June 13, 2022: The video below walks through some of the important changes in paradigm that Christian Worship: Service Builder delivers to the task of planning and preparing Lutheran services.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Congregations who meet in a multi-site configuration or who have partnered with neighboring congregations to support a pastor in a dual parish setting will find that Christian Worship: Service Builder works well in such situations and at a fair annual cost.
First, let’s clear the air on one thing. There’s no integrity in abusing the licensing terms of Christian Worship: Service Builder. I mentioned in a previous article that shared costs represent the fact that part of walking together as a synod is funding together the kind of work we can only accomplish collectively. Congregations should not think in terms of splitting the cost of Christian Worship: Service Builder with other congregations.
However, genuine multi-site and dual parish settings can take advantage of software features and a pricing model that reflects their administrative configuration.
Multi-site congregations are congregations that serve multiple geographic locations. Multi-site congregations will have one Christian Worship: Service Builder subscription and will utilize the “Locations” feature in the software to manage worship plans across multiple locations. Multi-site congregations will be billed at the plan level that reflects their total, combined worship attendance across all sites. However, multi-site congregations are ineligible for the subscription plan discounts that otherwise apply to congregations who have made a qualifying purchase of print hymnals and psalters.
Dual parishes are congregations that jointly support a single pastor who serves both congregations. Dual parishes may acquire a single Christian Worship: Service Builder subscription and utilize the same “Locations” feature within the software to make distinct worship plans for distinct locations. However, to qualify for this arrangement a dual parish must be served by a single pastor. Dual parish congregations remain eligible for subscription plan discounts based on qualifying hymnal purchases.
Note that the location feature of Christian Worship: Service Builder is useful for more traditional administrative arrangements as well. For instance, a congregation with a school and a local nursing home ministry can treat both as separate locations for the sake of maintaining a calendar of service plans for each.
Finally, pastors who wish to partner with colleagues to plan and prepare worship will find that the powerful and practical sharing features in Christian Worship: Service Builder make such collaboration possible between congregations who maintain separate subscriptions as required by the licensing terms of Christian Worship: Service Builder.
Christian Worship: Playlist is a flexible and practical solution that will work for the broadest number of congregations possible, requires only a minimal level of computing resources and technical skill, and avoids obsolescence by making use of reliable existing software.
Many congregations, my own included, have relied on products like HymnSoft to lead congregational singing in the Sunday service. Christian Worship: Service Builder will offer an optional, add-on product called Christian Worship: Playlist as the successor to Hymnsoft.
It is not a feature-by-feature update to HymnSoft, rather it is a new product with a different approach to solving the particular technical problem that HymnSoft had set out to solve. At the heart of the solution is encoded audio.
Encoded audio is an audio recording in an MP3 or M4A format. In this format musical attributes like key, tempo, and instrumentation cannot be adjusted. That is because encoded audio is a recording of a real musician playing the music through a high-quality digital instrument. This is in contrast to sequenced audio, like MIDI, which is a set of digital musical instructions. With sequenced audio, it is possible to make adjustments to key, tempo and instrumentation, but the musical performance can feel mechanical and sound artificial because it lacks the human element of playback.
MIDI is a very powerful system, but because it is technically challenging, because it has a very limited market, and because copyright holders are extremely reluctant to grant digital permissions for MIDI distribution we have moved away from MIDI as a technical solution in the successor to HymnSoft. Therefore, Christian Worship: Playlist will offer only encoded audio.
So, how will Christian Worship: Playlist work? The software will integrate directly with your Christian Worship: Service Builder worship plans. Christian Worship: Playlist will generate a set of encoded audio files based on the music you have scheduled for a particular service. You can customize the number of stanzas in a particular hymn and can select organ or piano recordings.
After creating the service, users will download a zipped package of the relevant encoded audio files for each service to be loaded into the playback software of their choice, such as Apple Music, Windows Media Player, or other audio players. The device used to play the service music could be a computer or a mobile device connected to the church’s sound system and does not need to be connected to the internet during playback. Other options include connecting the computer or mobile device to the AUX IN jack on a digital organ to play through its speakers or to a standalone powered speaker..
This new approach will require an adjustment by many, but we have concluded that this approach makes the best use of our resources and provides a solution that reaches as many as possible. It will be a flexible and practical solution for making use of the Christian Worship suite.
Christian Worship: Playlist will launch in 2022 after the main launch of Christian Worship: Service Builder targeted for late 2021.
An enduring challenge we’ve faced in this time between the early preview of Christian Worship: Service Builder and the coming launch has been describing the software and its capabilities. Congregations and their leaders naturally have dozens of questions about what they can expect Christian Worship: Service Builder to do for them week in and week out.
But, rather than dig into every little detail about the software, we’ve chosen to speak in broad terms about the most prominent capabilities of Christian Worship: Service Builder. We know that, in fact, the best way for people to learn what Christian Worship: Service Builder can do is to use the software.
Imagine trying to describe a new vehicle. You might describe the styling of the exterior or the performance under the hood. You could explain what it feels like to sit in the driver’s seat or how the car handles under braking. This communicates something about the car, but you and I both know the best way to get the new car across is to show someone the car, or, even better, to have them drive it.
The same applies to Christian Worship: Service Builder. To understand the software and appreciate how it will fit into your congregation’s worship ministry you simply must take it for a spin. You’ll learn more that way than you could learn from listening to me explain it. This is why Christian Worship: Service Builder provides a generous trial mode at no cost.
The trial mode in Christian Worship: Service Builder has no practical time limit. It does not expire after 30 days. You can try Christian Worship: Service Builder for as long as you’d like before committing to an annual subscription. The only limitation on the trial mode is that you cannot export material for printing or presentation. Granted, that’s a significant limitation, but it does mean that you can explore everything about the software up to that critical point.
And because trial mode includes access to the entire content library and all the software’s features, we cannot offer trial accounts before the launch. Trial mode is the finished product, not an intermediate, half-finished beta. Trial accounts will become available on the same day as launch later this year. Then you’ll get answers to many of your questions by taking Christian Worship: Service Builder for a test drive. And I’m quite certain that once you’ve seen for yourself all that Christian Worship: Service Builder can do you’ll be eager to put the software to use in your congregation.
Christian Worship: Service Builder represents a change in paradigm, not only in the tools and resources that congregations will have at their disposal, but also in the overall strategy of how Northwestern Publishing House publishes digital versions of our denominational hymnal.
Previously, the best way to distribute digital versions of the hymnal and the subsequent worship supplement was via physical media. Congregations received optical discs full of files and subsequently maintained the files in their local setting and acquired appropriate annual licensing for their use.
But now and into the future, Christian Worship: Service Builder will replace physical media as the way to access and use digital versions of Christian Worship. New technology developed in recent years resolves several limitations in the previous model and supports the long-term success of Christian Worship.
Above all else, a centralized repository — a single source — is far more practical. Features like global search and richly related metadata make finding and cross-referencing materials possible in a way that could not be accomplished in the previous distribution model. The entire system is designed to make questions like, “Where is that file located?” far less common. Worship planners will interact not just with a file system but with a powerful and intuitive software application.
But the advantages of this system are not limited to the materials included in Christian Worship. Congregations may import into Christian Worship: Service Builder materials that they purchase from third parties and access those materials in the same way that they use the core Christian Worship corpus. A Christian Worship: Service Builder subscription offers not just better access but increased capability.
Some benefits of this new approach are less glamorous but important nonetheless. For example, a centralized repository makes the process of correcting errata possible. Changes or improvements made to the material take place at the source and are subsequently accessed by every congregation using Christian Worship: Service Builder. The matter of copyright permission and reporting is dramatically improved as well. Christian Worship: Service Builder will handle virtually all of a typical congregation’s mandated reporting. Such processes were largely impossible or impractical before.
Finally, this new paradigm better reflects our shared investment in a denominational hymnal. It is vital to understand that offering Christian Worship: Hymnal and Christian Worship: Psalter in digital format for a nominal fee is not economically feasible. I can assure you that the Technology Committee, together with Northwestern Publishing House, worked thoroughly to ensure that pricing is fair for congregations and sufficient to support the long-term viability of the platform. The overall pricing model of Christian Worship: Service Builder reflects the reality that part of walking together in a synod includes funding together the work the synod has agreed to do.
I am confident that you will quickly grasp the value of Christian Worship: Service Builder when you start using your free trial account later this year. Not only that, the software will remain in development so that new features and capability are added over time. And, happily, congregations who determine that the costs associated with digital publishing are too high may still use Christian Worship in their congregations. Hard copy pew editions of the Christian Worship: Hymnal and Christian Worship: Psalter are currently shipping. These versions maintain the tried-and-true simplicity of buying and using books in print.
Christian Worship is, in a sense, a hybrid product. We designed it to meet the needs of congregations that work in digital formats, print formats, or some combination of the two. Pricing has been carefully calibrated to ensure that congregations get good value. Between the durable value of printed books and the capability of a digital platform every congregation will find a solution that works in their setting and that supports the long-term success of Christian Worship for themselves and for their brothers and sisters in WELS.