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.
Hi, I am interested in learning what this tool is about.
Is it something you add on to an already established website? Meaning, does it stand alone or not?
I am looking for an editable calendar for my worship team that we can all see and sign up on. Or for me to invite, them to respond, and then list them on a calender that is view-able to everyone in the group. I am NOT interested in ‘merging’ multiple calendars as Google offers.
Thanks for a short and helpful answer.
Lisa,
It is a a stand alone site. You might be able to impede it using an iframe, but I have haven’t considered it. I just have a link to it on my website. It would meet you calendar needs. I use it for all my volunteers (Worship, readers, nursery, etc) on one calendar. You can even set it up to warn you if people are scheduled twice. People can all sign in on it. You can set different permissions levels to let people do different things. You could all work on a worship service and see what is scheduled (who and songs). Members can even set things up to let you know when they are available, but I haven’t used the function because i create a form using the google doc I described in another post. Honestly, it is usually only those involved with worship planning that log on. The other just get the notices. The calendar displayed is more of a list than a monthly calendar. However, people can subscribe to it in their own personal calendars if they like to. Hope that helps. Brad
I am sure there must have been something here to download but I can’t see it. Please help. I sounds like just what I have been looking for, for Grace Baptist Church.
Service builder is an online tool not something you can download.