Leaders, Ministry Leadership, Tech, Worship Planning
Tips and Tricks for Planning Center Online (Show #24)
#PlanningWorship (Video Below)
When we plan for worship, we are planning more than just songs. In praying for the Holy Spirit to move, it is amazing to see how God speaks into the heart of His people.
As worship leaders, how do we plan for souls instead of just planning songs? When it comes to planning services, there are many tools to help us do God’s work.
Finding the right resource to help us plan for our churches can also make all the difference in our preparation and leading. Today we will take a look at Planning Center Services for worship leaders from our good friend Chris Denning.
“Let the assembled peoples gather around you, while you sit enthroned over them on high.” Psalm 7.7 Unless you’re one of the few holdouts, you likely know the JOY and GOODNESS that is planning services with Planning Center Services. PC Services is easily the BEST tool to use to plan any of your services.
PC Services can help you do what you do better, faster, and more efficient than ever. From traditional churches, contemporary churches, bigger churches, smaller churches, and PC Services has helped them execute their services, no matter the type.
ORGANIZE EVERYTHING:
In PC Services, you can organize everything that has to do with your services. This includes multiple locations (using Folders), your volunteers, music & charts for your music team (more on this later), and ESPECIALLY your service flow.
By using Headers and creating a custom view for your plan, you can simply and clearly lay out the flow for your service so that there’s no confusion on the order, the length of parts, or even who’s leading certain parts.
One thing that will make your life better is using the details section (which will be visible to all) to dictate who is leading the song and the other vocal parts you want covered. This is also a great place to put notes for anything you need your production & music teams to notice.
TAG YOUR PEOPLE:
Using the Tags under the People tab is likely the most UNDERUTILIZED feature that will free up your time. While this does take some time on the front end, you will gain it all back and then some when you’re scheduling or fixing holes in your schedule.
Tagging your people allows you to assign your people to teams, so that Planning Center knows who’s on what teams. This allows you to easily add people to plans, rather than having to add them one by one. This is especially helpful in the Matrix view (another INCREDIBLE feature).
And when you have someone decline (and you will), tagging people will provide a list of people who are available to serve for that position. Talk about a stress reliever!
CREATE CLEAR COMMUNICATION:
The best part about PC Services is the level of clarity in communication between lots of teams it can provide. For instance, how many times has your hospitality team needed to know about a special element in a service, or maybe your Pastor has a question about one of the songs?
Pretty much all the time. By including everyone involved in a service on a plan, you give a central place for people to go for information. For reference, we include the following teams at our church: Music, Production, First Impressions (i.e. Hospitality), and Stage Personalities (i.e. Communicator, Welcome Host, Closing Host, etc). This way, anyone involved in the service has access to all the information they need!
RESOURCE YOUR TEAM:
You probably already know that you can add charts & .mp3’s to Songs so that your team can have basic resources. But what if you could take these resources to the next level? The songs tab allows you the ability to provide easy access to an unlimited number of resources for your music team. One simple hack is to use PC services native Chart Editor to create a chart one time and have it in every key.
You can also link files for stream or download (be sure you have the proper licenses for downloads), but you can also link to hosted files, YouTube & Vimeo videos for tutorials, PraiseCharts, iTunes, Amazon, or Spotify links, as well as RehearsalMix.
By giving your team access to these tools, you set them up to prepare well, which leads to great rehearsals, and, ultimately, incredible services! Take the extra step and add all the resources you can find to help your team take your services to a new place. Get Chris Denning’s free eBook http://eepurl.com/U7aVn that will teach you more step-by-step tricks.
“Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs.” Psalm 100.2 So as we plan our services, no matter the devices, no matter the method, we are to plan for God to move. May the response and purpose come from His lips not ours.
May the songs we plan enable souls to sing. There’s nothing like the sound of God’s people singing in one voice. What are we doing to help them? Are we just planning songs or are we planning souls? You can make many plans, but the LORD’s purpose will prevail. – Proverbs 19.21
@cdenning @BranonDempsey @worshiptt
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