Worship Leader Blog

(This is pretty much a no-brainer, but it took a long time for us to figure out that this might be a good way to do this, so I offer it for your consideration.)

We have three Sunday morning services at our church--the early service (8:30am) is our "traditional" service, where the music is mostly hymns and older worship choruses, accompanied by organ and piano. Our 9:45am and 11:15am services are "contemporary," where we have a full worship band (except for the last few months, when we've been without a drummer, but that's another story). As soon as most of the first-service crowd has cleared out, our sound techs begin playing walk-in music over the PA that is more geared toward our contemporary worship crowd. In the past, we have provided the sound techs with CDs that contain a variety of different kinds of songs, but for a long time we weren't too good about doing that consistently, so the same CDs kept getting used week after week.

Then one morning we were backstage before one of the contemporary services, listening to the walk-in music and observing that it was the same stuff that was used for the last several weeks, and someone suggested that we should get an iPod and create a new playlist each week and let the sound techs use that instead of CDs. (Like I said earlier, it seems like a no-brainer.)

So we got an iPod Nano, the 4Gb model, and now I take it home each week and assemble a playlist for the following week. This gives me the opportunity to tailor the playlist to the sermon content, if I wish, and I can also create several weeks' worth of playlists at once and just have the sound techs play the current week's list.

You need a cable for this--one with a 1/8-inch stereo plug on one end and a pair of RCA plugs on the other end is perfect, because the sound guys can plug it into the "tape" input on the board.