articles

Russ Hutto discusses selecting music and crafting worship set lists that are on mission: Finding songs that allow us to express our love to God is fairly easy. With modern worship writers churning out hundreds if not thousands of songs per year to choose from, we’re in a wonderful era…

Kenny Lamm addresses font sizes, font types, and line spacing: Displaying song lyrics in worship with excellence is an often overlooked area of preparation, yet one that can really enhance our worship times. Conversely, poor slide production and operation of the lyric display can greatly hamper worship. (If your church…

Jeff McIntosh introduces the top most used typefaces that churches are using: You have many typefaces (fonts) to choose from when projecting lyrics during your church service, youth group or worship concert. I wanted to introduce you to the top most used typefaces that churches are using and give a…

Chris Rouse explains how to spruce up your worship slides: In my job I see a lot of lyrics slides at a lot of different churches. Some look amazing; some, well, some don’t. I’ve been guilty of making my share of poorly designed lyric slides in the past, but hopefully…

Matthew Starner shows how to make good worship slides better: I had a request from a friend who is doing slides at his church asking for some guidelines and examples of how we do our slides. I looked around for some articles to send him and, finding none that were…

Nathan Sutliff lists ways to start seeing your lyric screens as more than just words: 1. Fonts I have been in too many churches that just rely on Arial, Verdana, or Times New Roman. Basic fonts that add no creative look to the screens at all. We’ve all seen it.…

John UpChurch wonders if youth ministry is Biblical: I tried to keep my skepticism in check. After all, my friend pastored this new church plant, and we wanted to be there for their first Sunday to support him. But the focus on “family-integrated worship” definitely took some getting used to—especially…

T. David Gordon lists 8 reasons the change is happening: 1. Contemporary worship music hymns not only were/are comparatively poor; they had to be. One generation cannot successfully “compete” with 50 generations of hymn-writers; such a generation would need to be fifty times as talented as all previous generations to…

Roger O’Neel shares praise band principles: We have had some great comments about the first post “Less is More” on both this site and a sister site worshipchat.com. Some of them stole my thunder on what I wanted to share in part 2 of this post. In the first post,…

Chuck Lawless offers a checklist for churches: I’ve written posts for this site and my own that describe some of the negatives our church consulting teams and “spies” have found in churches. The goal of this post is to show some of the positives we’ve seen in different churches. The…

Bob Kauflin explains how he planned a service after a sudden death in his congregation: Last Thursday at 10:06 AM, Brian Chesemore, a pastor at Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville, texted me and the other pastors. He informed us that one of our members, 42 year old Wade Stephenson, had…

Brad Bridges helps churches think about visitors before they arrive at your doors: Most people think of church hospitality occurring on Sunday mornings. But what if I told you church hospitality could extend even further using these seven guest experience tips to show church hospitality outside of Sunday morning? Yes,…

Aaron Niequist says U2 is the perfect model for a traveling rock show, but a potentially unhelpful model for weekly church. About ten years ago, I wrote a piece called “Everything I Know about Worship Leading I Learned from an Irish Rock Star“. But after seeing U2 last week in…

Amanda Furbeck offers a great example of how to engage others in our worship music: Is your worship music contagious? Do your songs draw people in, point them to Jesus, and help them give words to their praise? We don’t have to be worship superstars to create an atmosphere of…

Scott Brown offers tips for public Scripture reading: For the person reading Scripture, a time like this requires careful preparation both of the heart and the body. First, let’s take the preparation of the heart.  The heart is moved only by what is in the mind. Thus, your mind must be…