My Worship Planning Methods
My Methods
I love collaborating with others. It doesn’t matter what the project is, I just love working with other people and hearing their thoughts and seeing where they come from. This bleeds into my worship planning style as well. My duties as a worship leader at my church is to plan student worship for Wednesday nights and for our Refuge venue on Sunday mornings. Because these two environments are radically different from each other, I have to have two different approaches whenever I plan worship for each.
Wednesday Night Student Services
I love planning worship for our student services on Wednesday nights. It combines two of the things that I love doing: collaborating with people and making music. For the student services, the student pastors and I curate two song lists together (one for Junior High and one for Senior High) to determine the pool of songs that we want to do for the semester. I believe that doing song lists are an awesome thing for student services for two reasons. The first is because it helps students in the student band become more established with the songs so that they can focus more on worshiping the Lord. It also allows me as a worship leader to work on technique and musical things with them to help build them up as a musician. The second is because it helps the students in the congregation to learn the song and be able to sing out more.
From there, I work with the student pastors to develop services a week in advance that way I can send out the planning center on Thursday immediately following the Wednesday night service. Each service is a journey that we create for the students. From beginning to end there is a purpose for everything we plan. The countdown lets students know when service starts. After the countdown, the student band normally opens up with a song that is fun and upbeat to cultivate the energy in the room. Following that, either a student from Student Serve (our student leadership team) or one of the interns or pastors will come on stage to welcome everybody. After that, we do two worship songs that are more atmospheric and will conclude with a prayer. Then one of the student pastors will come and preach the message, which is then followed by an invitation song and conclusion of the service.
The whole worship process is very collaborative. The student pastors and I work extremely close together to ensure that we bring a service that is relative to the students and done with excellence!
Sunday Morning Refuge Worship Service
On Sunday mornings, I lead worship in our Refuge Venue, which is a simulcast venue with live worship. Because there isn’t a live pastor, it is harder to be collaborative. Here, my approach is radically different. I still make a song list of 20 songs, but my biggest goal with these songs are that they are able to be sung with minimal effort. Because of the nature of simulcast, it becomes hard for the people in the congregation to engage in worship. Therefore, my job as the worship leader is to do everything that I can to bring them to a place that they feel like they can worship. That is my main concern with the Refuge Service on Sunday mornings. I plan four worship songs at the beginning with one song that follow after for the invitation.
