The Opening Song
Most weeks at Verve we start our service with an “opening song.” We’ve found a loud song will help bring people in from the lobby, stop conversations and get people focused. We have a few things we’re looking for in an opening song, and I thought it might be helpful to some of you pastors out there to know our thinking. So here are our priorities:
First, we want it to be a song people know. At Verve we mostly get unchurched non-Christians. They are nervous coming to church, and have all kinds of negative stereotypes of Christians. We want to put them at ease and bust their stereotypes, so they’ll be open to what God wants to do in them through the service. We do that by building a bridge. Instead of focusing on what differentiates us, we start out by focusing on what we have in common. This helps people who are on edge realize we can probably relate to each other, and starts to lower their defenses.
This is why the song has to be something off the radio, not a Christian song, and why we would never start a service with worship songs. If we started the service with a Christian song, or worse with everyone standing to sing together, it would just accentuate our differentness and create increased anxiety for people who are nervously wanting to find God. I think of Acts 15:19 where the early Christians said we shouldn’t make it difficult for people to turn to God.
Second, we want the song to be upbeat. We will occasionally break this rule for a great reason – we’re starting a series called “Losing My Religion” and this band called R.E.M. happens to have a song called that, but it’s a little on the melancholy side – but we want the song to be rocking. Why? The same reason you’ll hear heart-thumping music before a sporting event. The same reason you’ll see a comedian come out and tell jokes before the filming of a TV show. The same reason you’ll hear lively music at Disney World when they’re about to open the park in the morning. Because it loosens up and livens up the crowd. Because it gets people amped for what will follow. Because it announces that something is about to happen. And something is about to happen. The people in that room are about to have a chance to worship the one true God, who is life’s greatest treasure. The people in that room are about to learn about Jesus and the amazing thing He did for us to give us an amazing relationship with God. The people in that room are about to have the opportunity to be inspired, equipped and empowered by the Holy Spirit to live a bigger life. And all of that is worth getting excited about. An upbeat song leading into it seems appropriate.
I’ll share with you the other two priorities we have with our opening song tomorrow. Tune in then.
Vince, we called this whole idea of service flow “programming” and it was part of my role in the Creative Arts. As you have done, we took this very seriously and spent a lot of time making sure we found the best of the best elements to place in our services. That said, you’re never going be able to sustain “home runs” every weekend. It’s actually a good thing to hit “singles”, “doubles”, and “triples” as well as the monster “home runs” and “grand slams” so that your services for the year have an ebb and flow.. As for the beginning of the service, we almost never started with worship unless we were specifically in a series talking about it. We wanted people to feel comfortable and be able to sit back before we ask them to do anything. 90% of the time it would be a “performance” tune. But we also didn’t want to become stale and/or predictable. So we’d change it up every now and then with some of these:
1) For a season, we used “YouTube Clips of The Week”.
2) Use a “game”
3) Use a “giveaway”.
4) Play instrumentals. Even with the performance tunes, we would sometimes go through a season of playing an “instrumental” version of something hot that we knew we could never fit into that series or topic or in church at all or sometimes we just didn’t have the vocalist to make it work.
As to this specific post, I would add a couple more things to your list to consider when picking a tune.
*Is it something the band can pull off well?
Nothing is worse than a church band trying to cover a song and doing a poor job. We spent as much or more time on the performance songs than worship. Why? Because non-churched people don’t know the worship songs so if we don’t play them exactly to the record, no one is the wiser. But they DO know the songs they hear on the radio. To that point, if you only have 1 quality singer who can pull off singing those songs, it’s OK to use them on all of them. We never sacrificed quality singers for quantity singers. We made a point to tell our music team that everybody had a place to sit on the bus. I realized early on that quality singers attract quality singers. We quickly built a great amount of “performance singers” because we stuck to using the very best of the best in that role.
*Pick songs that represent your audience.
This is a different take than you have stated above. I do agree with the “all format” feel at a church as long as it fits your demographic. We’re not talking about 30 songs that are being played in an hour here. We’re talking about 2 or 3. Rarely do you have an audience of all 20 somethings or all 50 somethings. Usually it’s a blend of a bunch of different age groups. Since we did 2 or 3 performance songs a week, we’d try to do something classic (a retro tune), something current and every now and then a closer that had a positive message. Not always could we hit that mark, but we’d definitely try to. Songs like “Peace of Mind” by Boston and “Don’t Stop Believin” by Journey cross over all age groups so you can feel OK doing those with younger crowds. But if you’re audience is made up of primarily Caucasian folks, don’t try to attempt a gospel tune that doesn’t fit your demographic. If you’re crowd is a more hipster feel, hip hop and top 40 might not make the most impact.
*It’s OK to play a theme for a series.
I can remember being in a series that felt like we needed to do all “folk” music so we did that to break up the monotony of our standard format. One year, we did a “Beatles” themed series. So all the songs were Beatles tracks. We were in a series where we were using movies as illustrations, so we started each service with a collage of “movie” soundtracks and had videos of scenes of those movies playing behind the band.
*Don’t “Christianize” the lyrics.
I hate when church bands make up their own lyrics of a song to replace the original just to fit the topic. Trust me, your audience is smart enough to know what you did. Get more creative. Repeat a verse, delete a bridge. I remember doing the song “Half of My Heart” by John Mayer. The verses were great but the bridge didn’t fit. So we deleted that section out and it worked perfectly.
*You don’t HAVE to display the lyrics.
99% of the time we would display the lyrics to the songs. But there were occasions where we wanted to get was the hook of the song. So in those instances, we may not display any lyrics or we may replace lyrics being shown with a video or something to go along with the tune.
*Your performance songs should OUTNUMBER your worship songs.
For the same reason that you would start off the service with performance songs, why would you dedicate more time to worship than to performance? Your non-churched person is going to feel just as awkward standing for 15 minutes no matter where you placed it in the service. So we would do 1-2 worship songs max with at least 2 or 3 performance songs.
Hope this is helpful.