David Lindner shares a list of ESSENTIAL tools for worship arts ministry:
Okay, this is what sparked the debate in our last podcast. It’s an extremely useful to, especially if you’re more the artist personality and less of the organized type. If you always feel like you’re behind in scheduling or in keeping in touch with the volunteers you work with, you’ll love it. If you like to plan ahead, it’s great because you can just go to the plan you’re thinking of, ad in an idea or two for that weekend and then when you’re ready to finish the plan – you have it – right there!
There are some other great features to PCO as well. Song & Chart organization, printing songbooks for the weekend, the community where you can see what other churches who use PCO are doing and others. With all that great functionality, it’s extremely simple & easy to use.
2.) Facebook
If you’re still using email & not using facebook, I’ll be praying for you. I pray for Kevin all the time about this. Facebook is such a great tool for ministry. It provides and easy way for you to keep tabs on your worship personnel & what’s going on in their lives without (and I know this sounds bad) having to have a conversation with each one of them every week. I don’t mean that it’s bad to talk to people in person, but who among us has time to talk to every single volunteer every single week? I know I don’t and because of facebook I don’t have to. We have a group for our Worship Arts Members. If nothing else, I can use this group as a list to go & mingle with all our people, but you can also use the group for discussions, announcements & prayer requests.
3.) A Blog
Obviously I think a blog is an important piece of the puzzle. It’s another way to build community among your team members online. You can use it as a teaching platform, you can use it to get feedback on new songs, and other things.
If adding a blog seems like too much, use facebook. You can have a blog within facebook & you can use your group for this kind of stuff too!
4.) An iPod
I’ve done posts about this in the past, and you can go check that out for more info. But there are many great ways to use your ipod as a worship tool. You can use it in rehearsals to listen to new music, you can put a slew of new worship songs on there and then go through them and decide which songs best fit your congregation. You can put your set on there and use it to practice with or learn new songs. There are a lot of great ways to use this as a tool.
It should also be said that the iPhone, iPod touch and Droid add another layer of functionality & usefulness for you as a worship leader. I haven’t been able to afford one yet, but one day I will. With apps like guitar tuners, metronomes, real time analyzers, etc. there are a lot of useful things in there!
5.) You Tube
Warning! Caution! I just want you to beware that not everything on You tube is, shall we say, wholesome. That aside, there are a lot of useful video tutorials on You Tube that members of your worship Team will find useful. Paul Baloche teaching his new songs, or Lincoln Brewster teaching the guitar lick to his new song, and many others doing the same kind of thing. It can save you & your instrumentalists a ton of time.
Well, that’s my list. What’s yours? Comment on this post with your tech tools that you can’t live without!
