As I’ve been visiting and playing in several churches over the past few months, I’ve noticed a few recurring problems that can easily be fixed to help the quality of your contemporary worship:

1. A stale sameness. We all have our favorite worship leaders, but if you’re a Joel Houston fan, does every song in your set have to be written by Joel Houston or one of his clones? It seems like everything these days is either Hillsong United or trying to sound like Hillsong United.

If you do five songs in your set, do two or three of your favorites, then throw in something different—a piano ballad, a hymn, a "golden oldie" praise song, a ukulele. Anything to add variety.

The best praise set I’ve heard in a long time was created by 28-year-old worship leader Jared Barber here in Greenville—it had a little bit of everything, reached a wide audience and kept you engaged.

2. Service order. Do you ever wonder why your guitarist/drummer/keyboardist draws a blank during your set when it’s time for them to start the intro to the next song? Many worship leaders don’t provide a service order for the band at rehearsal. Instead, the band is given a stack of jumbled charts for the upcoming Sunday.

I want to know the order and have it in front of me (seeing it on a worship planning website isn’t enough) so I can start getting it ingrained into my head.

Print out a one-page service order with announcements, sermon, song order (with the key for each song) and anything else happening. Band members can keep it to the side of their music stand. If my music is memorized and I don’t have a stand, I fold the service order up and keep it on my keyboard or on the floor.

When I inevitably draw a blank and can’t remember the next song, a train wreck is avoided. Or I might step off the stage during announcements when, oops, there’s still another song coming up for the offering.

3. Song keys. In one church, we played a song in B, and the song that immediately followed was in C. It would have been a much easier, effortless and smoother transition to play both songs in B or C.

After you create your praise set this week, look it over and even sit down and play it through on your guitar or piano. Can the worship flow be improved by nudging keys slightly? Related keys are your friend—going from D major to G major works much better than going from D major to F# major. A half-step makes all the difference!

With the weekly Sunday worship grind, we can sometimes go on autopilot and let quality slip. Resist the inertia and recharge for this week’s worship!

Composer/arranger Don Chapman is the editor of the weekly WorshipIdeas.com newsletter that goes out to more than 50,000 worship leaders every week.

For the original article, visit worshipideas.com.

Get Spirit-filled content delivered right to your inbox! Click here to subscribe to our newsletter.

Dr. Mark Rutland's

National Institute of Christian Leadership (NICL)

The NICL is one of the top leadership training programs in the U.S. taught by Dr. Mark Rutland. If you're the type of leader that likes to have total control over every aspect of your ministry and your future success, the NICL is right for you!

FREE NICL MINI-COURSE - Enroll for 3-hours of training from Dr. Rutland's full leadership course. Experience the NICL and decide if this training is right for you and your team.

The NICL Online is an option for any leader with time or schedule constraints. It's also for leaders who want to expedite their training to receive advanced standing for Master Level credit hours. Work through Dr. Rutland's full training from the comfort of your home or ministry at your pace. Learn more about NICL Online. Learn more about NICL Online.