About

This website is a one-person labour of love, built up over multiple journeys through the liturgical year, and expressing the fruits of 30 years spent supporting musicians who are serving in churches.

My initial goal was:

Building bridges between God's people, by providing tools for managing music and worship arts programmes in liturgical churches.

As I looked at what material was already on the internet, I found that:

• There are plenty of websites to help you understand scripture, theology and liturgy as it is done in your denomination.

• There are many church-music publishers, copyright management organisations, musician support groups.

• There are some forums where you can have in depth discussions about the finer points of liturgical law and the appropriateness - or not - of certain types of music for public worship.

I aim to have links to the best of these, across the full range of liturgical traditions found in the English-speaking Christian world.

More importantly, I want to share the templates and tools that real people have used to plan and organise liturgies.   No theology, no worship-wars, no copyright restrictions.   Just templates, tools and resources that you can use, and adapt to suit the needs of your community, no matter what your liturgical style.

Also, I wanted to write some articles to share what I know about the management aspects of running music and worship-arts programmes in liturgical churches, on topics like:

• organising your music-library
• copyright
• audio / video systems
• team scheduling
• leadership styles
• managing relationships
• planning and budgeting
• recruiting new volunteers
• managing staff vs volunteers
• dealing with complaints

After a while, I also started to provide suggestions for lectionary-based liturgical planning.   Initially this was based on the Roman Catholic Sunday lectionary, and focussed on free-use hymns.   Then the lists broadened to include a range of traditional, folk-influenced and contemporary Christian Music (CCM) styled hymnody, and also copyright free art-works.   A series of suggestions based on the Revised Common Lectionary has been started, as well.

Based on requests received, I've added articles about 

• A medium sized calendar of saints, listing 2-4 saints for each month of the year
• A list of world-days-of-prayer
• Information about learning to play the organ
• How to organise a church service

and more.

What happens next is up to the Holy Spirit.