How to get people to sing in church – Celebrate The Wins

Celebrate The Wins

At my church, we love to celebrate the wins – we do it all the time. I believe it’s an important leadership strategy and I encourage you to do it in your churches as well – so let me know in the comments what was the best thing about your services this past weekend. For us, it was definitely congregational engagement during worship, and I’ve listed a few things that I think will really help encourage people to sing in church

Our win: Congregational Engagement

This weekend, people really sang loud.

I lead worship in a large multi-site church, but often the environment I lead in is what you could consider small – typically 80-100 people. We call it CoffeeHouse – it’s an acoustic, lower-key alternative to our main worship services. We often have just a few people on stage, and our arrangements lean toward acoustic (we don’t use a full drum kit, for example).

Here are some thoughts on why people were so engaged this weekend.

Familiarity

It’s Christmas time, and we sang Christmas songs. In particular, the song Go Tell It On The Mountain was super high on the engagement scale this weekend. People love Christmas time, and people love to sing Christmas songs. But this was a sort of tipping point in our services – it brought a spirit of worship into the room.

Pick at least one song each week that you know your church will engage with at a high level – if you can put it early in your set list, even better. It will help create an atmosphere of engagement.

Full Stage

This weekend we had more people on stage than we typically do. I believe this absolutely contributed toward high engagement. I know many of you are struggling to find musicians and vocalists to fill your stage – don’t stop trying. Recruiting and building teams is probably the most important thing you can do. Click here to see a video Bryce, one of our staff worship leaders, and I made about the importance of and how to build teams.

Furthermore, our musicians were very well prepared, and the arrangements and music sounded great. Do not discount the importance of excellence when it comes to engagement.

Stage Presence

Two of the volunteers in the band this week are always smiling. Every time you’re around them, you just become happier. It’s contagious. And they bring that spirit to the stage. I’m convinced one of the greatest tools we have as worship leaders is our smile. It will break down walls and lead people toward worship.

Your turn

So what was the best thing about your worship experience this past weekend? Let me know in the comments. And make ‘Celebrate the Wins’ a common practice among your staff and volunteers. To take it up a notch – if you are a ministry leader in your church, send an email out to your volunteers and celebrate the wins with them – let them know how important they are and how they contribute toward those wins.