Who selects your music for Worship?

[Wally]

For those involved in Worship Teams, choirs, etc.... who selects the music you play during worship? If someone other than the Pastor selects the music, does it have to be "approved" by the Pastor or Church Leadership?

[ptrallan01]

Selects the music. The pastor has veto power but rarely uses it. He does sometimes request certain songs to go along with the theme of the message.

Music in our church is rather free as the deacons do devotion prior to praise and worship and select their own materials. We tend to reciruclate songs for Praise & Worship. New song for P&W are introduced as choir songs first and then as P&W.

The piano player chooses what we hear as prelude and during prayer. The "band" does one quick "jam" type song somewhere in the middle, usually something we are learning and are ready to try a little in public with no singing.

Peter

[reverbbb]

Our church started out as an accupella team from Church of Christ origins. When our song leader resigned and moved onto another church, our pastor invited an old friend to become the P&W leader. There is no pay involved.

Upon accepting the position, the new guy was told by the pastor, that you may take our P&W in any direction that he wanted, but encouraged him to consider adding a band with instruments. That story is on a different topic so I'll just cut to the chase.

Ultimately, we have a full P&W band. Our P&W has deligated the song selection process into a rotation format. Currently, our rotation is the P&W leader, the keyboardist and myself. Therefore, it is my duty to select songs every third week.

Our pastor rarely makes any cotributions to the songlist. However, he likes to see the order of worship follow a particular pattern. The pattern is generally like this:

2 songs

Welcome

2 or 3 songs

Communion

1 song

Offering

2 or 3 songs

Announcements

Break

Lesson

1 send-off song

We sometimes depart from that exact format. But the pastor wants to be sure that we cover all the elements. This takes us right at 1 hour each Sunday, then a 10 minute break then a 1 hour lesson. Yes, it is a long session for sure. We are going to shorten the songlist and the lesson time so that we can ultimately start two Sunday morning sessions due to over-crowding.

This week it is my turn to select songs. I am thinking about 6 very meaningful songs with lots of prayer time and reflection instead of the normal 8 straight ahead songs. Our church loves the full hour of P&W. But we have to make room for our growth.

[Teleguy]

The Worship leader picks it, but is often open to input from us.

[stephen]

The Worship leader picks it, but is often open to input from us.

Same here.

[jazzrat]

For am services the pw pastor chooses....now for the Epic service I play for... the band chooses. If the speaker(pastor) has a particular song or topic
he is looking to tie into we have a couple weeks notice to track it down
and learn it.
For instance last night the college age pastor spoke and requested the Green Day tune, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (minus the 'F' word) which we learned last week in practice. Way fun, especially for a geezer rocker!

[Ascension]

:dunno We never know what we are doing untill its over and half the time we go with the flow and pull something off by memory or write by the spirit on the fly .While we allmost allways have music and a set we put together right before we play but :dunno we usually wind up not folowing it :innocent :angel .

[SAguitar]

For the last year and a half, we have been without a full time teaching pastor, so our worship pastor has planned all the services. And he has a gift for it for sure. It's been great! When we break in a new song, usually about 2-3 times a month, we will first play it for the opener when people are still coming in from the lobby. Or, we'll do it as a special so folks can get used to hearing it first. Then a week or two later, we'll put it into a worship set.

[Crunchyriff]

I don't know ALL the behind the scenes mechanisms here, but one of our associate Pastors (music ministry) pretty much has a head-scratching session with our senior Pastor, and they tailor much of the morning's music around a theme within the message being preached that Sunday.

AFAICT, the next step is our music Pastor assessing who will be playing that Sunday (our musicians are in rotation), and then tailors further the worship to the "stronger points" of the particular players and singers that morning, along with throwing something in to "stretch us", musically. Sometimes God mandates a change impromptu, and we roll with it.

We are blessed with many fine musicians and singers at our church, many of them pro players. It's a tremendous resource that God has blessed us with, and I find myself humbled to be included among those people.

They just added a Satruday Night service that has taken off with a bang. Music is just a tad more free and 'open'. I got to open the worship in one of the first "preliminary" Sat night services, (as a singer), doing a more shall we say, Black Pentecostal number that just ripped. What a blessing and a GAS it was!!

I tell ya, if you can't get excited about your eternal destination in Salvation thru Jesus....well, you know... :crazy

[MrMike]

My former pastor used to say, "If that doesn't light your fire, your wood is wet!".

[LesStrat]

The Worship Leader.

[tom grossheider]

We have a full time Worship Pastor that chooses the songs. For a special number that is done during the offering time, that particular artist will usually pick a song meaningful to them. There is probably some degree of scrutiny over music that isn't appararent to most of us, but quite a bit of freedom for the most part. In the few times I've had the privilege of leading worship, I was solicited for input for any songs I wanted to do. We worked closely together to compile a package and it worked well. It's nice to have a great working relationship with the staff and musicians.

[beatlenut]

The worship band leader (me).

[Wally]

Thanks for the replies so far. I have been playing for the same service for about 4 years; we picked our own music w/no pastoral involvement up till about 6 months ago. Now we select most of the music and the pastor selects the rest (he sees the list of songs that we pick ahead of time).

The reason I posed the question is that I have read a lot of criticisms of contemporary worship lately, and a lot of it was directed at the lack of pastoral oversight of the song selection, and songs with "bad theology".

I tend to agree that the pastor, who is the worship leader, should oversee the music for theological content - but it should be done well ahead of time to avoid last minute changes and problems.