Productivity Tools? YOU?
All of you who know me are welcome to pick yourselves up off the floor now. The first two words in the title of this post are not, at first glance, connected in any way with the third. I am known for neither my productivity nor my aptitude with tools. I was accused by a previous pastor of being too lazy to spend 18 hours finding a Christmas program from the catalog, and instead spending 200 hours writing one myself. He was not far from the truth.
That said, I’m going to share with you three of the tools that are indispensable for my life in music ministry. They may seem old-school to some of you, they may seem obvious to others, but I hope that I might persuade you to consider at least one of them.
The Baptist Hymnal
Yeah. The Baptist Hymnal. For those of you over a certain age, I will wait for your collective, “Duh.” For the rest of you, I will wait for your collective *eye roll*. But seriously, if there is a resource that I use from week to week, unfailing, it is this one. Why? Because it is a collection of music, curated by faithful pastoral worshipers, arranged in categories, imbued with scripture, indexed with useful connections, and if the projectors went out, or I died, our church could function faithfully for a Sunday or ten with nary a hiccup.
If you go through the hymn book and learn every resource it has for you, from the scripture references to the metrical indexes to the responsive readings to the tune listings and well, of course, the hymns, you will be a well-rounded, able, and edified leader of God’s people in worship.
Guess what? They even have an app.
Hymnary.org
So if you already have a hymnal, why are I taking you to an online hymnal? Because I want to make sure you know about this resource. These wonderful people have undertaken to catalog every known hymnal in print, so you can find every verse ever written (or rewritten) of every hymn you can think of, and many you haven’t.
From here, if you need all eighteen stanzas of “O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing,” you can find them. If you want to find alternate tunes to existing hymns, they’re all there. Just fumbling around in there will help you think of aspects to worship music that you’ve never considered before.
You can find the first print editions of Isaac Watts’ lyrics. You can find verses of hymns that edify and strengthen your life and heart beyond what you could imagine. If you are looking for a turn of phrase to introduce a modern song in a powerful and poetic way, you can search for keywords that give you some inspirational momentum. I highly suggest this resource.
Finale
Finally, Finale. This is the old workhorse of music publishing software. I’m still running an old version (2014, I think). But I don’t know what I’d do without it. For charting lead sheets, working up choir arrangements quickly, and preparing music for publication, Finale is another of my go-to tools to get through the week as a minister of music.
Other alternatives include Sibelius and Dorico. I haven’t ever used either of them, since I’ve been on Finale since the early 2000s, and it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. But whichever you use, I heartily recommend learning how to work out your own arrangements. You can customize them to your church’s needs, and not be dependent on the chord changes you see on SongSelect.
Conclusion
So those are my three tools that keep me running through the week. I’ve obviously left out other productivity tools, such as Planning Center, Evernote, and Twitter. Find what works for you, but these three give me resources that I can’t do without.
