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 wanted to share the templates that I use 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 is based on the Roman Catholic Sunday lectionary, and focussed on free-use hymns. Recently it has broadened to include a range of traditional and folk-influenced hymody, and also copyright free art-works. What happens next is up to the Holy Spirit.
