At CrossWay Church, we have found a great free tool that has really helped with our worship planning and volunteer management. It is called ServiceBuilder.net.
Worship Planning
Service Builder allows you to 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.
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 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 to 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.
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 the developer, 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. There are ads but they aren’t obnoxious and if you donate to the developer. He can remove them.
Comments
One thing, ServiceBuilder has added an attendence feature since I orginally posted the blog. It also allows different levels of permissions (admin, group leader, user, etc) so that multiple people can work on the schedule.
You are mistaken. Nothing about it is free. We're small and looking but your advertisment was misleading
Sorry this article is 4 years old. They have changed their info since it was written. It is worth the money for us
For a truly free and open source worship service planner, try http://worshiphhn.org/whhn . It may not have all the bells and whistles that some paid-for programs have but it has all you need for worship service planning. It is multilingual as well.
Let's Discuss
We love your comments! Thank you for helping us uphold the Community Guidelines to make this an encouraging and respectful community for everyone.