The worship rota – how to organize musicians

The worship rota – how to organize musicians

Last week we posed the following Friday Facebook Question:

Should you mix up your worship teams in terms of ability or is it unfair that the better musicians end up always having to work with out of time drummers and flat backing vocalists?

I decided today to write about a few different ways that I know of that churches organize their musicians with a few strengths and weaknesses of each.  For any of you other worship leaders out there, or any of my worship team musicians, I’d like to hear if you know of others, or if I’ve missed anything.  I know many churches don’t have a choice of players and are thankful to have all the slots filled.  For medium sized churches like ours and especially the bigger ones, it gets more complicated.
1) Mix and Match Rotation
This is the method we use here where we rotate around who gets to play depending on all sorts of factors including availability, skill, dedication to worship practice, seniority, chance to train up younger team, … and much more.
2) Dedicated Teams
One month at a time, or 1st and 3rd Sundays or …. Same band plays together all the time.  You can get a really tight team this way.  Definitely some advantages for depth of relationships as well.  Can be tricky to pull off with availability.  I am not quite organized enough for this one.  I just end up back at system 1). Sometimes you get clicks and fragmentation of some bands knowing some songs better than others, different styles can emerge, … competition can be an issue.  I think if you have multiple services that are split like Sat/Sun evening services, that would be different, but we don’t.
3) House Band with section leaders
I know of one church that has a house band with a key section leader for each instrument that is in charge of training all the players in the church including youth and children’s worship.  The key bass player, for example, makes sure there is a solid bass player for every team every week.  Some cool mentoring aspects.  Puts a lot of responsibility on volunteers.  Can get tricky if volunteers aren’t very good at scheduling.  That is why we don’t do this, although we do quite a bit of mentoring…
4) 3 Chair System
Every position has 3 musicians who share.  Top chair plays twice a month.  2nd and 3rd chair each play once a month.  The worship leader at that church even gave himself 2nd chair… so he only leads once a month, but he is in charge of the admin for everything and plays producer role quite a bit.  Very cool.  Not sure if it’s always easy to decide who gets what chair.  Very big church so the reality is that most musicians will need to find outlets outside of the sunday service to play.  When you have thousands at your church, the bar can be pretty high, in this case very very high. I feel a real call to train younger musicians, and we aren’t quite this big, so this one is a no go for us.
That’s all that I know of at the moment.  Do y’all know of any others?
Any thoughts on which one is best? Any personal experience in the matter?
Please do tell.

Its worth clicking through to the Facebook discussion as there are lots of interesting responses. Organizing musicians is sometimes as challenging as herding cats, however, Jason Chollar, a worship leader who writes a great blog over at Cedarhome.org wrote a blog post in response. Here are his thoughts.

I decided today to write about a few different ways that I know of that churches organize their musicians with a few strengths and weaknesses of each.  For any of you other worship leaders out there, or any of my worship team musicians, I’d like to hear if you know of others, or if I’ve missed anything.  I know many churches don’t have a choice of players and are thankful to have all the slots filled.  For medium sized churches like ours and especially the bigger ones, it gets more complicated.

1) Mix and Match Rotation

This is the method we use here where we rotate around who gets to play depending on all sorts of factors including availability, skill, dedication to worship practice, seniority, chance to train up younger team, … and much more.

2) Dedicated Teams

One month at a time, or 1st and 3rd Sundays or …. Same band plays together all the time.  You can get a really tight team this way.  Definitely some advantages for depth of relationships as well.  Can be tricky to pull off with availability.  I am not quite organized enough for this one.  I just end up back at system 1). Sometimes you get clicks and fragmentation of some bands knowing some songs better than others, different styles can emerge, … competition can be an issue.  I think if you have multiple services that are split like Sat/Sun evening services, that would be different, but we don’t.

3) House Band with Section Leaders

I know of one church that has a house band with a key section leader for each instrument that is in charge of training all the players in the church including youth and children’s worship.  The key bass player, for example, makes sure there is a solid bass player for every team every week.  Some cool mentoring aspects.  Puts a lot of responsibility on volunteers.  Can get tricky if volunteers aren’t very good at scheduling.  That is why we don’t do this, although we do quite a bit of mentoring…

4) 3 Chair System

Every position has 3 musicians who share.  Top chair plays twice a month.  2nd and 3rd chair each play once a month.  The worship leader at that church even gave himself 2nd chair… so he only leads once a month, but he is in charge of the admin for everything and plays producer role quite a bit.  Very cool.  Not sure if it’s always easy to decide who gets what chair.  Very big church so the reality is that most musicians will need to find outlets outside of the sunday service to play.  When you have thousands at your church, the bar can be pretty high, in this case very very high. I feel a real call to train younger musicians, and we aren’t quite this big, so this one is a no go for us.

That’s all that I know of at the moment.  Do y’all know of any others?

Any thoughts on which one is best? Any personal experience in the matter?

Please do tell.

Other posts you might like:

The Conscious Competence Learning Model

Worship Team Rotas Made Easy With Free Google Tool

Worship Team Dynamics – the phases a new team must go through