- In this video, I'm gonna share with you
six reasons why I believe Planning Center Services
is the best piece of software for worship leaders
who wanna keep their ministry organized.
Planning Center makes it so easy for worship leaders
to accomplish their primary administrative task,
including scheduling musicians, creating practice resources
and, of course, creating service plans.
I've been using Planning Center for over seven years now,
and I cannot imagine my worship ministry without it.
So, keep watching this video because not only are you gonna
learn about the benefits of this software,
but you're also gonna see that even the smallest of worship
ministry on the smallest of budgets can utilize
the full power of this software starting today.
(music)
This video is brought to you by Worship Leader School,
where you're gonna find the essential training, advice
and support you need to plan and lead worship as well as
to grow and develop yourself as a worship leader.
Go to worshipleaderschool.com to learn more.
If we haven't met yet, my name is Jake Gosselin,
I'm the creator of Churchfront.com, an online resource for
innovative and creative church leaders.
Make sure you subscribe to the channel and
hit the notification bell so you can receive all of our
latest content to help you grow yourself
and grow your church.
Make sure you also check out the show notes below this video
for some great free tools and resources
for your worship ministry.
In the year 2011, which seems like forever ago,
I was hired for the first time
as a part-time worship leader.
Up until then, I had spent about four years
leading worship as volunteer
and finally I had arrived in a position where
I had to take things a little bit more seriously,
and I especially needed to make sure I stay organized.
And I remember on the first day of work,
my pastor came into my new office and he said,
"Hey, we use Planning Center Services to plan our
worship services and to keep all of our volunteer scheduling
and teams organized".
And I'd never heard of Planning Center up until that point,
and it only took a couple days of me
dabbling in Planning Center for me to discover
how powerful it was and how much it was gonna make my life
easier as worship leader.
And now, after using the software in worship ministry
for over seven years, I see this software
just as important as Gmail or Dropbox or any other
comparable project management software out there.
And, of course, this software is specifically applicable
for those of us leading worship but, man, I think it's just
such an indispensable tool for our worship ministry.
And just to make it clear,
I'm not sponsored by Planning Center,
I don't have an affiliate relationship with them.
I'm just a huge fan of this tool, and I think
more worship leaders need to be using it.
You see, because last week I ran a poll on YouTube channel
asking you whether or not you're using
Planning Center Services to stay organized.
And of the 250 responses I got, one-third of you are not.
So, two-thirds are using Planning Center Services,
one-third are not.
And, I'm a little bit surprised by that,
I thought it was gonna be closer to like
75% or even 80% are using Planning Center Services.
So, that's why in the rest of this video,
I wanna walk you through - especially those of you
not using Planning Center, I wanna walk yo through
the major benefits of using this software
in your worship ministry.
So, here's the first reason why I think
you should be using Planning Center.
It's budget friendly and even free.
Even if you're in a situation right now where maybe you're
a solo worship or maybe you only have less than five people
in your worship and tech team, 'cause maybe it's
two musicians and two people who run tech.
If you have less than five people who are regularly
serving in these capacities at your church,
you can use Planning Center for free.
You can use the full power and capability of
the software for nothing.
So, financially speaking, there is no
legitimate barrier there for getting started with it.
And even if you do have a team of,
let's say, 10 people to 25 people,
to use Planning Center it's only gonna cost you $14 a month,
which, for that price point ,
it's not nothing but sure ain't much.
And as your worship ministry grows,
this price and plan will grow with you,
and I think rates are incredibly fair
for the amount of value you get from this software.
Reason number two you should use Planning Center
is for managing your song library.
One of the most important things we do as worship leaders
is we manage and organize the library of songs
that our churches are singing week in and week out.
And rather than just having paper copies of
a bunch of songs in a file cabinet somewhere,
its much better to have a digital database song library
where you're gonna be able to keep everything organized
and Planning Center makes this really easy to do.
You can directly import songs from CCLI's database
which makes reporting your use of those songs much easier.
You can also categorize the different songs
in your libraries according to genre, themes, tempo
and other things that just help you find
the particular songs you want for a particular spot
in a worship service.
You can even run reports on how many times you may have sung
a particular song over the past months or years.
And as worship leaders, this data can come in handy
for us to know what songs our congregation maybe is
most familiar with or what songs they're not familiar with,
and we might wanna repeat a little bit more.
So, that's one of my favorite features of Planning Center
is having the song library in one place online,
and you can create a bunch of different, unique and
helpful data points from it.
Reason number three you should be using
Planning Center Services is the lyric and chord editor.
As a worship leader, you must be providing your team with
accurate and high quality chord charts.
And you also wanna have the flexibility to alter
these chord charts, such as transposing them on the fly.
That's why I don't recommend just attaching PDF files to
songs within Planning Center, because you can't just alter
those on the fly nearly as easily.
There've been so many times where I've had to transpose
something on the fly, and because I have the raw text of the
chord chart within Planning Center, changing the key or
making any other alterations to the chart is
really, really quick and simple.
It's also important to upload the raw MP3 files of
legally purchased music for your band
to practice along with.
Even though Planning Center can do it,
I don't recommend just linking songs to Spotify or YouTube
where they can stream it.
'Cause often with that you don't have the capability
to transpose those songs,
and half the time, the arrangements aren't even
the proper arrangement to go along with the chord chart.
So, buy the song legally from iTunes or Amazon
and that's gonna give you the ability to upload the MP3 file
and then you can transpose it so they can
practice the song at home.
And make sure you have the CCLI rehearsal license
or something comparable so they can do this legally.
Reason number four Planning Center is a great tool
is for scheduling and communicating with your team.
Scheduling our team members and communicating with them
throughout the week can be one of the biggest headaches
for worship leaders.
But, Planning Center makes this process really easy.
Within seconds, you can import people
into your Planning Center account,
you can assign them to particular teams
or positions within your ministry.
And then, when you're looking at a weekly service plan,
you can easily add them to a particular role
for a particular week.
Planning Center is then going to prepare
some email notifications or even in-app notifications
to invite those people to serve in your worship service.
All they have to do then is press 'Accept' or 'Decline',
and you can even create automated reminders for people
who have accepted to serve on a particular day.
So then a couple days before worship service
or before a rehearsal, you know,
they'll automatically get a message like to be like,
"Hey! Make sure you're prepped for rehearsal
or for our worship gathering this week".
And, of course, like any other communication platform
it only works in so much as people actually use it.
So, make it a clear requirement and expectation to your team
to actually check their email or to download the app
on their smart phone and make sure notifications are on.
Many times I've heard the excuse from worship leaders
that sound something like this,
"Oh, we can never use Planning Center because my team
never checks their email".
Its not really a valid excuse.
Have you ever made it clear to them, as their leader,
that's it's an expectation for them to use their email
or to use the Planning Center app?
Ask yourself that question.
Make sure you set the expectations for them as their leader,
'cause you wanna get everybody on board with using this
as your central hub for worship ministry communication.
And even if you have a harder time with some folks,
you can just be proactive and text them or Snapchat them
or whatever they're doing to be like,
"Hey! Go onto Planning Center and let me know if
you can serve for these times".
But with all that said, Planning Center will make your life
so much easier when it comes to scheduling your team members
and communicating with them.
Reason number five why I Planning Center is the
ability to create worship service plans.
As worship leaders, we need to approach our
worship gathering with some sort of plan.
Of course, things do not always go according to plan
and we do need to be flexible to the leading of the
Holy Spirit within our worship gatherings.
But when we look at the Book of Corinthians, for example,
Paul makes it clear to the church in Corinth that,
"Hey! When you approach worship, it needs to be done
in an orderly fashion because God is a
God of peace, not a God of confusion".
So, Planning Center will help you plan worship services
in a way to eliminate confusion.
The service plan feature of this software makes it really
easy to lay out what's happening when and
who is responsible for leading what.
It's also really important for worship leaders
to be collaborating with the other leaders
on their church staff and having a central place where
everybody can log on to this cloud-based software
and alter the worship service or make comments
or have discussion about it.
It's just super helpful with collaborating
in a team environment.
And then at our church, always a half hour
before the service, we run through the plan
to make sure that everybody is on the same page,
and then we say our final prayer before our worship begins.
Reason number six why Planning Center is a great tool
is the integrations feature .
Planning Center plays really well with
the other pieces of software
that we use in our worship ministries,
including CCLI, ProPresenter, Praise Charts,
Essential Worship, Worship Together, The Worship Initiative,
a lot of those websites where you can find
some great song resources.
These integrations may not seem like a big deal,
but they're gonna save a whole lot of time,
especially when it comes to those repetitive tasks of
importing songs or building your ProPresenter playlist.
It's really, really valuable to have
this integration functionality.
And, of course, Planning Center Services
integrates beautifully with all of the other
Planning Center apps you can use for church and management.
And I highly recommend that you and your church
leadership team look into using Planning Center,
not only for your worship gatherings
but for check ins, registrations, giving
and all the other important stuff
that we need to do as churches.
I've used a handful of other church management software
that's out there and, hands down, Planning Center
is the most powerful yet the most user-friendly.
I don't know what it is...
I compare Planning Center to like the
Apple of the church management software world.
And if you are ready to utilize the power of
Planning Center for your worship ministry,
I wanna invite to check out worshipleaderschool.com
and, within Worship Leader School, I have a course
that walks you through the essentials of Planning Center
for worship.
What questions do you have about using Planning Center
for your worship gatherings,
make sure you let me know below in the comments
and let me know if you use Planning Center at your church
and what are your favorite features
about this software.
Thank you so much for watching.
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