Worship Planning // Song Repertoire

Have too many songs and the congregation looks lost while you lead them. Have too few and the worship team gets bored and loses passion. What’s a worship leader to do? What is the perfect number of worship songs to have in your book?

Why it’s Important

As “music people”, we only need to hear a song once or twice before we’ve got a pretty decent grasp on it. But for the average congregation member, it takes a lot longer. What comes so easily to us, other people really do struggle with. So how do we engage people that aren’t musically inclined while still not allowing our teams to get complacent with repeated material?

Size vs. Frequency

I feel strongly that the size of your song repertoire is not nearly as important as how frequently you sing any given song. This comes down to how much time you are allotted at your church for music. A church that does an average of 2 songs every week would go through a repertoire of 40 songs every 20 weeks. A church that does 8 songs per week would do it in 5. Obviously the church that does more music is better able to handle a bigger repertoire. (Side note: In this example, one church is not better or more spiritual than the other…just different. Hopefully the decision of how much time is allotted to different aspects of worship [teaching, music, prayer, etc.] was made in conjunction with both the worship leader and the teaching pastor.)

Know Your Congregation

This will be a recurring theme in subsequent posts and it is the most important thing we can do as worship leaders. Maybe your congregation is the type that knows Hillsong United and Citizens songs better than some of your band. Maybe your congregation still listens to the Gaithers and you’re trying to ease some modern music into your services. Maybe the people of your church don’t listen/know any Christian music at all and this is their one time a week to worship God through song. We can’t, as shepherds, be caught up so fervently in what we want to play that we forget about who we’re ministering to.

Personal Experience

Since I’ve led the modern worship at our church for almost 8 years and heard from many congregants during that time, I feel I have a pretty good grasp on where we are at musically. While I would say we aren’t a super progressive church musically, we do have a good number of people that listen to K-Love/Air-1 and so, hear a lot of the songs during the week that we play on Sunday. The amount of time allotted for music is usually somewhere around 20-30 minutes given what we have going on during service that day. This translates to 6-7 songs per week depending on how I arrange them. I feel like repeating songs every 10 weeks or so has worked well for both congregational familiarity/participation and worship team excitement. Given all of this, I try and keep our repertoire somewhere around 70 songs.

Do I think this is the model that every church should use? Absolutely not! Every congregation is different. But I think putting energy into finding out what your church’s “song number” is can be really beneficial.