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The best church service plan contributes to an excellent worship experience! It’s easy to implement with these 11 steps.
Don’t let the cynics deceive you—there is such a thing as the “perfect church service.”
And no, it’s not like pitching a “perfect game”—which happens once in a lifetime.
It’s a natural, repeatable thing that your church can aim toward (and achieve) every single Sunday.
Excellence in your church service rests on well-formed routines.
Think about it.
If you don’t have a routine for something you do regularly, you’re putting extra energy into accomplishing it every time you do it.
The more you can ritualize it by doing it the same way every time, the more intuitive, expected, and automatic it becomes. This allows you to channel your energy into making that thing better in uncommon and exceptional ways.
Your church service is no different.
Your church service is a perfect example.
Church is a routine of assembling among believers that the body of Christ has practiced for over 2,000 years.
God values routine, and consistency is a positive trait that enables the further cultivation of other positive traits and virtues.
If you take seriously the automation of essential elements of your weekly church service by streamlining their ritualization through routine, you will be able to participate more effectively in the sacred practice of the weekly assembly of believers, which the Bible sets as a fundamental precedent for Christian worship (Heb. 10:25).
However, building consistency is no small feat.
It can be challenging.
In this article, we will walk through 11 critical steps that make the routinization of vital elements of your church service as easy as possible so that your church service team has the time, energy, and resources to focus on improving and optimizing other aspects of the service.
Service planning requires forethought, strategy, and intentionality from your entire team–pastors, your church service team, worship leaders, your church security team, and all other members of your church staff.
Planning a church service should be a repeatable process that follows a strict planning protocol, utilizes planning tools, and provides a seamless worship experience for your congregation every time. An effective planning process starts with a structured plan that applies to your entire service–from opening your doors before the service begins, to worship, to tithes collection, to the message and response time, to a time of silence, to prayer and wrap-up.
Coordinated services planning will also include detailed plans for every type of volunteer and staff member–including your worship service team, your team of pastors, your church security team, and, of course, your coffee hour team.
To create a seamless worship experience, you need service planning tools to help you communicate and coordinate with your staff and volunteers.
Breeze is a church management software that can help you develop a system for organizing, managing, and communicating with your team for the best possible service. Breeze’s suite of tools even includes Service Planning, a unique tool for helping your team manage every element of your church service. Worship Tools is an additional feature that allows worship leaders to upload a song library that is accessible to the whole team, delegate tasks, and create an effective plan for pre-setup.
Here are 11 steps that will help you become a 21st-century church professional–in other words, a team leader who executes a service with minimal church service hiccups and, most importantly, helps create a space for helping your congregants draw close to God.
Every improvement begins by taking an honest look in the mirror.
Where are your weak spots?
What are the common complaints?
What are regular “cringe moments” in your church service?
What do you secretly wish you could improve, remove, or smooth out but feel like you can’t express due to a tight budget or overworked volunteers?
Don’t worry about those constraints now.
Just take the time to list the blunders, errors, trips, glitches, and miscommunications in your system.
Take a Sunday to write a list of improvement areas and create an action plan for streamlining your worship service.
Once you have a list of your liabilities, it’s time to list your assets.
What skills do you have in the tool belt of your worship service team?
Make a list of every team and every strength in members on those teams:
Greeters:
Music:
Offering:
Coffee Hour:
Small Group Leadership:
Sound and Production:
Once you have made your list of common errors and team member strengths, you have the ingredients to begin strategizing how to put solutions in place to craft the perfect church service.
It will be tempting to immediately resolve your “common errors” list with your “team member strengths” list.
But before you do that, consider a more basic infrastructural solution: software and hardware.
Look at your weaknesses list. What significant problems first require a software or hardware solution that could potentially optimize your team members’ ability to solve the problem?
If a weakness is poor audio and video quality, should you invest in a wireless lapel mic, multi-cam setup, and high-quality live-streaming software to train your most tech-talented team members?
If a weakness is coffee hour, do you need to get a new coffee machine, bring in a barista for two hours, and get your coffee hour team trained on how to brew the perfect cup-o-joe?
The point here is simple:
List ideal software and hardware solutions before playing matchmaker with your problems and team member strengths.
If you try to solve problems with raw talent from your team, people will feel that you are trying to achieve unattainable perfection through sheer force of will and over-expectation rather than investing in the most significant project of achieving the best quality of church service excellence possible.
One very important tool for planning your church service is church management software (ChMS). Whether you have a 50-person congregation or a stadium-style megachurch, a good ChMS is an essential part of implementing an effective planning process for your weekly church service. This tool will allow you to manage team members, delegate tasks, plan events, and coordinate everything from small groups to worship practice, setup/tear-down personnel, and donations.
Once you have chosen your church management software, training your most competent team members on this software is essential.
Take those on your team who are the most administratively gifted and hold a training session to become administrators on the platform, schedule team meetings, update events, and send updates to involved parties. A practical training session will help your team master hardware and soft solutions that can help them execute excellent service.
Professional training on different tools will give your team the gift of agility. If a training issue arises, then pivot and be flexible as needed. Remember that a training session can be held virtually and in person.
Training on seamless solutions will help your team confidently plan events, master coordinated services planning, easily plan each element of worship, and mitigate future planning errors. Most importantly, it will help you develop a planning process for executing a perfect church service week after week.
If things go wrong at the last minute during your otherwise excellent church service, your team can communicate this and adapt to compensate.
Once you have the tools and personnel to execute a church service and evade common “hard” problems (logistical, communication, and resource issues), you should allow yourself to indulge in writing a perfect church service.
If nothing went wrong, what would happen?
If everything went right, what would happen?
If recurring errors didn’t hamstring you, what do you dream of accomplishing?
Write out exactly how the service would go team by team—how would each team function from the Saturday night before to the Sunday afternoon after the service?
How would your greeters, children, security, facilities, educational, music, production, and volunteer team function during the pre-setup, setup, preparation, initiation, time of silence, service, post-service, tear-down, and clean-up phases?
At what time does each phase occur?
How does each team transition from each phase to the next?
What responsibilities does the team leader bear that the team members don’t?
How are these responsibilities delegated and communicated?
How does each team use the church management software to streamline the answers to these questions?
By answering these questions, you answer the fundamental question: “What does the perfect church service look like in my church?” Answering this question can help you increase the quality of church service that is ideal for your particular needs and congregation.
People believe a “perfect church service” is impossible for several reasons. One reason is that they think a perfect service means there are no problems.
Here’s the thing:
It’s not a problem to have problems.
There will always be problems.
The real problem is needing soft solutions to common issues.
Soft solutions combine administrative training with a commitment to high-quality church service. The 21st-century church professional will know a range of solutions that can help them execute an excellent church service, no matter what goes wrong.
These solutions are rehearsed alternatives that your team knows how to improvise when things go wrong during the live event.
Did the drum microphones stop working mid-song? Everyone should know how to seamlessly transition to acoustic mid-song.
Are the lyrics for song D instead of song C being displayed? The audio-visual team should know how to quickly flip to song C without scrolling through additional slides.
Did the left-side projector stop working mid-service? We know how to transition to a no-projector alternative by seamlessly directing congregants to the sermon page on the church website.
Did the preacher’s lapel mic stop working halfway through the sermon? That’s ok—the backup lapel can be transitioned remotely by the A/V team without anyone knowing.
The key is creating seamless solutions to common problems, not eradicating the possibility of the issues.
You want to create clean solutions and train your team members to execute these solutions so well that onlookers would never have guessed there was a problem.
It comes down to a training issue. And practice happens in the church when team leaders make the time to rehearse soft solutions with their church staff. Practice is the foundation of consistency, enabling you to pull off a seemingly perfect church service week after week.
Make sure it is evident among your teams who is responsible for executing the solutions to common problems in your weekly church service. Create “roles” for volunteers and staff to implement solutions.
For example, instead of tasking “Rob” with a certain job for the church security team, create a position called “Security #1” that is responsible for handling problematic visitors in the lobby. Then, on the first and second Sundays of the month, Robert M. can fill the “Security #1” position and implement the solutions to that hypothetical in real-time.
Implementing a church service plan that tilts your church toward excellence won’t happen in a single Sunday.
It will take many Sundays of trial and error to get better each week. When things go wrong, you need to have a “lessons learned” mindset. If an error occurs that gets through all your planning, rehearsal, and “soft” solutions, all you can do is be as specific as possible about next Sunday—” Here’s what we’ll do next time to prevent something like that from happening.”
Ideally, you don’t want your protocol to be incident-driven. But you’re not omniscient; you can only anticipate so much. A planning process maximizes the possibility of success but doesn’t erase the possibility of failure.
You can plan, use appropriate tools, and do your best to prevent unforeseen incidents from reoccurring through further strategizing and rehearsal.
Having a “lessons learned” mindset means that you hold your planning protocol with an open hand.
Don’t be so attached to your plan that it cannot adapt to your church’s real needs.
Don’t let your idea of the perfect church service become a tyrant to your church service volunteer and staff team so that they aren’t able to fix the real problems on the ground because they’re too busy fixing the issues that you think are important.
Do remain receptive to input.
Do remain open to feedback.
Change the plan if your team tells you there needs to be an addition or alteration.
“Blessed are the flexible, for they will not be bent out of shape.”
― Robert Ludlum, The Janson Directive
Hold weekly or monthly run-throughs with your church staff and volunteers.
You can hold these run-throughs before or after the service while everyone is present.
There are several reasons for getting good service reps in.
First, team leads and volunteers are still practicing communication and problem-solving in real time. A good run-through helps them get in lockstep.
Second, run-throughs help teams get comfortable performing tasks in a particular space. It is as simple as muscle memory and visual cues. People operate better when they can carve out a behavioral groove in a specific space through repetition. Performing a run-through on location allows teams to practice their role in the real space.
Third, every team member can’t attend every run-through. So, holding them monthly (at least initially) allows everyone to practice their team task, even if they can’t make one or two training days.
Remember that the “Perfect Church Service” isn’t about being a perfectionist. Christian Churches aren’t about achieving perfection; they’re about creating a space to glorify God, experience His presence, and learn from His Word.
Instead of aiming for perfection, incline your church service teams toward excellence with the proper planning protocol and planning tools. In the 21st century, more seamless solutions than ever exist to help you achieve church service excellence. There are tools to help your entire church staff succeed–not to mention every church service volunteer, from the teenager serving in kids ministry to the security guard at the front door to the mom singing on the worship service team.
The more intentionality you put towards soft solutions and service planning, the smoother your operations will go and the more seamless worship experience your church members will have. Not only that, but every church staff member should have a personal plan for helping to contribute to success.
To streamline this planning process, go through this simple 11-step planning process:
Implement this process, and you’ll have a streamlined strategy and process for optimizing your church service plan as quickly and effectively as possible.
A wide range of churches need soft solutions, hardware solutions, and church planning to help them pull off the perfect church service week after week. A solution like Breeze Church Management Software can help you mitigate future planning errors and hiccups (like that terrible coffee cake or switching from song C to song D mid-song). When your entire church staff is trained, it’s even better. You’re ready for church service excellence!
An excellent worship service begins with an equipped church staff, a dedicated team of volunteers, the right tools, and a commitment to genuine Christian worship. A friendly welcome and an uptempo song about gathering together will set the tone for the day.
The seven elements of worship include:
These elements deepen the worship experience and draw congregants closer to God.
You can now level up your worship team’s experience by upgrading your ChMS toolkit to include Worship Tools. Service Planning is part of your Breeze subscription, and Worship Tools is available for an additional monthly fee. Worship Tools include adding songs from SongSelect®, Access to Breeze’s new Song Library, and our brand new Worship App.
Yes! When you add Worship Tools to your Breeze subscription, the Worship App is included! It makes practicing and performing easy. Team members can conveniently view chord charts, annotate notes, rehearse, and perform the setlist directly from the app.
To organize a top-quality time of worship, you’ll need tools for every part of worship, from rehearsal to pre-setup to execution. The correct audio files, a video feed, a multi-cam setup, and a library of resources are all essential. You’ll also need a way to easily access your song library (i.e., song B, song C, song D) to handle resource issues and delegate tasks to your different volunteers.
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