At CrossWay Church, we have found a great low cost worship planning tool that has really helped with our worship planning and volunteer management.  It is called Service Builder.net  There are is a column of ads but they aren’t obnoxious and if you donate to the developer, Jason.  He can remove them.

Worship Planning:

Service Builder allows you  set up different service templates that automatically import your order of worship with all of the components (songs, video clips, reading, prayers, etc).  You can even assign different people to those roles.   When you plan services, you can filter out the songs that you have sung with in the past few weeks so you don’t get in a rut.

Here is an example of what the worship planning page looks like.

[frame src=”https://churchwebtoolkit.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ServiceBuilderWorship.png” width=”738″ height=”633″ lightbox=”on” title=”Service Builder Worship Template” align=”left” ]

In order for you to do this, you need to create a database of songs for your congregation.  There are tons of praise songs in the database that you can chose from.  There are over 100 common hymnals too.  If you have songs that aren’t there, you can easily input new ones that aren’t there.   Each song has its own page in the database. You can link to chord sheets, mp3, and an YouTube videos so musicians can learn them before practice.  You can also email a link to the order of worship were they can access all of this information.

Volunteer Management:

Service Builder also allows you create a church database and assign different people to each role.  You can create a schedule for each week.  Here is the coolest part.  You can set it up to automatically notify them that they are scheduled that week by either email or text and they can import it into their own calendar too.  They don’t have to create a log in to do this.  Your admin has to do it.

Here is an example of what the volunteer page looks like.

[frame src=”https://churchwebtoolkit.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ServiceVolunteers.jpg” width=”523″ height=”261″ lightbox=”on” title=”Service Builder Volunteer” align=”left” ]

Another cool feature is that multiple people can schedule events.  Service Builder will automatically inform you if people are scheduled in multiple roles.

 

Adding New Features:

 I can’t say enough about Jason.  He has added features I have recommended and he is continually updating it with others suggestions as well.  Recently, he added attendance so you can use this to track your weekly attendance as well.