Worship Leaders by John A. White Contributing Writer May 07, 2009

The other worship tool is wordsheets. A wordsheet is simply the words to the song arranged by verse and chorus. Even though most of the people you lead will know the words to the songs, wordsheets thend to comfort people and allows them to sing with confidence. They also help a new person to feel comfortable. Usually the worship CDs and tapes have words. You might be able to get the words from the church's worship library too.

That's all tools you need. Just familiar recorded music and word sheets.

STEP 2 – How to Prepare a Worship Set

Now that you have a 30 song repertoire, what do you do with them? It is easy to get overwhelmed with the possible combinations. In fact, if you lead a 4 song worship set, that gives you 405,000 unique combinations with your 30 songs. Let's talk about how one prepares a directed and meaningful worship set. Basically there are two ways to develop a worship theme:

1. The intuitive way... by gathering all the information you can and allowing the Holy Spirit to guide you through the intuitive processes to assemble a worship set.

2. The spiritual way... spending time with the Lord to gain knowledge concerning what you should prepare and allowing the worship set to immerge out of your dialogue with the Holy Spirit; in essence, take dictation from what God instructs you to present in your worship set.

Most worship leaders use a combination of both methods. Ultimately, how you assemble the worship set depends on what graces you've received from your relationship with God and the method that God speaks to you.

Once you have an idea about what you would like to accomplish in your worship (i.e. to Love God, to thank God, to exalt one of God's attributes (holiness, glory, blessedness...) to repent, to motivate toward mission...) then chose some songs from your worship repertoire that speak of your theme or that can be paired with another song to speak of your theme.

Once you've selected some songs, hopefully one or two songs more than you need, think of how the arrangement of the songs can reinforce your theme. You'll notice that many worship sets start with up-tempo songs with general theme and end with slower-tempo songs with more specific themes. This is not accidental, it is an arrangement rooted in biblical worship theology. When you consider tabernacle worship, you find three fundamental processes relating to the gates of the tabernacle, the court and the tent of meeting. The worship processes are shown in Figure 1. The green arrow shows the general direction of the flow of worship; starting from the busyness of everyday life (at the gate), then entering in a place of spiritual preparation and specifically of cleansing oneself and repenting of sins (in the court) and finally meeting God face to face (in the tent of meeting). Musically, you attempt to match the tempo of the music with these three processes as well. The call to worship is generally upbeat because we are calling people to take a break from their busy lives, the music slows down a bit during the spiritual preparation process to match the process of stilling ones thoughts and preparing themselves to meet with God and finally slows again as people are ushered into God's presence of peace and stillness.

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