Blog | Choosing Worship Songs for Ordinarytime: Sustaining Depth After the High Seasons

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The church calendar has its peaks — Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost. These are the Sundays that come with built-in emotional weight, full rooms, and a clear thematic direction. But most of the year isn’t spent on peaks. Most of the year is what the liturgical tradition calls Ordinarytime — the long stretch of Sundays between Pentecost and Advent where no major holiday anchors the week, where attendance settles into its regular rhythms, and where the steady, unglamorous work of discipleship through worship happens.

How you lead worship in Ordinarytime reveals a great deal about your theology of worship. It’s easy to lead well when the room is full on Easter. The real test is what you do on the third Sunday of July when half your congregation is on vacation and there’s no particular reason for anyone to be especially engaged.

Here’s how to think about song selection for the long seasons.

Understand What Ordinarytime Is For

In the liturgical tradition, Ordinarytime isn’t actually ‘ordinary’ in the sense of being unimportant. It’s ordinary in the sense of ‘ordered’ — a time for the steady formation of Christian life through repeated encounter with Scripture, prayer, and worship. The saints weren’t primarily formed on Christmas and Easter. They were formed in the accumulated Sundays of the long, ordinary year.

This reframe matters for worship planning. Ordinarytime isn’t a fallow period between the exciting seasons. It’s where most of the actual formation happens. Your song selections in these weeks should be chosen with that long-game intent — not what will feel most exciting on any given Sunday, but what will build the most durable theological vocabulary in your congregation over months of repeated singing.

Build a Core Repertoire

One of the most valuable things you can do during Ordinarytime is establish and deepen your congregation’s core song repertoire. These are the 20–35 songs that your church knows deeply — not just recognizes, but has truly internalized. Songs that congregation members can sing from memory, that carry meaning accumulated through years of collective singing.

When you’re planning sets for the ordinary Sundays of summer and fall, this core repertoire should anchor your selections. New songs have their place, but the depth of engagement your congregation has with a well-loved song that’s been sung for three years is qualitatively different from the surface engagement with something they heard for the first time last week.

Ordinarily time is when you can afford to sing that song again — the one everyone already knows — and go deeper into it rather than always moving on to something new.

Balance the Theological Diet

Over the course of Ordinarytime, take stock of what theological themes your congregation is regularly singing. Are you covering the full range of Christian experience — praise, lament, confession, gratitude, declaration, wonder, longing, commissioning? Or are you stuck in a narrower range?

Many contemporary worship repertoires skew heavily toward praise and declaration (which are important) at the expense of lament, confession, and longing (which are equally important and often more honest to people’s actual experience of life).

Ordinarily time is a good season to introduce a lament song or two — a psalm-based song that gives voice to honest struggle in the presence of God. Your congregation contains people in real pain, and worship that only ever sounds triumphant can feel alienating to them. Songs that make room for ‘my soul is downcast, yet I will hope in God’ serve the full breadth of your congregation far better than an unbroken string of declarations.

Introduce New Songs Thoughtfully

Ordinarytime is actually the best time to introduce new songs — precisely because there’s no additional weight on the Sunday. You’re not trying to introduce a new song and also land an Easter service. You can give a new song two or three consecutive weeks, let people learn it without pressure, and assess whether it’s connecting with your congregation before deciding whether to add it to your core repertoire.

A few principles for introducing new songs: teach it before you lead it (play it as a prelude or background, mention it from the front before the set), repeat it within 2–3 weeks of its introduction, and don’t introduce more than one genuinely new song per month. More than that, and your congregation spends more of their worship energy learning music than actually worshiping.

Also be honest with yourself about when a new song isn’t landing. Not every song that connects in the wider church culture will connect in your specific congregation. If you’ve given a song three or four genuine tries and your congregation isn’t engaging with it, let it go. The worship of your congregation is not the right venue to prove a point about a song.

The Long View of Worship Formation

Worship formation is slow. People aren’t primarily formed by the songs they sing on any single Sunday — they’re formed by the accumulated weight of years of singing the same truths, praying the same words, and returning week after week to the same rhythms of praise and prayer and proclamation.

This is actually good news for worship pastors in Ordinarytime. The fact that there’s no holiday this Sunday, no special guest, no packed house doesn’t mean nothing important is happening. Something is happening: your congregation is being shaped. The songs they’re singing are depositing a theological vocabulary that will serve them in their private prayer, in moments of crisis, in the conversations they have with their children and their neighbors.

Lead Ordinarytime with the long view. The most important work you do in worship ministry may be the most invisible — the faithful, unspectacular Sunday in early June when you led your congregation to sing an old song with fresh attention, and it went quietly deep.