At the previously mentioned church, most Sundays, I lead worship.

I've been thinking a lot about music inside the church service, more specifically about the instruments and band that we use.

Most of the time, the band for Sunday mornings at Engaging Life consists of me on acoustic guitar and lead vocals, my father-in-law Robert on keyboard and vocals combined with a rotating cast of female vocalists (we have 5 or 6 ladies who are part of the team and they swap out on a schedule that Mrs. Blount made). About 1/2 of the time we have a drummer, and they play a second hand electronic kit that we purchased from another local church.

Most Sundays, this rag tag group sounds pretty good, but I've been thinking about ways to make things better. As a smaller church, we don't have access to much money or many more people that can help out, so with limited resources how can we continue to experiment with our music? Here are a few ideas:

Drum machine and / or programmed synth

While we don't currently play to a click track, I think I might like to try out pre-programming drums and playing the loops back live. I have most of the tools I would need for this, although I'd need to buy something to trigger different songs with my feet (because my hands are busy playing guitar most of the time).

One of the problems with having a drummer only about 1/2 of the time is that uptempo songs lose a lot of their punch, and I think if I had the capability to pre-program some drums I could prepare for having no drummer, but still keep a lot of the benefit of having a rhythm section.

Start a band

I know what you're thinking, don't you already have a partially staffed band? While it's true that I have a great team to work with on Sundays, no one that is currently participating has the time to devote to a full time band.

I'm a decent song writer, and have a little experience performing in non-church context. Every 6 months or so I get the itch to start a proper band, with practices and playing shows, and maybe even a bit of touring.

I think that if I did start a band, and was able to rally together the right number of members (Bass / Drums / Keys would be more than enough for my liking) I could with luck convince them to help out with worship ministry in the church. Getting this started now would fill in our need in the moment, and I could encourage other musical members of the congregation to also start bands so that I wouldn't be leading every Sunday.

While I'm not positive about the amount of time I could invest into this idea, I think it has a bit more forward focus than the drum programming does.

Start a music school for interested youth

Another option I've been contemplating for a few years is to start teaching kids in the church how to play the different instruments they might be interested in. I'm not a terribly competent drummer or pianist, but I could get the kids started enough to play through most of the sort of songs we sing, and then allow them space to learn more on their own.

I think this is the concept that has the most value. It has the combined strength of developing the people that we already have in our church and developing the music ministry without a lot of output or cost.

The struggle here though is the amount of time this could take. We're talking about a possible 6 months for each student to go from nothing to playing on Sunday, but only if we could do a weekly practice and the kids followed up with practice on their own.

Thoughts?

Are you a part of a smaller church that has been working on developing interesting and engaging worship? I'd love to hear your thoughts about the ideas expressed here. Please email me: joshua at engagelakecounty.com