Last year our staff team attended a satellite location of the Elephant Room and I thought it was great. I loved the concepts, I loved the participants and I loved how it went. I blogged my way through each of the sessions and you can read the recaps here -

• Preaching to Build the Attendance vs. Preaching to Build the Attendees: Matt Chandler and Steven Furtick
• Culture in the Church vs. Church in the Culture: Mark Driscoll and Perry Noble
• Compassion Amplifies the Gospel vs. Compassion Distorts the Gospel: Mark Driscoll and David Platt
• Unity: Can’t We All Get Along? vs. Discernment: My Way or the Highway: Steven Furtick and James MacDonald
• Multi-Site: Personality Cult vs. God’s Greater Glory: Perry Noble and Matt Chandler
• Love the Gospel vs. Share the Gospel: Greg Laurie and Mark Driscoll
• Elephant Room Takeaways

Elephant Room Round 2 is on its way and there is still time to register. Watch this video to get a feel of how it will go -

The Elephant Room is happening in Chicago on Wednesday, January 25 and there are locations all over the US (and one in Canada!) that you can attend. Registration and more info here – www.theelephantroom.com/registration-locations/

As I’ve told you before, 2011 was a big year for me when it came to reading. I set out at the beginning of the year to make reading a real priority and gathered books (physical and digital) I wanted to get through.

“Pursuing Christ. Creating Art.” by Gary Molander was not originally on my list but towards the end of the year I had heard so many great things about it, I decided I needed to include it on my reading list. I was not.. not.. NOT disappointed. To be honest, once I started reading, I could not put it down! (Actually, to be accurate, once I started reading I couldn’t close my Kindle app.)

The more I read, the more excited I got. The more I read, the more I wanted friends of mine to read it. The more I read, notes and quotes were posted on twitter and facebook. Thanks to the beauty of social media, Gary and I were able to connect that day over twitter (him, @garymo, me, @chrisfromcanada) and I made sure he knew I thought the book was really important and I wanted more people to read it.

PURSUING CHRIST. CREATING ART. is written for people who are living in the intersection of the Christian faith, and the creation of art. By their nature, artists look at a life of faith differently, and that unique journey warrants an exploration of what it means to be a Christ-follower and an artist. The book intentionally veers away from tips and techniques and formulas, while concentrating on the journey, the mystery, and the heart.

Thanks to Gary’s generosity, I have got three copies of “Pursuing Christ. Creating Art.” to give away to my blog readers. Not only will you get the book but Gary has offered to autograph them personally for you so you can brag to all your friends!

Enter below – the contest is open now and I’ll announce the winners on Thursday, January 19. Some of these entries can be done once per day so make sure you’ve got as many chances as possible to be one of the winners!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

If you’re seeing the mobile version of this site, the giveaway widget may not show up. As a first step, leave a comment below to enter the giveaway and then come back to this page to see the other ways you are able to enter the contest.

[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

Hopefully you’ve been tracking with this series and beginning to see how many of these resources are working together to help you as you research, resource, communicate, plan and lead on Sunday morning. Blogging is helpful for connecting with other worship leaders, Planning Center is great for planning and communicating, ProPresenter is a great tool for running the visual side of Sunday morning – of course there are lots of tools which can accomplish these things but I’ve tried to share with you some of the reasons why I use the ones I do.

WorshipHouse Media is a great site which aggregates media content from lots of different producers in one place – motion backgrounds, worship intro videos, mini teaching videos, animated Bible text videos, whatever you’re looking for when it comes to visual content as part of your worship service, you’ll want to see what WorshipHouse Media has to offer.

The site is setup the way you’d expect – you can search by title or theme or producer or scan through various media types. There’s a list of what’s popular and at certain times of year media will be featured for Christmas or Easter, etc depending on the season.

The real beauty of WorshipHouse Media is that it isn’t only in-house videos produced by WHM staff which are available through the site. Video producers from media companies and churches all around the world are producing videos which are available at a really reasonable cost at WorshipHouse.

You may not have anyone in your church who can do any kind of video production, you may not have any media staff at your church but with a small budget allocated to purchasing videos every year you can have the benefit of great media to go along with your presentation on Sunday morning.

Visual communication is vital in our culture – remember, people coming to your church receive most of their information (for better or worse) from a screen. Computers, TVs, movies, phones, tablets – people are used to receiving and processing information on a screen.

If you are using videos as part of what you do on Sunday morning, WorshipHouse Media is a great aggregator for you. If you don’t use videos, have a look. You probably don’t want to jump right in to the deep end but talk with your pastor, present him with a well thought-out idea of how you’d like to use a video as part of your worship package, the songs that would be combined with it, how the video would be introduced and how you hope it would impact people in the congregation. If you’ve developed a level of trust with your pastor, hopefully you’ll be able to talk through the idea and try some of these new things.

Check it out – www.worshiphousemedia.com

[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

We are living in the age of the app. Hardware is no longer restricted by knobs and buttons but only by the app store it’s connected to and the developers who are doing their best to extend its ability. Almost every genre of software has been transformed by apps over the last few years – Angry Birds, Dropbox, Flipboard, YouVersion to name a few!

It’s no different when it comes to apps for worship leaders. Lots of software services out there (including some that I’ve talked about in this series) will have their own app. The power of these services has been extended to millions of devices – whether they’re iOS, Android, Blackberry, whatever – all around the world.

There are several apps that I use on my iPhone or iPad almost every day. YouVersion is my default Bible reader. Flipboard and Zite get read while I’m drinking my morning coffee. My wife opens Weather HD before turning on the TV for the forecast. Not to mention Tweetbot, Kindle, Instagram.. and on and on it goes.

One app which has become a staple gives me and my band a ton of control when it comes to running click tracks on Sunday morning. SoundCue for iPad does everything and more I would expect an app like this to do and I wanted to share it with you as part of this blog series.

You may or may not run click tracks with your band on a Sunday morning but if you do one of the first questions is always “How are we going to play clicks?” I remember my touring band days when we would run click tracks off CD on a portable CD player that our drummer would control. Not ideal – lots of skipping, scratched CDs, etc – but it allowed us to try some pretty great things that not many other bands were doing 10 or 12 years ago.

The point of this post isn’t to explain how click tracks work or what you need to get setup but if you are running clicks, you need to give SoundCue a look.

A couple of months ago I put together a quick walkthrough video of this app as a thank you to the developers. They were kind enough to give me a review copy of the app and I thought it was definitely worth sharing:

The only update that I’d give since recording that video is that moving songs from iTunes to my iPad wirelessly with iOS 5 is definitely easier so you’ve got three really easy ways of getting click tracks off your computer in to SoundCue – email it to yourself as an attachment, add it to a shared Dropbox folder or sync with iTunes.

SoundCue is a little pricier than most apps out there (as I’m writing this it’s $14.99 in the Canadian iTunes app store) but if you are a regular user of click tracks with your worship band and you’re looking for something better than the iTunes interface, this is a great option.

You can get more info on SoundCue over at their website – www.soundcueapp.com

[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

Okay so today’s post is covering a resource that is pretty new to me but I am convinced that ProPresenter is the best choice out there when it comes to projection and managing the visual side of Sunday morning.

Moving to ProPresenter is a recent change for us but one we’ve been planning for a long time. You may be using Powerpoint or software from another visual worship company but if you’re able to make the investment in ProPresenter, it is a decision you will not regret.

We have been using other software for the past 5 years and had become frustrated with the number of band-aids and “just do this” quick fixes we were having to do to make sure that we could pull off our projection on Sunday morning. Once our presentations started freezing for no good reason and the software was crashing on a pretty new computer, we knew it was time to make a change.

There are way too many features to recap in this blog post and honestly one of the best features of ProPresenter is the amount of support provided by developers and the user community. Just have a look at how some of the features of ProPresenter 5 are laid out on this page and how each one is given lots of explanation - http://www.renewedvision.com/propresenter.php?page=pro5

I’m ready to assume that if you’re in the market for projection software and ProPresenter is an option for you, you know what you’re doing when it comes to media, videos, motion backgrounds, etc so there’s not much value in me explaining the basics but let me hilight three features in ProPresenter 5 that I am loving and which I think you will find really helpful.

Song Arrangements
We have rehearsal on Thursday night and one of the things we do is work out song arrangements – get a good feel of how we’re going to do verses, choruses, bridges for each of our songs. These aren’t set in stone and there is always freedom to go outside of the arrangement on Sunday morning but doing this gets everyone – singers, band, projection – on the same page with where we’re going next.

With the song arrangement feature, all it takes is a bit of drag-and-drop to get the arrangement in place for that service. The slides in the song will adjust themselves according to the arrangement that you’ve laid out. If anything, you’ll come back Sunday morning after your rehearsal and will remember how the arrangement of that song went during rehearsal. Awesome!

Fill in Blank & Bullets
One of the factors in wanting to move away from our previous software solution was that we had to import Powerpoint into the presentation for our pastor’s message slides. This meant another workflow for formatting, another level of file management and another piece of software that our projection volunteers had to know. Enter ProPresenter with a solution to allow us to get rid of Powerpoint!

Filling in blanks and creating bullet slides are really the only uses we had for Powerpoint and in ProPresenter 5 those are taken care of. By moving to this new software we are simplifying our preparation workflow and keeping our entire presentation local to one software solution. This is good!

Planning Center Online Integration
If you’ve been reading this series from the beginning, you know that I am a big fan of Planning Center Online and ProPresenter 5 takes it to the next level by integrating my PCO plans right into their software. If you are a PCO user, you have got to see how easy this is to implement. Talk about making your Sunday morning preparation easier – all of your planning, scheduling and managing your service and visual media in one place!

Watch this video to get an idea of how easy this is:

Again, the feature list on ProPresenter is huge and if you’ve placed a priority on the visual aspect of Sunday morning at your church you’ll definitely want to have it on your list as a possible solution.

You can find lots more info on ProPresenter and order directly from their website – www.propresenter.com

[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

Soon after coming on staff at my church in the fall of 2005 I discovered that lots of worship leaders were blogging, sharing updates with one another and letting people know the kinds of things that were happening in their churches. I found these blogs really helpful and quickly learned that I would be able to learn lots by staying updated with these other worship leaders through their blogs.

After a conference in early 2007 I decided to jump in to the world of blogging and quickly got setup with WordPress. I loved how easy it was to manage my site on the WordPress server and that I really didn’t need to manage anything other than my own content. I began blogging my Sunday setlists, sharing links and writing about some of the things I was learning in my role.

Over time, I knew that I wanted to migrate my blog to my own self-hosted server to give me the benefit of a few things that weren’t available with my blog hosted by WordPress – a greater selection of themes, more control over plugins and eventually the ability to sell advertising.

In five years, blogging has been an incredible journey. I’ve been able to learn from tons of other worship leaders, share resources with people who are looking to learn, encouraged me to think critically about how I lead worship and, most of all, been loads of fun.

If you are looking to start blogging, I want to give you info on three things which will get you up and running.

1. WordPress - www.wordpress.com
   There really isn’t any other option worth considering. I’ve looked at most other blog platforms and I keep coming back to WordPress. The ease of use, the ability to expand the platform combined with the community of users is pretty unbeatable. If you’ve got an issue with your blog, chances are that someone out there has a solution. If you’ve got something you want to do with your WordPress blog, chances are that someone out there has figured out a way to do it on theirs. Setting up a WordPress account is very easy and you can be up and running with your own blog in minutes.

   www.wordpress.com will get you everything you need and running a  blog on WordPress is free.

2. FlockHosting – www.flockhosting.com
   Once your blog is at the place that you’re ready to have it hosted on your own server, FlockHosting is a great option. I’ve hosted domains with Chuck for several and I love his pricing, I love his customer service and I love the reliability of his servers.You can buy a domain or get one free from FlockHosting when you pay for a year of hosting. Pay $60 to get your server setup with a year of hosting and your domain registration – great deal! One really great thing is that there is a one-click install option to get WordPress setup on your new FlockHosting account – no downloading or uploading, no FTP, nothing but clicking one button to get WordPress up and running!

3. Standard Theme – www.standardtheme.com
   The world of WordPress themes is a neverending sea of good, bad and ugly. Even with best wordpress themes in Google you’ll get back 22 million results. Stop the madness!I was fortunate enough to be a beta tester for Standard Theme when it was released by the team at 8bit and I have never looked back. Standard is the easiest, simplest, most straightforward theme I’ve come across and the platform allows for some really great customization. Once you decide to run WordPress on your own server, Standard Theme is the first theme option you should check out.

So there you go, three resources to help you get started or to take the next step in blogging. If you’ve decided to take the leap, leave a comment here so we can visit your blog and encourage you.

[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

Leaders are readers.

You’ve heard that before, right? I am convinced it is true. Very few things can shape your thinking, inspire and motivate next steps like giving a few hours to reading a great book. The beauty of reading books (as opposed to tweets, blogs or magazine articles) is that you have to read books over the course of several days or weeks – and that’s totally acceptable! I love the way that a book is able to infiltrate my thinking as I’m working my way through it.

Because books can have such a deep effect on us, it’s important to be reading great books. Your life is not long enough to be able to read everything so make sure that you use your reading time well. Read great fiction, great history, great biographies, great stories. You remember doing this as a kid, don’t you? I can still remember getting books from my grandfather every year at Christmas and leafing through pages and pages and pages of incredible stories.

Have you lost that? Have you lost the wonder that books used to give you as a kid? If you have, maybe reading has become clinical and simply information driven. “I have to read this because I have to know this stuff. I have to read this for a class. I have to read this because my pastor asked me to.” Ugh.

Whether you love reading or not, the reality is that even in our incredibly digital, wired, connected world reading is still very, very important. Don’t believe me? iPad, Kindle, Nook, etc, etc, etc – you may not love the specific device but one of the core purposes of creating the device was to give people a way to read more books. And that’s exactly what people are doing.

In 2011 I set out to read more than I have in any year since university – and yes, most of those were “I have to” books back then! I spread my reading attention pretty wide and read books by church leaders, business leaders, artists, and other authors who just intrigued me. Most of my reading happened on my Kindle iPad app but I read a bunch of real books too.

How much did you read this year? Want to read more this year? Leaders are readers. Don’t forget that.

So here’s what I’ve done. I’ve compiled a short list of some of my favourites which I often recommend to other worship leaders. Some of these are almost required reading for people on our worship teams and some are pretty high level and may take you a few months to work through, like they did for me.

I’ve set these links up as Amazon affiliate links – if you’re willing to buy them through the link, a small chunk of the sale price will come back to me. Consider it as a way of depositing a couple of bucks in to my new book account so that I can keep on reading!

So here you go, in no particular order, some of the books that I’d recommend to worship leaders looking to expand their library. The first set is links to physical copies of the books – kindle versions are below:

If you’re reading this on RSS, the books may not show. Head over to the blog to get the full post – http://www.chrisfromcanada.com/worship-leaders-toolkit-recommended-books/

[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

PraiseCharts has become a kind of one stop shop for me. Once I’ve planned a service, finalized songs and have a pretty good idea of what Sunday will look like I’ll look at the songs and realize that I need a lead sheet in a certain key,  maybe a click track or I might need a really detailed arrangement of a particular song. PraiseCharts is the first place I look for all of these and more.

Sure you can search online for a chord chart that’s been hacked together and from this post you know that CCLI’s SongSelect is a great resource for chord charts and lead sheets but that’s not in every church’s budget. There are also songs which sometimes aren’t available anywhere other than PraiseCharts.

Here’s how it works. When you get to the PraiseCharts site, just type in the title of the song you’re looking for:

 

PraiseCharts will find the song and show you all of the resources they’ve got attached to that song:

 

Beauty!

The chord charts that PraiseChart’s arrangers put together are top notch and they really shine when used alongside a click track. You and your band may not use click tracks yet but if you do, PraiseCharts has clicks for hundreds of songs. Here’s a list of click tracks produced by PraiseCharts which are available at a really affordable price.

(I’ve got a post coming later in this series that will talk more about click tracks and a great app you can use to play them live.)

So if you are looking for great resources for the songs you are doing on weekends, PraiseCharts is a great place to start. The team behind the site is A++… the extra + is because a bunch of them are Canadian! Ryan and his team are now moving behind producing song resources with other sites like WorshipVue for media content and WorshipTraining to help develop your worship teams with more great stuff on the way.

Find more info on PraiseCharts here -
www.praisecharts.com
www.facebook.com/praisecharts
www.twitter.com/praisecharts 

[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

Copyright compliance is one of those do-I-hafta? kinds of things. Yes, you hafta.

Your church has serious liability issues if you are not fulfilling your end of the copyright bargain. It goes like this: Artists (in the case of what we do, songwriters) create content (songs) which you share with your audience (congregation). In exchange for the artist giving you the opportunity to perform their song, you get to pay them a small amount of money as a way of reimbursing them for their creative work. Not a bad system, in theory. An incredibly hard system to manage, in reality.

Enter CCLI.

The beauty of CCLI is that they have worked out all of the agreements and details which will undoubtedly take way too much of your time and energy. You don’t know copyright law, you don’t know royalties and the reality is that you would spend so much time dealing with the ins and outs of all this stuff that you’d be costing your church too much money.

CCLI allows your church to comply with copyright law in your own country using a simple subscription fee model. You pay a small amount of money based on the size of your congregation and you are given the opportunity to perform any of the songs in CCLI’s library. Of course there are restrictions and limitations – that’s what small print is for! If you are doing nothing about copyright at the moment, checking in with CCLI is a great first step.

So that’s the first part. CCLI just helps take care of copyright issues for your church.

Beyond that, CCLI has created some other really helpful tools and resources for worship leaders and churches.

SongSelect is one of my favourite resources and a tool which I use every day. Here’s the basic idea: CCLI has taken all of the songs in their library and allowed you to search by title, lyric, theme, author, etc. Many of these songs (and almost all of the newer stuff that you’re looking for) will have chord charts and lead sheets attached to them. These charts can be printed in any key for your band.

There isn’t a week that goes by that I’m not searching, finding, printing, playing and sharing chord charts and lead sheets from SongSelect. Yes, there is an extra fee to access CCLI SongSelect but if you are buying songbooks or individual chord charts on other sites you may want to see if this is a better value.

On top of SongSelect, CCLI has all kinds of great products and resources available. The two newest ones are the streaming license and rehearsal license. We haven’t had a need for either of these licenses at my church but I did an interview with Rod Rachinski, COO of CCLI, earlier this year on how churches can benefit from the rehearsal license:

Get more info on CCLI here -
www.ccli.com
www.twitter.com/ccli

Copyright compliance can be a major issue for some churches. CCLI is a great resource that can take care of most copyright issues but they’ve also created a whole set of tools which can really help you do your job.

[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

Nothing in the last few years has changed the way that worship leaders plan services, manage resources and communicate with volunteers like Planning Center Online. If you are still using a mishmash of email, spreadsheets, sticky notes and Word documents to schedule volunteers, keep track of what songs you’re singing and plan your services, you owe it to yourself and to the ones you are leading to look at Planning Center. Their site is full of great tutorials and the guys behind the product are more than willing to help show you what it can do.

Here are a few things that Planning Center does really, really well:

• scheduling and communicating with volunteers in the way that best suits them – email, text, facebook, etc
• manage chord charts and lead sheets for your entire music library
• integrated mobile apps for iOS and Android
• lots, lots, lots more!

I’m coming up on five years (our first Sunday using it was January 21, 2007) as a Planning Center user and here are three (of many!) reasons why I love using it:

1. Planning Center is the easiest way to communicate with my volunteers
With one click, I can send an email to everyone scheduled to serve on any particular Sunday. If I make a change late in the week, if there is something I need them to know after rehearsal, if I want to bring a particular song or transition to their attention, Planning Center makes it very, very easy to do.

Sure I’ve got everyone’s email address but it’s not uncommon to have 12 or 15 or 20 people scheduled across our band, singers, projection and audio teams. One little click is definitely preferred over digging up a dozen or more email addresses.

2. Planning Center is the easiest way to plan and manage my service outlines
Sorting the song database to see which songs we haven’t sung recently, the matrix feature to see several outlines on one screen and the crazy easy drag-and-drop interface are all ways that Planning Center is a huge help for me as I plan services. Let me give you a heads up on one way that I love to use the matrix when I’m planning a series. Time for some screenshots!

First, I’ll lay out the weeks of a new series in the matrix. For this example, let’s use our Easter series coming up this March & April which will run for three Sundays, Good Friday and Easter Sunday:

Click the image to see it full-sizeNext I’ll add songs to the last Sunday of the series that I think may work thematically with the big idea of the whole series. At this point I’m just trying to build a pool of songs which may work during those Sundays. I’m not concerned yet with grouping songs together, building sets of songs or which songs will happen on which Sunday. I’m just gathering ideas. Here’s what it might look like after I’ve added some songs:

So now I’ve got my series laid out in a matrix, a pool of song ideas on the last Sunday. Usually I’ll end up with around 30 songs in my pool for a series which would run 4 to 6 weeks. From here, I can scan the list of songs and begin to see how song sets might work together and which songs may work with a theme on a particular Sunday. The beauty of the matrix is that I can drag and drop songs from right inside the matrix across the whole series. With just a few clicks and drags, my series can now look like this:

This alone is worth the price of admission and makes service planning really manageable whether you do it on your own or as part of a creative team.

3. Planning Center is constantly developing and improving
One of the hesitancies people have when they commit to an online tool (whether it’s free or paid) is future product development. Moving to any online resource is fine but the internet is littered with online tools which launched with a bang and have simply been left to rot or have been canned altogehter. We’ve all seen and used tools which were promising and practical but either didn’t develop the way we thought or have gone to the digital graveyard. Planning Center is not one of these.

All you need to do is have a quick look at the Planning Center blog to realize that development on this product is on-going in the right direction. With mobile apps, a complete redesign of the look, the iPad music stand interface and a long list of other improvements over the last few years, the team at Planning Center have shown they are committed to not only maintaining the status quo but pushing the limits on what the product is able to do and how the users are able to interact with it.

Here’s where you can find more info on Planning Center Online -
www.planningcenteronline.com
www.twitter.com/planningcenter
www.facebook.com/planningcenter

Do you use Planning Center at your church? Jump in the comments and let everyone know how you plan services at your church and what tools you are using to help make it happen.

So there you go, the first post in the worship leader’s toolkit blog series. Many more to come!