Blog – Motion Worship – Video Loops, Countdowns, & Moving Backgrounds for the Christian Church

7 Tips for Simplifying Your Holiday Calendar

The holiday season is a special time for the church community, filled with opportunities to connect, celebrate, and share the joy of the season. However, managing the church's holiday calendar can be overwhelming, with the temptation to pack it full of events and activities. In this blog post, we'll explore the benefits of simplifying your approach to the holidays and focusing on just a couple of ...

Six Church Service Ideas for the Sunday After Thanksgiving

The week after Thanksgiving is a special time for church communities to come together and reflect on gratitude, share in fellowship, and spread love to those in need. It's an opportunity to transition from a season of thankfulness to a season of giving. In this blog post, we'll explore some creative church service ideas for the week after Thanksgiving that can help foster a sense of unity, service...

Best Practices for Changing Lyric Slides

When executing services and events at your church, the onscreen presentation is a huge part of your congregation’s experience. When it comes to slides with lyrics, going unnoticed is the goal. If an attender is thinking about when the slides change, it’s likely because they’re too early or too late. In that case, they serve to distract from the experience rather than enhance it. Here are...

How To Schedule Your Week as a Senior Pastor

As a senior pastor, your work schedule is unlike most. While you might enjoy more flexibility in your calendar and diversity in your to-do’s than a typical 9-5 gig, you also face unique challenges and uncharacteristic demands. Creating a schedule that allows for deep productivity, meaningful pastoring, and sufficient rest is a puzzle that takes trial and error to figure out. While everyone is di...

How to Prioritize Your To-Do List as a Church Admin

As a church admin, It can be difficult to prioritize tasks when everything feels like the most important, asks come out of nowhere, and your inbox and co-workers won’t quit interrupting. How do you stop letting your to-do list run your life and use it, instead, to set you up for success in the moment and for tomorrow? There are many productivity techniques and different methods that work for...

When Should You Start Planning Your Christmas Church Services?

What if I told you that it’s possible to relax during the week leading up to Christmas, even as a senior pastor, worship pastor, or tech director? I know, I know, sounds crazy, right? While December 22nd is traditionally reserved for crippling anxiety and last-minute service planning, I’m here to tell you that it’s possible to be prepared and give yourself space to soak in the holiness of th...

Hire or Contract? Sound Professional Edition

Most churches find it important to have someone available to run sound for rehearsals and services. While some are lucky enough to have a sound-board-savvy volunteer on the roster, most of us find that hiring a professional either to be on staff or contracting week to week can be a simple way to elevate production quality. When it comes to contracting or hiring, how do you know which route is b...

Worship Pastors: Why and How to Start Using Music Directors

I’ve been to a lot of churches that don’t have assigned music directors. It seems to mostly be smaller churches that feel they either don’t have the resources/personnel necessary for a Music Director (MD), or just generally don’t feel it’s needed. I’m here to tell you that almost any church is not only capable of introducing an MD role to their teams, but will actually be better off fo...

Keeping the Church’s Post-Easter Momentum Alive

One of the best church weekends of the year - Easter - is immediately followed by one of the most difficult weekends of the year. For several weeks (or months), you and your team spend hours planning, organization, and executing tasks for Easter services, only for all the momentum to come to a screeching halt when it’s all over. We get it - Easter takes all your focus and energy, and by the t...

Circumvent Common Easter Sunday Disasters

Easter Sunday is one of the biggest weekends of the year for churches. While you’re putting finishing touches on your resurrection celebration, it doesn’t hurt to incorporate a plan for how to manage any potential fail points. Securing a few precautionary measures will help you feel confident to tackle any last minute issues or demands when Easter rolls around and elevate your peace of mind so...

Worship Pastors: Building Close Relationships with Your Team

You wear a lot of hats as a worship pastor. You’re doing a lot of administrative organizing tasks throughout the week, you’re finding songs and curating setlists, coordinating with staff members, and communicating to the team. But while an effective worship pastor needs to be good at driving the bus from a managerial standpoint, they also need to be relational and empathetic with their team...

3 Tips for Managing Details as a Church Admin

As a church administrative assistant, you’re constantly juggling details. Your day is jam packed with going to meetings, taking notes, revising plans before Sunday morning, scheduling building rooms for groups, and standing in the middle of a hurricane of last-minute requests. It can be… draining to say the least. Being a church admin is a very dynamic job, and it can be difficult to proper...

Four Tips for Elevating Production Quality Right Now

When it comes to tightening up production quality on Sundays, a few tweaks can go a long way. Often, it’s not about adding more, but about making sure that what you already have is clean, consistent, and ready to go come the weekend. Here are four tips you can apply right now to tighten up your production quality week after week: Slide to the Right For most small to mid-sized churches, ...

New Worship Team Orientation Meetings: Best Practices

While an audition process is great for gauging someone’s capability, it’s not the end of the onboarding process for new worship team members. Maybe a singer passed worship team tryouts but after you get them involved, you begin questioning whether or not you were right about them. Are they actually ready? It’s not uncommon after a new team member is brought on to experience a rehearsal fi...

Worship Ministry: Balancing Volunteer and Paid Musicians

There are several churches that rely entirely on volunteer worship teams, while others rely 100% on a paid contract musician structure. It’s pretty easy to keep everyone’s expectations similar when the whole team is comprised of all volunteers or all paid musicians, but once you start mixing them together, the balance can get difficult. Who should be paid and who should be a volunteer? Shou...

Tips for Training in New Worship Team Volunteers

As a worship pastor, you deal with people of all sorts of skill levels. Chances are if you’ve worked in churches for long enough, you’ve seen people volunteer to help out who can hardly play an instrument, as well as volunteers far beyond your own skill level. That’s the nature of working in a church – you see a very wide array of skill and commitment levels in volunteers. And while mos...

Building a Leadership Team in your Church Plant

When you’re planting a church, it’s important to equip capable, trustworthy leaders to help bring the vision to life. Finding these leaders, however, can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re juggling everything else that comes with planting. Here’s a four-part roadmap for finding, recruiting, and nurturing a successful team for your new church: Pray with people you trust Jus...

Church Musicians: Should You Pay Them?

As a freelance drummer in Minneapolis, MN, I’ve had the opportunity to play at several churches in the area. I have gotten the privilege to share the stage with volunteer musicians at new church plants meeting in high schools and theaters, as well as at megachurches. Playing at several churches has given me the chance to see how different worship pastors approach building worship teams, sched...

How Often to Introduce New Songs at Church

You want worship music to be engaging and reflective of your church’s culture. Every church will have a unique selection of songs that fit their congregation best. However, while sticking to your roots is smart, that doesn’t mean you need to leave your congregation singing the songs over and over. In fact, if you are frustrated that your congregation is not involved and engaged in worship as m...

Working Ahead: Building a Sermon Calendar

Staying on top of your work as a pastor can be difficult at times. You wear a lot of hats, and depending on your church size and culture, you may be working what feels like much more than a single job. But your primary job as a pastor is to lead your congregation and “make disciples”. While preaching a sermon allows you to teach someone about a single concept or passage of scripture, “dis...