Monday, August 19, 2013

21 Handy Tools For Your Worship Toolbox



by Tim H. Swanson
If you're anything like me, you're not a natural planner. But today there are fewer excuses for poor planning and communication than ever. The internet has more helpful tools than you could shake a drum stick at. When it comes to leading worship, these are the tools that are as vital to leading worship as your microphone.
Communication & Social Media
PlanningCenterOnline.com - This service has limitless potential to assist you in planning worship services. I use it for almost everything: a database for volunteer information, scheduling music, scheduling volunteers, and sending people sheet music and recordings (this service will even transpose your recordings into the key you will be doing them in). Planning Center is a worship leader’s best friend.
Basecamp.com - A project management service. I use this anytime I want to do a project outside of Sunday morning services. It’s an excellent way to stay in touch with your team, and communicate tasks and deadlines with great efficiency. Currently I am using it to produce MV Music’s next worship album; and Jeff Merry and I are using it to plan the Worship!Arizona Conference.
Gmail - I just switched to gmail from yahoo. I love their new feature that categorically separates your inbox. It helps me stay organized, and keeps me from having to sift through junk.
Text Messaging - Your team is probably like mine - really busy. Texting is a great way to stay in touch. If one of your team members is at work, you can text him/her and wait for a response. Then you don’t have to try to keep track of what you wanted to tell them. Also, if you’re concerned about accountability when communicating with members of the opposite sex (and you should be), you can easily forward texts to your spouse or supervisor to stay above reproach.
Google Drive - It’s just like Microsoft Office, only you can access it from anywhere on the planet where there’s wifi. It’s a great communication tool because you can invite other people to view documents without having to print them out, email them, change their format, etc. Also, Drive automatically saves your progress with every keystroke, which means no more losing work because you forgot to save it.
Facebook - If you want to be current on what’s going on in the lives of your team members, send them a friend request. It gives you a direct window into areas of their lives where you would otherwise never see. Also, the page and group functions are great tools for communicating with both your team and congregation.
Buffer - A big part of my problem is finding time to do social media stuff. If I don’t keep it in check, it’ll take over my work day. Buffer, allows you to create a queue with everything you want to communicate to your team via Facebook, Twitter & Linkedin. Then it’ll send out your communications at scheduled times during the day. This way you can do all of your social media planning during one period of the day. After that, you can forget about it, and go on with your workday.
Instagram - A picture is worth a thousand words, and Instagram gives you a thousand pictures that tell you what’s important to the people on your team and in your congregation. It also gives you a bunch of really cool photo editing options for your own photos, which you can use to keep your team and church informed about what’s going on with their leader.
Twitter - With Twitter, people give little status updates throughout the day. Now, I don’t really care what Ashton Kutcher is eating for breakfast today. However, I do care what great Christian leaders like Andy Stanley, Ravi Zacharias, Matt Redman, and Michael Hyatt have to say. These guys give out free tips on being a leader and Christian all day long.
Linkedin - A good worship leader is a career minded worship leader. Not because it’s important to make money when leading worship, but because your experience in worship is second only to your heart for serving Jesus. A good church will want to see that you have been consistently invested in leading worship over a long period of time. Linkedin not only serves as an online resume to show people what kind of experience you have, It also gives your friends the ability to endorse you for skills related to your job. That gives you credibility.

Organization
Cozi.com - Maintaining a calendar is important. Maintaining a calendar that your spouse or significant other can see is even more important. Ministry leadership is a turbulent career path. Your job always calls for new and different things. Cozi gives you the ability to easily link your calendar with the people you’re accountable to. When I put an appointment in Cozi, it automatically appears on my wife’s phone, and she can see what I’m up to and where I’ll be throughout the day. This is a powerful tool for communication in my marriage.
Google Tasks - I frequently find myself overwhelmed by all the stuff I have to get done. Google tasks keeps every part of my job in one handy widget on my phone. Anytime I feel lost and overwhelmed, this app helps me remember what I’m supposed to be doing, and take the next step forward.


Music
Klove - Have you ever taken the Klove challenge (listen to nothing but Klove for 30 days)? If you haven’t you should. I did. Now I get to worship whenever I get in my car, and I have found some of my greatest congregational songs by listening to Christian radio. I used to be a critic of stations like Klove. Now I can’t deny it - it really is positive and encouraging.
Praisecharts.com - This is my one-stop-shop for music charts. Whether you use chord charts, lead sheets or a combination, praisecharts has everything. You can even get the recording that matches your charts from this website. This is the first place I got to when I’m looking for the written music to a new song I want to do.
Musicnotes.com - Music notes is my second stop when shopping for music. While Praisecharts.com has lots of church music, musicnotes.com also has secular stuff. So this website tends to have a lot of the more obscure stuff.
Youtube.com - People tell me what songs they want to hear all the time. Youtube let's me listen to the whole song without having to buy it.
EasyWorship - ProPresenter, Power Point and EasyWorship all have different features. I use EasyWorship because it has higher compatibility abilities with Apple and PC. And it has a function that displays the upcoming line of the next slide on the rear screen for my singers.
CCLI Song Select - This service has tons of features, but I use it most as an easy way to import song lyrics directly into EasyWorship when we do new music.
Spiritual Development & Personal Growth
Youversion - This Bible app has just about every translation known to man. But the thing that my friends and I love is that it has about a billion different reading plans that’ll help guide your daily devotional time. I also love the widget for my smartphone that gives me a daily verse to consider.
Google Play Books - Leaders are readers, there’s no way around it (trust me, I’ve looked). It doesn’t matter whether you use Google Play Books or Amazon Kindle, both will give you the advantage of reading the first chapter of many books before you buy them. But most importantly, if you would walk around with your entire library in your pocket, why wouldn't you?
Feedly - This smartphone app allows me to collect the blogs and feeds of all my favorite writers in one place. It’s kinda like a newspaper where I get to choose what goes into it. Mine has a lot of stuff on leadership and church music. Yours can have anything you want!

These tools have expanded my capacity to lead in every way. And I know there are more out there. What tools have helped grow your leadership?

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