Eclectic Christian

As an eclectic Christian, I have learned to appreciate several different types of worship. Admittedly most of my exposure has been in the Protestant stream of Christianity, but I still learned to enjoy what I would categorize as Classical, Traditional, and Contemporary worship.

It has also been my privilege to lead worship in a variety of churches, denominations, and para-church settings. I have been doing this for most of the last 27 years. One of the things that I find most important in doing what we do at church, is having a commitment to quality. The things that we are doing we are doing “to the glory of God”. God expects us to do our best at the tasks that he has given us.

For me, this commitment to quality means that on the Sundays that I am leading worship, many hours of preparation would have gone into planning in the previous week. Here is how the breakdown looks.

Day 1.
Step 1:My wife and I will start with the sermon topic for the following Sunday’s sermon. We will usually brainstorm separately on the topic, thinking of both songs (older and contemporary) as well as scripture that will fit the topic. Time taken – About 1 hour.

Day 2.
Step 2: We combine our lists, adding any songs that may have come to us over the last 24 hours. This will generally give us a list of about 20 songs. Time taken – Five minutes

Step 3: We whittle out those that we are not comfortable with musically, or quite frankly not interested in singing – Time taken 10 minutes.

Step 4: From the remaining songs, we further reduce the number by looking and seeing which songs flow together. We try to be comfortable with the flow both thematically, musically, and tempo wise. We also try to have a variety of periods represented within our songs. If we are doing eight songs songs, then we might have two that are fairly new, three which are very familiar (but written within the last 10 years) one contemporary song that is older than 10 years, and a couple of hymns.
Time taken 1.5 hours.

Step 5: My wife and I would then practice together (i.e. without the worship team) until we were very comfortable with the music (Especially how the songs would be introduced musically or verbally, how the song would end, transitions or chord changes in the songs, number of times through a song, transitions between songs)
Time taken 1.5 hours.

Day 3.
Step 6: We would then need to pull the lyrics for the musicians and the lyrics for singers. Any missing music or lyrics would have to be created and/or photocopied.
Time taken 15-30 minutes.

Step 7: At this point we would be ready to take our music to the worship team for a practice. Typically it would take about 1.5 hours with the worship team before everyone was comfortable with what we were doing. We would always have an extra song or two on standby in case a song just wasn’t working.
Time taken 1.5 hours

Step 8: The power-point presentation for Sunday’s music would be created. Typical time would be 30 minutes to one hour. Software programs such as easy-worship or Song Select can really help in this step as well as step 6.
Time taken 30 minutes to 1 hour.

Day 4.
Step 9: Sunday morning we would have another half hour run through with the entire worship team, and then we would be ready to play.
Time taken 30 minutes.

Day 5.
Step 10: Some churches will do a short 30 minute post service evaluation as to what worked well and what did not.
Time taken 0 to 30 minutes.

Total time taken over the week to prepare for worship: Roughly seven to eight hours.

Of course I have also had those days where the power goes out, or the computer dies, or the new a/v system doesn’t work. That is when you grab for the nearest hymn book and say, OK, what can I come up with in the next 15 minutes!

Any other worship leaders out there reading this? What has been your experience?

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 12:47 am and is filed under music, Uncategorized, worship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.