I always love coming across resources and tools that help my church be more effective in ministry. If you’re involved in children’s worship at your church, here are 5 tools that may help you save time, get training, and be more effective in what God has called you to!
1. Planning Center
If you haven’t heard of Planning Center, you’re missing out! They provide tools for child & volunteer check-in, event registration, service planning, and more! It’s a must-have for churches that have volunteers (hopefully you do!) and want to use something better than a Word document or Excel spreadsheet to plan and organize.
For kids worship teams, you’ll probably want to start out with PCO Services. Starting at $14/month, PCO Services helps you coordinate all your worship team members, import chord charts, and transpose music to fit your needs. Do you often find yourself needing to make last-minute changes for Sunday morning? PCO has you covered with drag-n-drop editing of each element in the service, so you can easily add a new song, announcement video, or rearrange when the prayer happens.
See how Planning Center could work in your church with these demo videos:
2. PraiseCharts
This is a great place to find everything from chord charts to orchestrations to choir parts for specific arrangements of songs that you may be looking for. For example, if you’re looking for sheet music for “I Surrender” (the new song from All Sons & Daughters), you can find them here.
Here’s one page you’ll definitely want to bookmark: the PraiseCharts Themes menu. Next time you’re trying to pick songs that coordinate with that week’s teaching theme, you won’t have to rack your brain and wonder how many songs are related to evangelism. Praise Charts has 59 of them!
Within each Theme, you can sort the options by popular and recent songs, or just view them alphabetically. Play samples of each song and save them to your favorites. The Themes menu comes in especially handy when planning for holidays. Check out their extensive song libraries for Christmas, Easter, and Mother’s Day, just to name a few.
The PraiseCharts blog also helps you stay up to date on the latest worship news, regularly updated with live performance videos and advice from today’s leading worship pastors.
3. WorshipHouse Kids
If you’re looking for motion backgrounds, countdowns, worship tracks, or mini movies—all designed just for kids—WorshipHouse Kids is the place for you! You can easily search WorshipHouse’s library to find just what you’re looking for and download it almost instantly. Here’s an example of a fun worship track you might wanna check out for your children’s service: “Nothing Is Impossible” by Shout Praises Kids.
Want more ways to keep your children’s worship engaging? Check out WHM’s Best Sellers list for ideas on new and popular songs to incorporate, or choose from a wide array of still backgrounds for visual worship aids. Preparing for special events is easy with resources organized around Thanksgiving, New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, and many others.
4. LeadWorship
Paul Baloche (often referred to as a pastor of worship pastors) has developed an amazing DVD series for worship teams. He covers topics like: background vocals, electric guitar, drums, music theory, songwriting, and much more! Paul’s site is also where you want to go for free song charts covering powerful arrangements like “The Same Love,” “Our God Saves,” and “Above All.”
When is the last time your kids’ worship team gathered for inspiration and training? If it’s been awhile, take a look at Paul’s Leadworship workshops. You’ll leave energized and equipped for powerful worship ministry. If you can’t make it to a live event, check out Paul’s powerful series on YouTube:
5. WeAreWorship’s YouTube Channel
YouTube has quickly become the go-to place to find kids worship music these days. Sometimes it can get challenging though to find kids’ versions of popular worship songs that have high-quality audio. I encourage you to check out WeAreWorship’s channel! You can do a quick search for the word “kids” and find plenty to choose from!
Hungry for community with other worship leaders? Join the WeAreWorship podcast and Mondays with Morgan for thought-provoking discussions and plenty of fun along the way. Check out one of these past episodes to start:
- Advice for Training Up the Next Generation of Worship Leaders
- Advice to Female Worship Leaders
- Laying the Groundwork for Worship with Young Adults
- Dealing with Difficult People on Your Ministry Team
- Learning to Trust When Life Takes a Turn
I hope you discovered at least one new tool through this article! Now it’s your turn! What is YOUR favorite tool that helps you in leading children’s worship? Let me know in the comments!
