The beginning of a new year is always a good time to reflect and take inventory of the past 12 months. No doubt you may have noticed top 10 lists popping up all over. I was curious myself as to what the top 10 worship songs were for 2010 and so I did some web research but ran into some roadblocks.
The first issue I realized is that only the more contemporary songs show up on any of these lists as those are the ones that people are tracking. (How would you even go about discerning how many times Amazing Grace is sung in churches?)
The second issue is that anyone can make a top 10 list based on just about any criteria including personal preference so how scientifically accurate are they?
The third issue is finding a list that deals solely with music used in worship. CCLI is one of the first places to look and you can find the latest list of their top 25 songs for Canada or the US (By the way there top 4 are identical and they have 21 songs in common though in different order). Of course this site only lists songs covered under CCLI.
WorshipTogether.com provides yet another list but again only material that is found on their website.
So in the end I came up empty handed but it made me wonder, what are your church’s top 5-10 songs/hymns? How do you decide what makes that list; the number of times a song is sung or whether it is a heart song that is requested at significant occasions (i.e. weddings, funerals)? Eager to hear what makes your list!
Comments
Jubilee Fellowship CRC has a list of "songs in order of frequency sung" on its website for liturgists and music teams to consult when preparing worship services. This list serves to guard against overusing a song, but also as a reminder of songs that the congregation knows.
You are welcome to browse it yourselves. The address is http://www.jubileecrc.org/resources/songs/JubileeSongs.html. (reminder to myself that I really should update this list, since it goes only to May of last year.)
The list is compiled by a perl program I wrote that parses a range of our MediaShout worship service files (which are nicely in xml format).
But here is a simple top ten list to get you going:
At Immanuel CRC (Fort Collins, CO) we occasionally compile such lists based on our own use. Your post inspired me to look back over the past 16 weeks to see what we've repeated. 16 weeks is just enough time for favorites (commonly repeated songs) to appear multiple times. Not too scientific, but it gets me started on a review that we're due for. We do around 7 songs in a service, one or two of those being presentation songs. We will average one or two hymns per service, but in a 16 week period it's unlikely that we would repeat any one hymn. (So I share Joyce's quandary--although Amazing Grace does appear on our list.) We also have 5 teams that rotate (one of the teams working with a traditional choir). What turns out to be the case, largely, is that if multiple teams do a song, it gets done more frequently. Here's the rough preliminary list sort of in order. At the end of the list are one's done only once in the past 16 weeks, but likely to come up again in the near future.
Interestingly, for whatever it's worth, four of these are from Hillsong and two are from Townend/Getty. Four are on the current (8/2010) CCLI top 25.
I was curious about our most frequently sung list when I read this - here's the top 12 for 2010:
Unchanging
Enough
Famous One
Hear All Creation
Here I Am to Worship
Jesus Messiah
Praise to the Lord, the Almighty
Everything We Need
Hosanna (Praise is Rising)
How Great is Our God
Take My Life and Let it Be
Your Name
Interesting!
Great thread here - I love seeing what's winding up on everyone else's setlists. Gives us a feel for where worship has been and is heading in the broader scope of the CRC. We've been discussing the increasing quality of lyrical content in worship songs that have been produced recently. I'm glad to see that many of them are working their way into folks' worship expressions. Like Jubilee, Sunrise keeps a playlist of our "regular" songs available online for our church members to listen to at work or download on their own. We call it Sunrise Radio: http://www.myspace.com/hilbelink/music/playlists/sunrise-radio-1525044
Here's Our Top 12 list for 2010:
Amazing Grace (My Chains are Gone) (Tomlin)
Changed (Aaron Niequist)
Evermore (Hillsong)
God of this City (Bluetree)
Hosanna (Baloche)
If We Are the Body (Casting Crowns)
I Will Follow (Tomlin)
Lead Me to the Cross (Hillsong)
Let Your Kingdom Come (Aaron Ivey)
Mighty to Save (Hillsong)
The Stand (Hillsong)
You Hold Me Now (Hillsong)
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