The Perfect Church Service Plan: How to Make Your Worship Service Smooth and Professional
The "perfect church service plan" isn't a myth. It's a reality that can help your members' worship experience be smoother and more professional. And it's easy to implement with these 11 steps.
Planning a Church Service
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 real, 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.
In fact, your church service is a perfect example.
Church is a routine of assembling among believers that the body of Christ has practiced for more than 2,000 years.
Routine is important to God, and consistency is a positive trait that enables the further cultivation of other positive traits and virtues.
If you take seriously the automation of key elements of your weekly church service by streamlining their ritualization through routine, you will be able to more excellently participate in the sacred practice of the weekly assembly of believers, which the Bible sets as a basic precedent for Christian worship (Heb. 10:25).
However, building consistency is no small feat.
In fact, it can be extremely difficult.
In this article, we will walk through 11 critical steps that make the routinization of key 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.
How Do You Plan a Church 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.
What Should Be Included in a Church Service?
Here are 11 steps that will help you become a 21st century church professional–in other words, a team leader that executes a service with minimal church service hiccups and most importantly, helps create a space for helping your congregants draw close to God.
1. Identify common problems
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.
2. Evaluate strengths and weaknesses
Once you have a list of your liabilities, it’s time to make a list of 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:
- Tom is the most likable greeter.
- Most other greeters are somewhat awkward.
Music:
- Jerry is the most gifted musician when there is clear leadership.
- Lisa is the best music leader in her personality, organization, and stage presence, but is only available once per month.
Offering:
- Deacons dress professionally, but need to make their demeanor more pleasant and expressively welcoming.
Coffee Hour:
- Gretta is great with the coffee machine, but makes terrible coffee cake.
- Liz owns a bakery and can supply pastries once per month.
- Bob is happy to give money to buy fresh donuts bi-weekly for church members and the coffee hour team.
Small Group Leadership:
- Sarah is excellent administratively and interpersonally, but doesn’t have the man hours.
- Leah needs some administrative training and is an eager volunteer. She has the time to volunteer and is great at handling resource issues.
Sound and Production:
- Andy is good with sound and audio files, bad with streaming on the video feed.
- George knows how to stream the video feed to YouTube and Facebook, but needs a few hours of professional training on audio files and dynamic content editing.
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.
3. List hardware and software that could solve your problems
It will be tempting to immediately resolve your “common errors” list with your “team member strengths” list.
But before you do that, there is a more basic, infrastructural solution that you need to take into account: software and hardware.
Look at your weaknesses list. What major problems first require a software or hardware solution that could potentially optimize your team members’ solving the problem?
If a weakness is poor audio and video quality, do you need to invest in a wireless lapel, multi-cam setup, and a high quality live-streaming software to get your most tech-talented team members trained on?
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 not to burn coffee?
The point here is extremely simple:
List ideal software and hardware solutions before you play matchmaker with your problems and your team member strengths.
If you just 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 bigger project of achieving the highest quality of church service excellence possible.
4. Implement tools to centralize programming
When planning your church service, one crucial tool to consider is church management software. This software can help streamline services for congregations of all sizes, from small gatherings to large megachurches. It’s a vital component in creating an efficient planning process for your weekly services.
Church management software comes in various versions, but the key is to have one in place. It allows you to manage team members, delegate tasks, segment your congregation, plan events, and coordinate everything from small groups to worship practices and donations.
Not using church management software today is like using outdated technology. Just as having a computer is essential for college, having church management software is essential for a smooth and effective church service in the modern era.
Choosing the right software is crucial because transitioning from one system to another can be challenging. Once your team is trained and your data is stored, switching software can be cumbersome. To avoid these issues, it’s best to choose Tithely from the start, ensuring you have a reliable solution that will scale with your church’s growth and save you time and effort in the long run.
5. Train competent team members on the planning tools
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.
6. Craft the ideal service
Once you have the tools and personnel in place to execute a church service and evade common “hard” problems (logistical, communication, and resource issues), you should allow yourself to indulge in the writing of a perfect church service.
If nothing went wrong, what would happen?
If everything went right, what would happen?
If you weren’t hamstrung by recurring errors, 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.
7. Strategize soft solutions to common problems
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.
8. Task appropriate team members to execute those soft solutions
Make sure it is very clear among your teams who is responsible for executing the soft solutions to common problems in your weekly church service.
This means that you create “roles” that volunteers and staff can step into to execute these soft solutions.
For example, instead of tasking “Rob” with doing 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 1st and 2nd Sundays of the month, Robert M. can be tasked with filling the “Security #1” position and implementing the soft solutions to that hypothetical in real-time. Robert M. should only be tasked with filling this role if he has the specific competencies relevant to executing this job well.
Make sure that no position is person-dependent, but can be filled by someone else who is trained to step into the leadership position if a leader cannot be found or is pulled away. This practice of executing soft solutions should be standard for church professionals in the 21st century.
9. Adopt a “lessons learned” mindset
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.
10. Keep adapting your planning methods to make your plan smoother
Having a “lessons learned” mindset means that you have to hold your planning protocol in an open hand.
Don’t stay married to your plan so much that it can’t adapt to the real needs of your church as they arise.
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 problems that you think are important.
Remain receptive to input.
Remain open to feedback.
Change the plan if your team tells you there needs to be an addition or alteration.
11. Run through the service plan
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 tasks, even if they can’t attend one or two training days.
Worship Service Planning Summarized
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 right planning protocol and planning tools. In the 21st century, there are more seamless solutions than ever 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:
- Identify common problems
- Evaluate strengths and weaknesses
- List hardware and software that could solve your problems
- Implement tools to centralize programming
- Train competent team members on the planning tools
- Script the ideal service
- Strategize soft solutions to common problems
- Task appropriate team members to execute those soft solutions
- Have a “lessons learned” mindset
- Keep adapting your planning methods to make your plan smoother
- Run through the service plan once per month with your church staff
Implement this process, and you’ll have a streamlined strategy and process to optimize your church service plan as quickly and excellently as possible.
Church Service Plan FAQs
There's a wide range of churches that need soft solutions, hardware solutions, and church planning to help them plan the perfect church service week after week. Using a software solution like Breeze Church Management Software can help you to 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, even better. You're ready for church service excellence.
What are the seven elements of worship for Christians?
The seven elements of worship include:
- Prayer (communication with God).
- Praise (collective worship through song).
- Scripture reading (guidance from God’s Word).
- Offering (tithes and donations as thanksgiving).
- The sermon (biblical teaching for daily life).
- Communion (commemoration of the Last Supper).
- The benediction (a closing blessing).
These elements deepen the worship experience and draw congregants closer to God.
How do you start a church worship service?
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.
How do you organize worship?
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.
Does Breeze help with service planning?
Yes! BreezeChMS includes a Service Planning feature to help you craft your ideal worship service. From scheduling volunteers to planning music and announcements, Service Planning is a Breeze with BreezeChMS. We’ve even added a feature called Worship Tools (available as an add-on for $29/month) that gives you access to Breeze’s new Song Library, the ability to import songs from SongSelect®, and even a brand new Worship App to make rehearsal efficient for musicians and worship leaders.
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Planning a Church Service
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 real, 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.
In fact, your church service is a perfect example.
Church is a routine of assembling among believers that the body of Christ has practiced for more than 2,000 years.
Routine is important to God, and consistency is a positive trait that enables the further cultivation of other positive traits and virtues.
If you take seriously the automation of key elements of your weekly church service by streamlining their ritualization through routine, you will be able to more excellently participate in the sacred practice of the weekly assembly of believers, which the Bible sets as a basic precedent for Christian worship (Heb. 10:25).
However, building consistency is no small feat.
In fact, it can be extremely difficult.
In this article, we will walk through 11 critical steps that make the routinization of key 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.
How Do You Plan a Church 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.
What Should Be Included in a Church Service?
Here are 11 steps that will help you become a 21st century church professional–in other words, a team leader that executes a service with minimal church service hiccups and most importantly, helps create a space for helping your congregants draw close to God.
1. Identify common problems
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.
2. Evaluate strengths and weaknesses
Once you have a list of your liabilities, it’s time to make a list of 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:
- Tom is the most likable greeter.
- Most other greeters are somewhat awkward.
Music:
- Jerry is the most gifted musician when there is clear leadership.
- Lisa is the best music leader in her personality, organization, and stage presence, but is only available once per month.
Offering:
- Deacons dress professionally, but need to make their demeanor more pleasant and expressively welcoming.
Coffee Hour:
- Gretta is great with the coffee machine, but makes terrible coffee cake.
- Liz owns a bakery and can supply pastries once per month.
- Bob is happy to give money to buy fresh donuts bi-weekly for church members and the coffee hour team.
Small Group Leadership:
- Sarah is excellent administratively and interpersonally, but doesn’t have the man hours.
- Leah needs some administrative training and is an eager volunteer. She has the time to volunteer and is great at handling resource issues.
Sound and Production:
- Andy is good with sound and audio files, bad with streaming on the video feed.
- George knows how to stream the video feed to YouTube and Facebook, but needs a few hours of professional training on audio files and dynamic content editing.
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.
3. List hardware and software that could solve your problems
It will be tempting to immediately resolve your “common errors” list with your “team member strengths” list.
But before you do that, there is a more basic, infrastructural solution that you need to take into account: software and hardware.
Look at your weaknesses list. What major problems first require a software or hardware solution that could potentially optimize your team members’ solving the problem?
If a weakness is poor audio and video quality, do you need to invest in a wireless lapel, multi-cam setup, and a high quality live-streaming software to get your most tech-talented team members trained on?
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 not to burn coffee?
The point here is extremely simple:
List ideal software and hardware solutions before you play matchmaker with your problems and your team member strengths.
If you just 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 bigger project of achieving the highest quality of church service excellence possible.
4. Implement tools to centralize programming
When planning your church service, one crucial tool to consider is church management software. This software can help streamline services for congregations of all sizes, from small gatherings to large megachurches. It’s a vital component in creating an efficient planning process for your weekly services.
Church management software comes in various versions, but the key is to have one in place. It allows you to manage team members, delegate tasks, segment your congregation, plan events, and coordinate everything from small groups to worship practices and donations.
Not using church management software today is like using outdated technology. Just as having a computer is essential for college, having church management software is essential for a smooth and effective church service in the modern era.
Choosing the right software is crucial because transitioning from one system to another can be challenging. Once your team is trained and your data is stored, switching software can be cumbersome. To avoid these issues, it’s best to choose Tithely from the start, ensuring you have a reliable solution that will scale with your church’s growth and save you time and effort in the long run.
5. Train competent team members on the planning tools
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.
6. Craft the ideal service
Once you have the tools and personnel in place to execute a church service and evade common “hard” problems (logistical, communication, and resource issues), you should allow yourself to indulge in the writing of a perfect church service.
If nothing went wrong, what would happen?
If everything went right, what would happen?
If you weren’t hamstrung by recurring errors, 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.
7. Strategize soft solutions to common problems
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.
8. Task appropriate team members to execute those soft solutions
Make sure it is very clear among your teams who is responsible for executing the soft solutions to common problems in your weekly church service.
This means that you create “roles” that volunteers and staff can step into to execute these soft solutions.
For example, instead of tasking “Rob” with doing 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 1st and 2nd Sundays of the month, Robert M. can be tasked with filling the “Security #1” position and implementing the soft solutions to that hypothetical in real-time. Robert M. should only be tasked with filling this role if he has the specific competencies relevant to executing this job well.
Make sure that no position is person-dependent, but can be filled by someone else who is trained to step into the leadership position if a leader cannot be found or is pulled away. This practice of executing soft solutions should be standard for church professionals in the 21st century.
9. Adopt a “lessons learned” mindset
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.
10. Keep adapting your planning methods to make your plan smoother
Having a “lessons learned” mindset means that you have to hold your planning protocol in an open hand.
Don’t stay married to your plan so much that it can’t adapt to the real needs of your church as they arise.
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 problems that you think are important.
Remain receptive to input.
Remain open to feedback.
Change the plan if your team tells you there needs to be an addition or alteration.
11. Run through the service plan
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 tasks, even if they can’t attend one or two training days.
Worship Service Planning Summarized
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 right planning protocol and planning tools. In the 21st century, there are more seamless solutions than ever 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:
- Identify common problems
- Evaluate strengths and weaknesses
- List hardware and software that could solve your problems
- Implement tools to centralize programming
- Train competent team members on the planning tools
- Script the ideal service
- Strategize soft solutions to common problems
- Task appropriate team members to execute those soft solutions
- Have a “lessons learned” mindset
- Keep adapting your planning methods to make your plan smoother
- Run through the service plan once per month with your church staff
Implement this process, and you’ll have a streamlined strategy and process to optimize your church service plan as quickly and excellently as possible.
Church Service Plan FAQs
There's a wide range of churches that need soft solutions, hardware solutions, and church planning to help them plan the perfect church service week after week. Using a software solution like Breeze Church Management Software can help you to 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, even better. You're ready for church service excellence.
What are the seven elements of worship for Christians?
The seven elements of worship include:
- Prayer (communication with God).
- Praise (collective worship through song).
- Scripture reading (guidance from God’s Word).
- Offering (tithes and donations as thanksgiving).
- The sermon (biblical teaching for daily life).
- Communion (commemoration of the Last Supper).
- The benediction (a closing blessing).
These elements deepen the worship experience and draw congregants closer to God.
How do you start a church worship service?
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.
How do you organize worship?
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.
Does Breeze help with service planning?
Yes! BreezeChMS includes a Service Planning feature to help you craft your ideal worship service. From scheduling volunteers to planning music and announcements, Service Planning is a Breeze with BreezeChMS. We’ve even added a feature called Worship Tools (available as an add-on for $29/month) that gives you access to Breeze’s new Song Library, the ability to import songs from SongSelect®, and even a brand new Worship App to make rehearsal efficient for musicians and worship leaders.
podcast transcript
Planning a Church Service
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 real, 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.
In fact, your church service is a perfect example.
Church is a routine of assembling among believers that the body of Christ has practiced for more than 2,000 years.
Routine is important to God, and consistency is a positive trait that enables the further cultivation of other positive traits and virtues.
If you take seriously the automation of key elements of your weekly church service by streamlining their ritualization through routine, you will be able to more excellently participate in the sacred practice of the weekly assembly of believers, which the Bible sets as a basic precedent for Christian worship (Heb. 10:25).
However, building consistency is no small feat.
In fact, it can be extremely difficult.
In this article, we will walk through 11 critical steps that make the routinization of key 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.
How Do You Plan a Church 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.
What Should Be Included in a Church Service?
Here are 11 steps that will help you become a 21st century church professional–in other words, a team leader that executes a service with minimal church service hiccups and most importantly, helps create a space for helping your congregants draw close to God.
1. Identify common problems
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.
2. Evaluate strengths and weaknesses
Once you have a list of your liabilities, it’s time to make a list of 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:
- Tom is the most likable greeter.
- Most other greeters are somewhat awkward.
Music:
- Jerry is the most gifted musician when there is clear leadership.
- Lisa is the best music leader in her personality, organization, and stage presence, but is only available once per month.
Offering:
- Deacons dress professionally, but need to make their demeanor more pleasant and expressively welcoming.
Coffee Hour:
- Gretta is great with the coffee machine, but makes terrible coffee cake.
- Liz owns a bakery and can supply pastries once per month.
- Bob is happy to give money to buy fresh donuts bi-weekly for church members and the coffee hour team.
Small Group Leadership:
- Sarah is excellent administratively and interpersonally, but doesn’t have the man hours.
- Leah needs some administrative training and is an eager volunteer. She has the time to volunteer and is great at handling resource issues.
Sound and Production:
- Andy is good with sound and audio files, bad with streaming on the video feed.
- George knows how to stream the video feed to YouTube and Facebook, but needs a few hours of professional training on audio files and dynamic content editing.
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.
3. List hardware and software that could solve your problems
It will be tempting to immediately resolve your “common errors” list with your “team member strengths” list.
But before you do that, there is a more basic, infrastructural solution that you need to take into account: software and hardware.
Look at your weaknesses list. What major problems first require a software or hardware solution that could potentially optimize your team members’ solving the problem?
If a weakness is poor audio and video quality, do you need to invest in a wireless lapel, multi-cam setup, and a high quality live-streaming software to get your most tech-talented team members trained on?
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 not to burn coffee?
The point here is extremely simple:
List ideal software and hardware solutions before you play matchmaker with your problems and your team member strengths.
If you just 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 bigger project of achieving the highest quality of church service excellence possible.
4. Implement tools to centralize programming
When planning your church service, one crucial tool to consider is church management software. This software can help streamline services for congregations of all sizes, from small gatherings to large megachurches. It’s a vital component in creating an efficient planning process for your weekly services.
Church management software comes in various versions, but the key is to have one in place. It allows you to manage team members, delegate tasks, segment your congregation, plan events, and coordinate everything from small groups to worship practices and donations.
Not using church management software today is like using outdated technology. Just as having a computer is essential for college, having church management software is essential for a smooth and effective church service in the modern era.
Choosing the right software is crucial because transitioning from one system to another can be challenging. Once your team is trained and your data is stored, switching software can be cumbersome. To avoid these issues, it’s best to choose Tithely from the start, ensuring you have a reliable solution that will scale with your church’s growth and save you time and effort in the long run.
5. Train competent team members on the planning tools
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.
6. Craft the ideal service
Once you have the tools and personnel in place to execute a church service and evade common “hard” problems (logistical, communication, and resource issues), you should allow yourself to indulge in the writing of a perfect church service.
If nothing went wrong, what would happen?
If everything went right, what would happen?
If you weren’t hamstrung by recurring errors, 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.
7. Strategize soft solutions to common problems
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.
8. Task appropriate team members to execute those soft solutions
Make sure it is very clear among your teams who is responsible for executing the soft solutions to common problems in your weekly church service.
This means that you create “roles” that volunteers and staff can step into to execute these soft solutions.
For example, instead of tasking “Rob” with doing 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 1st and 2nd Sundays of the month, Robert M. can be tasked with filling the “Security #1” position and implementing the soft solutions to that hypothetical in real-time. Robert M. should only be tasked with filling this role if he has the specific competencies relevant to executing this job well.
Make sure that no position is person-dependent, but can be filled by someone else who is trained to step into the leadership position if a leader cannot be found or is pulled away. This practice of executing soft solutions should be standard for church professionals in the 21st century.
9. Adopt a “lessons learned” mindset
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.
10. Keep adapting your planning methods to make your plan smoother
Having a “lessons learned” mindset means that you have to hold your planning protocol in an open hand.
Don’t stay married to your plan so much that it can’t adapt to the real needs of your church as they arise.
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 problems that you think are important.
Remain receptive to input.
Remain open to feedback.
Change the plan if your team tells you there needs to be an addition or alteration.
11. Run through the service plan
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 tasks, even if they can’t attend one or two training days.
Worship Service Planning Summarized
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 right planning protocol and planning tools. In the 21st century, there are more seamless solutions than ever 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:
- Identify common problems
- Evaluate strengths and weaknesses
- List hardware and software that could solve your problems
- Implement tools to centralize programming
- Train competent team members on the planning tools
- Script the ideal service
- Strategize soft solutions to common problems
- Task appropriate team members to execute those soft solutions
- Have a “lessons learned” mindset
- Keep adapting your planning methods to make your plan smoother
- Run through the service plan once per month with your church staff
Implement this process, and you’ll have a streamlined strategy and process to optimize your church service plan as quickly and excellently as possible.
Church Service Plan FAQs
There's a wide range of churches that need soft solutions, hardware solutions, and church planning to help them plan the perfect church service week after week. Using a software solution like Breeze Church Management Software can help you to 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, even better. You're ready for church service excellence.
What are the seven elements of worship for Christians?
The seven elements of worship include:
- Prayer (communication with God).
- Praise (collective worship through song).
- Scripture reading (guidance from God’s Word).
- Offering (tithes and donations as thanksgiving).
- The sermon (biblical teaching for daily life).
- Communion (commemoration of the Last Supper).
- The benediction (a closing blessing).
These elements deepen the worship experience and draw congregants closer to God.
How do you start a church worship service?
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.
How do you organize worship?
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.
Does Breeze help with service planning?
Yes! BreezeChMS includes a Service Planning feature to help you craft your ideal worship service. From scheduling volunteers to planning music and announcements, Service Planning is a Breeze with BreezeChMS. We’ve even added a feature called Worship Tools (available as an add-on for $29/month) that gives you access to Breeze’s new Song Library, the ability to import songs from SongSelect®, and even a brand new Worship App to make rehearsal efficient for musicians and worship leaders.
VIDEO transcript
Planning a Church Service
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 real, 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.
In fact, your church service is a perfect example.
Church is a routine of assembling among believers that the body of Christ has practiced for more than 2,000 years.
Routine is important to God, and consistency is a positive trait that enables the further cultivation of other positive traits and virtues.
If you take seriously the automation of key elements of your weekly church service by streamlining their ritualization through routine, you will be able to more excellently participate in the sacred practice of the weekly assembly of believers, which the Bible sets as a basic precedent for Christian worship (Heb. 10:25).
However, building consistency is no small feat.
In fact, it can be extremely difficult.
In this article, we will walk through 11 critical steps that make the routinization of key 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.
How Do You Plan a Church 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.
What Should Be Included in a Church Service?
Here are 11 steps that will help you become a 21st century church professional–in other words, a team leader that executes a service with minimal church service hiccups and most importantly, helps create a space for helping your congregants draw close to God.
1. Identify common problems
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.
2. Evaluate strengths and weaknesses
Once you have a list of your liabilities, it’s time to make a list of 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:
- Tom is the most likable greeter.
- Most other greeters are somewhat awkward.
Music:
- Jerry is the most gifted musician when there is clear leadership.
- Lisa is the best music leader in her personality, organization, and stage presence, but is only available once per month.
Offering:
- Deacons dress professionally, but need to make their demeanor more pleasant and expressively welcoming.
Coffee Hour:
- Gretta is great with the coffee machine, but makes terrible coffee cake.
- Liz owns a bakery and can supply pastries once per month.
- Bob is happy to give money to buy fresh donuts bi-weekly for church members and the coffee hour team.
Small Group Leadership:
- Sarah is excellent administratively and interpersonally, but doesn’t have the man hours.
- Leah needs some administrative training and is an eager volunteer. She has the time to volunteer and is great at handling resource issues.
Sound and Production:
- Andy is good with sound and audio files, bad with streaming on the video feed.
- George knows how to stream the video feed to YouTube and Facebook, but needs a few hours of professional training on audio files and dynamic content editing.
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.
3. List hardware and software that could solve your problems
It will be tempting to immediately resolve your “common errors” list with your “team member strengths” list.
But before you do that, there is a more basic, infrastructural solution that you need to take into account: software and hardware.
Look at your weaknesses list. What major problems first require a software or hardware solution that could potentially optimize your team members’ solving the problem?
If a weakness is poor audio and video quality, do you need to invest in a wireless lapel, multi-cam setup, and a high quality live-streaming software to get your most tech-talented team members trained on?
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 not to burn coffee?
The point here is extremely simple:
List ideal software and hardware solutions before you play matchmaker with your problems and your team member strengths.
If you just 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 bigger project of achieving the highest quality of church service excellence possible.
4. Implement tools to centralize programming
When planning your church service, one crucial tool to consider is church management software. This software can help streamline services for congregations of all sizes, from small gatherings to large megachurches. It’s a vital component in creating an efficient planning process for your weekly services.
Church management software comes in various versions, but the key is to have one in place. It allows you to manage team members, delegate tasks, segment your congregation, plan events, and coordinate everything from small groups to worship practices and donations.
Not using church management software today is like using outdated technology. Just as having a computer is essential for college, having church management software is essential for a smooth and effective church service in the modern era.
Choosing the right software is crucial because transitioning from one system to another can be challenging. Once your team is trained and your data is stored, switching software can be cumbersome. To avoid these issues, it’s best to choose Tithely from the start, ensuring you have a reliable solution that will scale with your church’s growth and save you time and effort in the long run.
5. Train competent team members on the planning tools
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.
6. Craft the ideal service
Once you have the tools and personnel in place to execute a church service and evade common “hard” problems (logistical, communication, and resource issues), you should allow yourself to indulge in the writing of a perfect church service.
If nothing went wrong, what would happen?
If everything went right, what would happen?
If you weren’t hamstrung by recurring errors, 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.
7. Strategize soft solutions to common problems
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.
8. Task appropriate team members to execute those soft solutions
Make sure it is very clear among your teams who is responsible for executing the soft solutions to common problems in your weekly church service.
This means that you create “roles” that volunteers and staff can step into to execute these soft solutions.
For example, instead of tasking “Rob” with doing 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 1st and 2nd Sundays of the month, Robert M. can be tasked with filling the “Security #1” position and implementing the soft solutions to that hypothetical in real-time. Robert M. should only be tasked with filling this role if he has the specific competencies relevant to executing this job well.
Make sure that no position is person-dependent, but can be filled by someone else who is trained to step into the leadership position if a leader cannot be found or is pulled away. This practice of executing soft solutions should be standard for church professionals in the 21st century.
9. Adopt a “lessons learned” mindset
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.
10. Keep adapting your planning methods to make your plan smoother
Having a “lessons learned” mindset means that you have to hold your planning protocol in an open hand.
Don’t stay married to your plan so much that it can’t adapt to the real needs of your church as they arise.
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 problems that you think are important.
Remain receptive to input.
Remain open to feedback.
Change the plan if your team tells you there needs to be an addition or alteration.
11. Run through the service plan
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 tasks, even if they can’t attend one or two training days.
Worship Service Planning Summarized
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 right planning protocol and planning tools. In the 21st century, there are more seamless solutions than ever 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:
- Identify common problems
- Evaluate strengths and weaknesses
- List hardware and software that could solve your problems
- Implement tools to centralize programming
- Train competent team members on the planning tools
- Script the ideal service
- Strategize soft solutions to common problems
- Task appropriate team members to execute those soft solutions
- Have a “lessons learned” mindset
- Keep adapting your planning methods to make your plan smoother
- Run through the service plan once per month with your church staff
Implement this process, and you’ll have a streamlined strategy and process to optimize your church service plan as quickly and excellently as possible.
Church Service Plan FAQs
There's a wide range of churches that need soft solutions, hardware solutions, and church planning to help them plan the perfect church service week after week. Using a software solution like Breeze Church Management Software can help you to 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, even better. You're ready for church service excellence.
What are the seven elements of worship for Christians?
The seven elements of worship include:
- Prayer (communication with God).
- Praise (collective worship through song).
- Scripture reading (guidance from God’s Word).
- Offering (tithes and donations as thanksgiving).
- The sermon (biblical teaching for daily life).
- Communion (commemoration of the Last Supper).
- The benediction (a closing blessing).
These elements deepen the worship experience and draw congregants closer to God.
How do you start a church worship service?
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.
How do you organize worship?
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.
Does Breeze help with service planning?
Yes! BreezeChMS includes a Service Planning feature to help you craft your ideal worship service. From scheduling volunteers to planning music and announcements, Service Planning is a Breeze with BreezeChMS. We’ve even added a feature called Worship Tools (available as an add-on for $29/month) that gives you access to Breeze’s new Song Library, the ability to import songs from SongSelect®, and even a brand new Worship App to make rehearsal efficient for musicians and worship leaders.
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