Crafting a Setlist
Over the years I’ve planned well over 2,000 setlists and they can often seem like both a mystery and a maze. Here are my thoughts on how to craft a setlist with the goal to enable an encounter with God and release worship.
1. Pray
Ask questions like ‘What is God saying to you and the church?’ and ‘What is your personal conviction right now?’ God may be revealing something to you that He wants to communicate to the wider church or group that you are leading. Whatever it may be, try and tune into what God is saying, that is always going to be the best!
2. Content
Someone once said that ‘Content is king’. The thing that marks us out from any other faith and religion is the centrality of Jesus. Without Him there is no life-changing power. We’ve made a rule in our sets that we always want a song that depicts and tells the story of the gospel. We’ve seen this literally change lives. Matt Redman has a helpful phrase: ‘we want revelation and response’. We need to feed our minds and hearts with the truth of God, this more often than not can draw a greater response of worship. Singing simple chorus after simple chorus can lead to response fatigue!
3. Who
Ask the question, ‘who am I leading?’, ‘who will be in front of me? Is it a small or big group? Age range? What’s the occasion? Morning or evening?
4. Dynamics
Plan for uptempo moments and for slower songs. So often I’m in sets of worship that sit around the 70-80bpm mark for 20mins and that can get boring. Think about how you can inject pace and energy alongside space for reflection and engagement of heart.
5. Journey
How can you bring people on a journey with the themes you explore? For example: God’s greatness and majesty to the incarnation, Jesus coming to earth and the gospel narrative of the Cross and Resurrection, the move of the Holy Spirit and the cry for God to move. That would be one heck of a thread to try and follow through in a time of worship!!
6. Flow
Think about key choice, intros and endings. Try and think through how you will actually put the songs together. People often leave it until the last moment in the process and then they run out of time. This can result in the time of worship feeling disjointed. I think of it like a car journey… imagine if you go on a 2-3 hour journey but the driver needs to stop 4 or 5 times for fuel, then tyre air pressure, then snacks, then screen wash and then the toilet. It could get pretty annoying and frustrating. Similarly we don’t want our times of worship to constantly feel interrupted.
7. Space
Leave enough room for the spontaneous and to be able to take risks. A while back we were getting frustrated that we only had 20 minutes of sung worship and we were filling it with four songs and a tag. So we took one song out and suddenly created more space. If we’re serious about being Holy Spirit led during a time of worship then we need to have enough flexibility to go where we sense him leading us.
8. Short term vs long game
We often talk about worship leaders as being both pastors and prophets. We want to lead the church where they’re at right now but also take them somewhere new. We can do this through our song choice. What do we need to sing right now and what do we need to introduce into our vocabulary to take us to a new place in our worship? Think about where you want to be in a few years time and work back from there.
Enjoy!