When your goal is to create something different and also include singing then it can sometimes mean different is confusing. As we have gone through the process of creating corporate singing / worship there are a few things we have learned as we begin to move in the direction:

1. You can’t start with a finished product. There are too many ideas, not enough resources, and too early on to have a finished product. Although it was tempting to go out and raise a salary to pay someone full time to take care of the singing and programming we wanted to resist the temptation and hopefully create a church model that is reproducible. So far our start up cost was $30K and a yearly budget of $150K.

2. Start small and grow. We didn’t want to give the impression that everything is taken care of when people walk in and people can just sit and enjoy the show. We wanted to start small and grow. Now to be fair this is tricky, but you don’t want confusion and chaos either.

3. Identify a list of songs. What I call a song bank to pull from. This can be complicated because everyone on the core team comes from different backgrounds and knows different songs and as a result you can’t satisfy everyone. We identified 15-20 songs that we thought people might know, or the majority of people might know and started teaching those songs. Instead of having new songs every week we wanted to at least identify a list of songs.

4. Songs with content. Songs are basically messages / sermons, but instead of someone talking it is someone singing. We want songs with content that teach about Jesus and His death, burial, and resurrection.

5. Transition / flow. Instead of just stopping between songs we want to add a reading of scripture, a prayer, an application, an encouragement periodically. It takes a little planning on the front end but it can help if songs transition and flow between one another.