Bonus: The Surprising Reason You Need to Start a Choir

Alex Enfiedjian 00:04 Hey, everybody, this is a bonus episode for you of the worship leader training podcast. Occasionally, when I have a few megabytes to spare on my podcasting plan, and I have a few extra thoughts spinning around my brain, I will spit out a short, but sweet bonus episode for you. So that’s what this is. And I’m excited to share these thoughts with you. Because I’ve been thinking about these things. And I hope that it’ll help you start thinking about these things. But before we talk about these things, I want to say happy birthday to the podcast, because the podcast is two years old today, officially October 19, was when we started two years ago, and it’s October 19 today, so thank you for being a part of it. If you’ve been apart from the beginning, that’s awesome. And it makes me happy. And to celebrate the birthday, we are launching worship leader training.com worship leader training calm. So now it’s no longer just a podcast, but there’s a website that will have blogs, and reviews. So training articles for you and reviews about products that are cool, or albums that were really digging or just things that we think you might like to check out. So all of this content, the podcast, the blog, and the reviews will all be at worship leader training.com. So go check that out. Happy birthday. Alright, so today for this bonus episode, I want to talk about the surprising reason why you should start a choir. And the reason I’m thinking about this is because I’ve been at my new church for about three or four months. And as the music is starting to improve, and things are getting exciting, I’ve had more and more people start to approach me about wanting to sing on the worship team. And you and I both know that not everybody is ready to sing or hold a microphone close to their mouth. And so I’m like, Man, what can I do with these people? Well, there’s an option, we can start a choir or appraise chorus, and appraise chorus would be a group of, I don’t know, six to 10 or 12 people that gather to sing on the stage, maybe once every six to eight weeks. And so what I’d be doing is creating an outlet for people to serve who aren’t necessarily ready to be on the worship team. And this accomplishes two purposes. One, it gives me a place to put people who aren’t ready. So when I say no, it’s not this hard. No, you suck it out of here. But it’s no, you know, I think a better place for you right now would be to join our praise chorus, and you can sing for the Lord and sing for the church. And it’d be great place for you to use those gifts. So that’s one of the reasons why I would start this thing is it’s a place to put people who aren’t quite ready. The other side of that coin is that it’s a training ground. So now you’ve got this thing going. And now you can start teaching these people about harmony, about blending about tone, all of that stuff. So it serves two purposes. And the title of this episode is the surprising reason why you should start a choir, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be acquired, what I’m really talking about is that we as worship leaders should have alternate training grounds where people can serve, that might be a youth band, that might be a women’s ministry worship team, it might be a men’s ministry worship team, it might be a college team. So you want to look at creating in your church, these different outlets for people who aren’t quite ready to stand on the stage on Sunday. And so I would highly encourage you to do that. Now, you’re like, I’ve got a lot to do, Alex and I don’t have enough time. And that’s where I’d say it’s really important for you to get creative with your planning and your scheduling of this because it really doesn’t need to add much time to your schedule. So for example, if you’re going to be doing a praise course once every eight weeks, what you do is you download the songs from Planning Center, if you have Planning Center, you should you download the mp3 download the chord charts and you put them in a dropbox folder. If you don’t have Dropbox, you should. So you take that link to that folder and you send it to the eight people who are going to be in your praise course you say, Okay, guys, in eight weeks, we’re going to play these songs. So it does take some advanced planning, you got to pick your set ahead of time and eight weeks, we’re gonna play these songs, please listen to them. Then the two weeks prior to the Sunday that they’re going to sing. You have them come an hour before your normal band rehearses and you say, All right, we’re gonna spend this hour going through the songs, teaching you the harmonies, making sure you guys sound good. And so really, it only adds two hours to your schedule in a week. So it’s totally manageable. And it’s totally doable. And it’s so worth it. Because not only are you training these people, and not only are you giving them a place to sing, it’s also a place to identify people who actually can sing and go, you know what, this person might be good with a mic, this person might be ready to be on the stage. So that’s why I think you should start a choir or a praise course, or a youth band, or a college band, or some just start some outlets at your church for people to serve and be creative about your scheduling and how much effort it really doesn’t need to take too much effort. So for example, for the youth band, at my old church, we started a youth band. And I literally picked the songs half an hour before the kids got there and threw the PowerPoint together. And it took me half an hour and every week they came they showed up we rehearsed for a half hour. So that’s what an hour’s worth of work. But now you’ve got a training ground for these young people. And and half of those young people I ended up using on my Sunday morning team because they got good enough to be part of Sunday mornings. So this is why I think you should highly consider starting other outlets. Besides Sunday morning. You don’t want the stage to be the only place to put musicians you want to have stepping stones to the stage. That’s my bonus episode for this week, or month or whatever it is. And that’s it. God bless you guys and I will see you on November first for the actual episode of the month. God bless. Bye