With my first post I must begin by recommending the most useful tool I have found for planning services–Planning Center Online. This tool powerful and easy to use. I lead worship at two churches (one on Sunday mornings and our church plant on Saturday nights). This involves, two different teams, two different services, and two different pastors. This is has changed my 12-16 hour planning process for services to 6-8 hours (and sometimes as little as 4 hours).

What can it do? Allow me to list a few features:

1. It creates pdfs for your cord charts. It also can be configured to generate the same chord chart in any desired key.

2. You can create a schedule for your worship team (i.e. who’s planing and what they are playing/singing). It then sends each person an e-mail with an "Accept" or "Decline." When they click accept/decline an e-mail is sent to you telling you that the person has confirmed or declined the request for the week.

3. It allows for uploads and link attachments. For example: I wanted my team to watch Paul Baloche’s "Worship Band Workshop" both "part 1" and "part 2." I found it on YouTube, and then attached a link. I sent an e-mail to my team and asked them to watch it. All they had to do is click the link and it’ll take them to the video.

4. Planning Center allows the leader to attach mp3s to the plans. This is useful when introducing a new song so that everyone on your team has listened to the song before coming to practice. There is an option in Planning Center to allow for downloads of the mp3 or just to allow the users to listen. For example: I wrote a song that our team was going to do on in a Sunday service. I did a recording of just me and my guitar and put it up on Planning Center. I set the permissions to download (because I owned the song) so that my team could put it on a CD, computer, or whatever in order to learn the song well.

These are just a few things that Planning Center allows you to do. You can check it out with a free subscription… but the free subscription doesn’t allow the users to do much. In order to get a deeper idea of how powerful this tool is, I’d recommend watching the tutorials. Planning Center Online