Lifepoint Resources

One of the joys of being the Musical Director for the Lifepoint campus of Lifepoint Church (as we are currently a two campus church, with a Lifepoint Downtown campus as well) is getting introduced to a plethora (oooh big word for me) of new worship music on a semi-regular basis, as well as delving (wow two in one post!) through a slew (yes, I did get a thesaurus) of all types of music to review for performance songs.

As far as Performance songs go, I'm working on a post for the Lifepoint Worship Blog (this past week's set listing post is up) regarding those, so check back there later, but as far as programming worship goes I wanted to share a few thoughts out there.

First off for programming a service let me recommend the amazing planning center online it's a service that helps you build your service and setup your people for their services that they can service.... sorry... Basically you can setup your service add your worship plans, schedule your people, and time everything. they have different paid plans for what your need, our let's me store our lead-sheets online and when I apply a song to the service it automatically builds a package of all the lead sheets (as long as I have them pre-uploaded) for the musicians and vocalists. (and the drummers, mustn't forget the drummers).

CCLI, not only a great site for keeping worship "legal" (CCLI license required) but also a great place to get charts, and to see new worship music. We use the Song select service which is awesome when I need to find a chart for a worship song... not always perfect (some songs/charts aren't available, some songs searches return a million [ok, not literally] results) but still a very good service.

Itunes (I'm not putting a link for this here, you should have it by now). I also use Amazon MP3 (Again no link here) to obtain most of my music selections. I can browse and preview thousands of worship songs without having to borrow a cd player and stand in the middle of an aisle with earphones. Not only that but I'm a huge fan of Podcasts, (the 8 gigs of space currently dedicated to storage of such would agree with that statement) and some churches (namely lifechurch.tv have made available, not only their sermons, but also their worship sets, it's cool to hear what other churches are doing).

North Point Music: (You can also find this one off the North Point Music Blog) - If you've got a subscription to the service then you can watch video tutorials on numerous subjects from how they run practices to how to play one of their worship songs, also has numerous Multi-Tracks and Core Packages available for purchase.

Numerous other blogs: Such as North Points, Elevations, (Wade Joy's who's the worship pastor for them), to name a few (There are others, so many others). It's a simple way to see what other ministries and/or churches are doing to reach their communities, along the lines I know Josh participates in the creative chaos blogs hosted by `Los. It's an "event" that takes place every Thursday where people from all across the country post something creative they've done in regards to their services.

These are just a few of the many resources I look to when it comes time to program the worship for the service...