Great Systems connected with Visual Thinking = Effective Worship (aka. sanity)

It's been a year since we started a contemporary service.  Some of the benefits we've experienced:

1) New Faces: this service has attracted some of our innactive members of the church as well as lots of guests from the community.  This was the main reason we started this service and it is growing!

2) A Growing Band: we continue to add new musicians.  As a result, we are experiencing some growing pains because not everyone can play every week.  We're shifting to a team-model where we mix up vocals and musicians and have different people play.

There are lots of pieces and parts to the service and there are some people on our team that would like to play different instruments.  I've made a card for each musician and vocalist and drew the instrument they would like to play (there's one guy who can play guitar, bass and drums so I rotate him through the instruments each week).

To help organize all this, I created a cork board (pictured above):

From top-down:

White = Date and Theme of the Sunday worship

Pink = musician/vocalist that is on for that Sunday

Blue = elements of the worship (readings, confession, forgiveness, etc.)

Bright green = songs

So far, the system is working great and I can instantly see what songs we're doing and who is on for each Sunday.  This also helps me be intentional about creating smooth transitions.

Whatever project you face, hopefully this helps you to literally 'see' the pieces and parts.  It doesn't have to be fancy: a corkboard and some colored index cards will do the trick!