Jaime Brown shows how to make a worship song fit your own ministry:
You hear a worship song. It’s a good song. You want to do that song in your church. You want your congregation to sing that song. You can picture that song working well on a Sunday morning at your church.
So you buy/download (or make) a chord chart/lead sheet/rhythm chart/orchestration of that song. And you send/post the mp3 for your worship team.
Sunday comes and you teach the song and lead it in your context. Exactly like it was on the recording. Every measure, every chord, every melodic riff, and every repeat. But strangely enough, it didn’t go ever quite as epic-ly as it did on the recording.
Of course it didn’t.
It’s not a bad thing to hear a song on an album or at a conference and want to incorporate it in your own setting.
And it’s not bad to get/make an arrangement of it and get it to your musicians to rehearse.
But in between your musicians hearing the song, and the actual implementation of that song in your rehearsals and services, a very important thing has to take place.
You have to own the song.
You have to tailor four important things in every song in order to make it work in your specific context.
1. The key. Is it too high? Is it too low? Transpose the song up or down a few steps to get in the average voice’s sweet spot.
2. The repeats. Just because the chorus needed to be repeated five times in a stadium full of 15,000 people doesn’t mean it should be reported five times in your hotel ballroom of 150 people.
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