Congregations often fall into one of two traps:

Familiarity and novelty. 

In other words, they either get too comfortable with their existing catalogue of songs, or they introduce so many new songs that the congregation has a hard time keeping up. 

How do we balance the reliability of familiar songs with the need to freshen up our song bank?

It's All About a Good Plan

I think one of the reasons why we tend to fall back on the familiar is because we don't plan far enough in advance. When Sunday is suddenly arriving in 2 or 3 days' time, it's easy to grab songs that are familiar for the congregation to sing and for the band to pull off. But here's the danger:

The songs you pick end up getting worn out after several uses, all because you had to choose convenience in the face of a looming deadline.

If you want to break out of the rut, start planning your sets weeks or months in advance. It's helpful to have a teaching team that takes the same approach to sermons, ideally where the entire year is mapped out by subject and Scripture focus. This way, you can hone in on songs that directly apply to each message and craft a set that hits all the right spots. 

This allows you to research new tunes to introduce or old songs that can be revived, and then also throw in songs that have been part of the rotation for a healthy amount of time. 

If you don't work with a pastor or teaching team that plans well in advance, then no worries—you can still do your research and craft sets that can be malleable from week to week. 

Keep Your Finger on the Pulse

Songs in worship are a unique way to express emotion in response to the Holy Spirit working through the Word—and as worship leaders, we need to keep a pulse on our congregation. Style, singability, and arrangements all play a part in drawing out the emotional response that is most apt for our congregations' current state. 

Choose songs that capture that energy, whether old or new, and arrange them in a way that fully allows your congregation to deliver maximum expression.

What I Typically Do

Since our teaching team outlines an entire year's worth of sermons broken down into mini-series, I typically choose one or two songs that become the anthem(s) for 4 to 6 weeks. These anthems get introduced at the beginning week, and then I don't touch them again until the end. Occasionally, I repeat an anthem in the middle of the series if the series is long. 

Often, each series' sermons highlight the same broad truths, so I will pick a couple of songs that speak to those truths, but program them on different Sundays. That way, we're singing the same truth, but in different presentations of melody, harmony, rhythm, and form. 

At the end of that series, I will retire those anthems to the next quarter, or even the quarter after that. It depends entirely on what the sermons or series call for. 

This results in a song bank of roughly a dozen or so songs that are intentionally chosen to support a year's worth of sermons. But as we usually do 4 songs on a given Sunday, we have a huge gap that has to be filled with other songs that are not chosen to be anthems for any particular series. 

I would say we rotate in twice as many "filler" songs in those series to round out each set, but it's really left up to our individual worship leaders to choose the songs. The only thing we try to avoid is directly repeating songs from week to week. I've found that roughly half of those filler songs are either new or familiar. 

What You Can Do

Now, our church has a great team of musicians who can play and sing new or re-introduced fairly easily. Your situation might not be the same, though, and introducing new songs can present a significant challenge to your band. 

In this case, I would just focus on 8 to 12 anthems to be used throughout the year in a variety of contexts, and aim for a good handful of those to be new tunes. For your fillers, recycle familiar songs, or even re-introduce songs you haven't done in a while; that way, it will seem as if the set is "fresh."

Let’s Finish This Year Strong!

Thank you so much to each of you who support Worship Strategies and our work to equip worship teams with new skills, encouragement, and empowerment!

The end of each calendar year is a great time to see where you can use what God has blessed you with to strengthen His kingdom, and we pray that you would include Worship Strategies in your support!

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Be blessed  👊✌️