Here are five things you can do to dramatically improve all of your church services. And, each of these things are free!
- Pay attention to key moments. Transitions are key points in a service, so make sure you pay attention to them. Work hard on setting up key moments and moving from one to another. Details like this really communicate excellence. For example, make sure your welcome segment is intentional and effective. Here’s a guide you can use to work on your welcome ahead of time. You’ll also want to be very intentional about what you do just before the offering. Set it up with intentionality and clarity. And, as your service comes to a close, make sure you lead people to take a next step.
- Evaluate everything. Evaluation is the key to excellence and it’s virtually free to evaluate your church service and talk about ways to make them better. To assist you with this, we’ve created several evaluation forms for you. Download and use the Service Evaluation form to evaluate your whole service. You can give these to a few key people to complete and schedule a debrief meeting. Make this a regularly scheduled event. Download and use the Sermon Evaluation form to evaluate your sermon. Find a few people you trust and give them permission to give you honest, helpful feedback. Here’s a “secret shopper” form you can use to give to an outsider. Invite someone to visit your church and evaluate everything from a guests perspective. You could hire an unchurched person in your community to do this or you can contact our team and we can do this for you.
- Involve others. You can involve others in feedback, but you can also involve them in advance. Why not send your sermon outline or completed message to a few people on Thursday to get feedback in advance? Why not ask volunteers, creative people or brand new people to get together and talk about ways to make the service better. When you pull the right people together, you’ll get great ideas.
- Practice. Whether it’s a rehearsal, run through of different service elements or a sermon preached to yourself, practice will help you dramatically improve your church service. Stop winging it!
- Plan. The call to ministry is the call to prepare and most problems can be solved with proper planning. Plan your year conceptually so you’ll know where you’re going. Put everything on a simple spreadsheet. Involve your team or some key leaders in the planning process. Here’s a weekend planning document you can use to plan all the key elements of your service.
Great church services don’t need to depend on a big budget. Nearly all of these things are free. Here’s another coaching video on how you can be excellent with the resources God has given you.