How Christian Worship: Service Builder will fit in your congregation's workflow
April 21, 2022: The video below illustrates three areas where Christian Worship: Service Builder works well in tandem with other software tools and techniques to accomplish advanced, customized workflow for worship planning and preparation.
For some time now the WELS Hymnal Project has been promoting how the key features of Christian Worship: Service Builder will save congregations and their personnel a significant amount of time spent on the task of planning and preparing services. That promise remains valid. It really is the case that you can convert a service plan into a printable worship folder in a matter of moments. I’m looking forward to seeing how congregations will reinvest their time on other aspects of ministry.
But it’s worth noting that Christian Worship: Service Builder is a new tool, which means some amount of upfront investment of time will be required to learn the software and to customize it for your congregation’s specific needs. You will probably find that you’re initially spending more time on worship planning and preparation than you were before. Why? Because for a time you’ll not only be planning and preparing worship, you’ll be learning the ins and outs of a new and unfamiliar software application.
I’m a parish pastor myself. I’m in the process of planning how to integrate Christian Worship: Service Builder into my own worship planning and preparation workflow. My goal in this article is to offer a look at how I envision Christian Worship: Service Builder will fit into the typical worship planning and preparation workflow of a WELS congregation.
This subject requires a somewhat longer article. With so much to cover, I’ll divide the topic into sections according to the general phases of worship planning and preparation. 1) Seasonal planning, 2) Service planning, 3) Asset production, 4) Asset customization, and 5) Asset delivery. Then, to conclude, I’ll offer a brief set of recommendations on how to plan your adoption of Christian Worship: Service Builder.
Seasonal Planning
Seasonal planning is the work of looking at long-range worship plans, usually according to one or more liturgical seasons. For example, a pastor may work ahead to make long-range plans for a coming Lent and Easter season.
Worship planners use a wide variety of tools to support seasonal planning. Some use a legal pad to capture ideas, others build complex spreadsheets to visualize broad swaths of the church year. Seasonal planning often focuses on high-level matters like service themes, preaching texts, proposed choral works, and other matters that benefit from advance scheduling. Seasonal planning may, for example, keep the Hymn of the Day in view, but the task of selecting all the hymns for every service may be saved for a more detailed phase of the work.
In my committee’s early research on worship planning we got the clear impression that long-range planning techniques are often unique to a planner’s personal style or a congregation’s distinct planning structure. Thus I anticipate that most congregations will keep their seasonal planning workflow largely unchanged—even with Christian Worship: Service Builder in the mix. But they will find numerous features of Christian Worship: Service Builder to be most useful in their seasonal planning work.
For example, the powerful search feature in Christian Worship: Service Builder will probably enhance the task of seasonal planning quite a bit. Planners will be able to quickly search and view all available Christian Worship: Hymnal and Christian Worship: Psalter material. Full-text search is, of course, an option across the corpus of materials. But so is a Scripture index, along with powerful search functions that offer the ability to search by hymn tune, category, author, key signature, and other useful metadata. Christian Worship: Service Builder produces worship folders, yes, but it’s also a powerful database to support seasonal planning.
I envision doing my seasonal planning with a hymnal and psalter open on my desk and my computer’s web browser open to the lectionary calendar and search page in Christian Worship: Service Builder.
It’s also worth noting that as you make seasonal planning decisions you can enter them directly into the relevant service plans. This is where Christian Worship: Service Builder offers a distinct advantage. In the past, you may have put your seasonal planning decisions into a spreadsheet or written document of some kind, but someone later had to do the work of stitching together those decisions into a service folder. Now, when you make a decision and enter it into the service plan, the resource gathering is done for you—the two steps are collapsed into one. With Christian Worship: Service Builder your seasonal planning will more directly affect the next phase: individual service planning.
Service Planning
Service planning is the work of converting seasonal plans into fully-detailed individual service plans. An individual service plan includes final decisions on every component of the service: the order of service, the hymns to be sung, the readings to be read, the psalms to be chanted, the prayers to be offered, and the rites to be conducted. This is where Christian Worship: Service Builder will start to save even more of your worship planning and preparation time.
Working from the calendar view, you’ll begin creating individual service plans for each Sunday of the year (or for any day on which you conduct a service). Individual service plans are discrete pages where all the aforementioned elements of the service are selected in a single planning view. You’ll add hymns and psalm settings, choose an order of service, insert any optional rites (like a baptism, for example), and so on. Any such items that you entered into individual service plans during your seasonal planning phase will be waiting for you to pick up where you left off. And throughout this process you’ll have access to the practical power of the underlying database. You can search and browse the entire hymnal corpus—and your custom resources as well—for elements to add to your service plans. There’s even a notes field where you can leave a note to yourself or others in your organization about a particular service plan.
Asset Production
Asset production is the work of converting an individual service plan into fully-formed materials. I’m using the term “asset” here in the sense that professional content producers might use it. It’s a general term for any material that you are producing for distribution. In the case of worship planning and preparation, the assets are a printed bulletin, an exported screen presentation, or both.
This is where I think Christian Worship: Service Builder will save even more time. The work of stitching together a worship folder has always been rather cumbersome. It requires working with numerous files—templates for orders of service, individual RTF and TIFF files for psalm texts and hymn tunes, and so on. Then there are the prayers and occasional rites, to say nothing of any custom materials in use in your local setting.
The fact is that most of the Lutheran liturgical service consists of interchangeable parts. Each part represents a potential workflow of its own. You probably have developed a system of some kind to keep track of all these assets. And someone is responsible for finding what’s needed every week and putting it into a worship folder. If you’re that person then you’re going to love Christian Worship: Service Builder because Christian Worship: Service Builder does all that work for you.
Christian Worship: Service Builder includes a bulletin and presentation planning view that is connected to each service plan. There you’ll see all of your planning decisions converted into ready-to-distribute assets. When you add a hymn, the hymn is available for rapid insertion into the bulletin. The same is true of every other liturgical element. It’s all there in—and when you select something for inclusion the asset comes along for the ride. No more hunting for RTFs and TIFFs. No more tedious cropping and editing. Your planning decisions are instantly converted into usable assets. It’s a simple idea in concept but the practical results are remarkable.
Asset Customization
It’s at this phase that an important handoff takes place. Here Christian Worship: Service Builder passes the project onto software tools that are better equipped to handle what you need to do with the material next.
In the past I have explained that my committee’s goal was never to make a worse WELS version of a better tool that already exists. This is why, for example, we’re not producing a media player as the successor to HymnSoft. There are already excellent consumer- and professional-grade audio players available. There is not enough benefit in developing our own, purpose-built tool for audio playback. In the same way, we recognize that applications like Word and MediaShout are outstanding tools already in wide use. So, when the time is right for those applications to take over we are happy to hand off the task to them.
We also recognize that this is the point of the workflow when most of the commonality between congregations disappears. If we’re all singing from the same hymnal and largely following a worship format that includes singing, reading, and preaching, then we’re all going to find the features of Christian Worship: Service Builder useful. But, we all have different needs for local customization of our worship folders and screen presentations. You may want to put your logo on the cover or add announcements in the back of the bulletin. Many congregations add liturgical clip art to their service folders as well. In the case of screen presentations you may want to add animations, images, backgrounds, and the like. Those are all jobs best handled outside of Christian Worship: Service Builder.
In my case, I plan on refactoring my approach a bit. For example, I have been using Apple Pages for worship folders and plan on continuing with that application. I’ll look into some ways to streamline—maybe even automate—the process of converting finished files from Christian Worship: Service Builder for printing according to our local specifications. I also plan on customizing the print layout settings in Christian Worship: Service Builder to modify the included templates for my congregation’s own print styles. This will take some work up front, but since worship planning and preparation is, at minimum, a weekly project I know that any workflows I develop will pay off handsomely in the long run.
Asset Delivery
In this final phase Christian Worship: Service Builder has no part to play. But your printer and bifold stapler do play a role. You’ll take your exported and customized bulletins and screen presentations and send them to physical devices like printers and projectors.
Adoption Advice
With such a powerful tool coming soon to your congregation, there’s wisdom in planning ahead to make the transition as seamless as possible. Here, to conclude, are a few bits of advice on how to go about adopting Christian Worship: Service Builder in your congregation.
Plan time to learn the new software and to set it up for your use
Christian Worship: Service Builder is scheduled for release the week of December 27, 2021. I would advise against thinking that your January 2, 2022 service will be planned and produced in Christian Worship: Service Builder. Instead, I suggest that you choose a Sunday 4–6 weeks after you first subscribe to Christian Worship: Service Builder as your target Sunday for using Christian Worship: Service Builder for service planning and bulletin production.
Of course you can adjust that timeframe to your own setting if you’d like. Maybe you have time to spend almost a week of full-time effort on learning the software and integrating it into your workflow. You could probably start sooner then. The main goal is to give yourself and your personnel enough margin to enjoy the process of discovering all the features that will soon be at your fingertips.
Consider working on service plans concurrently for a time
Here’s the approach I will probably use. I’m aiming to use Christian Worship: Service Builder in earnest for the first Sunday in Lent. During the season of Epiphany I will continue to prepare worship folders using my current methodology with the 1993 version of Christian Worship. But, during those weeks I’ll be budgeting time to set up Christian Worship: Service Builder. I’ll use my Lenten worship plans as my personal proving grounds. If all goes according to plan, when the first Sunday of Lent rolls around I’ll have a shiny new system in place that has my worship planning for all of Lent largely done.
Dive into customizations strategically
I think one of the most popular features of Christian Worship: Service Builder will be the rich “My Worship Resources” section. The ability to customize resources for local custom and practice is extremely practical as is the capacity to store things like seasonal dialogues and occasional prayers for use and re-use. I’ve got folders and folders full of stuff that I am eager to put into Christian Worship: Service Builder. But here I need to be strategic and methodical. I plan on working my Lenten materials into My Worship Resources first as part of my Lenten transition plan. Then, as needed, I’ll work my other customized elements into the system.
I don’t have an administrative assistant, but your congregation has one on staff. Administrative help can definitely hurry things along. But even then I’d suggest that you dive into the deep end of Christian Worship: Service Builder strategically and methodically. Try not to swamp an already overwhelmed assistant. Take your time knowing that over that time the benefits of a rich library of My Worship Resources will accrue and pay dividends at compound interest.
I’ll be paying attention to questions about workflow that come through our communication channels. If I’ve made any glaring omissions or errors in this article I’ll work to expand the work or correct it. Please also note that Christian Worship: Service Builder includes a full help center with a thorough knowledge base and dedicated customer support team. Once you are a subscriber to Christian Worship: Service Builder all those training and help resources will be at your disposal. They will make my contribution to this discussion rather small in comparison.
I look forward to the coming launch of Christian Worship: Service Builder. It’s been years of effort on the part of many people. Soon all of our WELS congregations will benefit from that work, which has been our prayer all along.