Refining Your Worship: Testing Songs to Serve Your Church Effectively
This is the last installment of a 5-part series. You can find the first four parts here, here, here, and here.
To build an intentional and powerful worship set for your church Sunday after Sunday, you must first ensure you are walking closely with the Lord. I didn’t initially plan to include this, but I cannot emphasize it enough. The best worship leaders I know maximize their gift by keeping their priorities straight. Walking closely in step with the Holy Spirit won’t let you pick perfect songs, but in tandem with the Scriptures, He is our helper and guide in all things, including how to best serve our local churches. Now that that’s off my chest, let’s dive into this week’s topic.
If we have been faithful in having good metrics in place for choosing our songs, and if we have kept things fresh and inviting by working on our instrumentation and arrangements, and if we have put those songs together in an intentional and meaningful way through flow and dynamics, we need to be testing songs. We need objective and predictable ways to see if a song is actually serving our church.
Here are a few ways to do this:
1. Seek Feedback from Trusted Individuals
Start with your lead pastor. I’ll write more about this later, but your lead pastor is the actual worship leader of your church. They are the ones rightly dividing the Scriptures and calling people to live lives of worship that overflow into congregational worship on Sundays. Their opinion matters. Depending on various factors, trust will be built, and they may lean into your leadership more and more in song selection. However, you should always run songs by them. If they think a song isn’t working, just cut it.
Don’t stop at your lead pastor. Find band members, regular church members, and others who support you to give you objective feedback. Seek it out. Look for patterns in feedback, such as "this song is awesome" or "this song is unhelpful," to help you determine if a song is really working.
2. Observe Congregational Response
Open your eyes on a Sunday. If you have taught a song, brought it back, rested it for a few weeks, and then brought it back again and the song never seems to connect—cut it. There are so many great songs that point to the wonders of our God that we don’t need to waste any moments on a Sunday. If a song helps a swell of worship lift, even if it isn’t your favorite or if it is an older song, sing it and lead it. Your job is to serve the corporate worship of your church.
3. Review and Reflect
Watch game film. Go beyond just song selection and take everything (dynamics, leading, arrangements, flow, etc.) into consideration. Put up a camera in your auditorium with a basic board mix and watch it back a few days after Sunday. I don’t recommend doing this on Sunday because you need to rest in the Lord’s kindness that He moved among your church that day. However, a few days later, when you can be more objective and clinical, watch your service back. Make notes. Have a meeting about it with the appropriate volunteers and staff. Make goals and plans based on patterns that you see.
We can’t rely solely on how we felt about a worship gathering. We need to trust the Lord in all of it, but we can’t just “let go and let God.” He has entrusted us with the task of helping our church worship with all that they have. This can go to many different levels of granularity, but these principles will help you get started as you look to serve your church better in worship leading.