow of your song sets probably
follow a similar pattern week-to-week. Planning
from scratch takes a lot of time. So consider
determining one or two templates for your song
discretionary sets to expedite planning.
time. TACTIC #2:
BATCH PROCESSING
that being a full-time worship leader is about
9% planning, 4% platform, and 87% trying to I talked about this concept in a previous article
hold the rest of the ministry together. so I won’t say much about it other than this:
So what do we do? Phone it in? Slap it planning four sets of music at one time takes
I remember those very early days of ministry together? less time than planning one set of music four
when ignorance afforded me the luxury of account and swipe their latest set? Or do we extensive worship service planning. And then I neglect other stuff? Like personal practice, fast forward to see myself plagiarizing my own team development, staff meetings, getting And there’s a crucial advantage besides saving
set list from two months prior. charts in the right key, and on and on. time: You get the music out to your team
Look
at
Elevation’s
Instagram
different times.
members sooner.
You’re probably at a place where your schedule For the last few months, I’ve focused on
114 August 2018
WorshipMusician.com