At some point, every pastor will face criticism about music volume. A few preemptive steps will go a long way to prepare you for the inevitable noise complaint.

Use a dB meter to collect data

Noise complaints are usually subjective, made on feeling or impression. It’s important to measure the sound in the auditorium for both frequency and overall volume so you can respond with a scientific measurement.

The metric used to measure volume is called a decibel (dB). Some common benchmarks are:

• 0 dB: rustling leaves
• 60 dB: conversation
• 85 dB: city traffic
• 100 dB: stock earphones at maximum volume
• 120 dB: a clap of thunder

You can buy a meter to wire directly into your soundboard, but I prefer to use a free Android app called Noise Meter. (iOS users, what’s your favorite equivalent?)

If you haven’t been measuring your service volume levels, avoid making decisions based on just one week. Collect some data—learn what your normal has been before you start making changes.

Take note of acoustic changes based on the state of the room. Sound checks and rehearsals happen when the room is empty, which means the volume will run 10–15 dB louder than it will during the service, when the pews are full of people breaking up the sound.

Set a baseline & maintain it

After you’ve collected a few weeks of data, set a baseline. Decide what you want your normal to be. Communicate this to your audio technician and anyone who might be leading worship. It needs to be a range, and it needs to be flexible to make room for dynamics. Leave yourself enough room to emphasize a powerful lift without blowing eardrums—enough room to give a little more bass to Easter Sunday’s big resurrection song.

So what should your level be? That’s an excellent question, and the answer will vary wildly from facility to facility depending on size, acoustics, and similar factors. Rooms that echo a lot are going to feel louder, even when the volume measurements are milder.

Respond thoughtfully with kind questions

When you inevitably hear “It was just too loud for me,” how do you respond? I recommend gathering more information before making any statements. Ask questions like:

Did you feel it was louder than usual? You need to know if this is a one-off concern or a more systemic complaint. You might not like the answer, but you need the information.

Which song made you uncomfortable? Was it the volume overall, or just the guitar in the opener to “God’s Not Dead”? You could be dealing with a frequency (pitch) concern, not a volume concern. Electric guitar often runs at frequencies that can be uncomfortable for older folks. Asking for more specific information can help you understand what triggered the discomfort. It also communicates to the concerned party that you’re competent and thinking about them.

Where were you sitting? It’s going to be louder next to the speakers. Period. Nothing you can do about it. Explain that sound dissipate throughout the room, and you need to make it audible for everyone. Suggest a different seat and you might reach a resolution without touching the levels.

Work your way gradually to, “I’m sorry to hear that. We’ll double-check the levels for next week.” Since you measure the levels and have set a baseline, you can say this without an ounce of hypocrisy.

We’d like to hear from you on this. What’s your baseline dB? Have you adjusted the music volume because of complaints? Tell us in comments—let’s share solutions!

Do you have a notebook full of half-finished song lyrics? If so, what if you could finish one of those songs with legendary songwriter Paul Baloche, and then record a demo version at the Integrity Music studios in Colorado Springs? You can, but you’ll have to act fast. This offer goes away tomorrow!

Enter to win this giveaway of a lifetime—and if you know another aspiring songwriter, be a good friend and share this link with them!

We already know how Proclaim makes creating a song slide easy with its CCLI integration. Even better, it helps you choose the perfect background for your slide—fast. Let’s say we’re going to sing “God of This City” by Chris Tomlin. You can pull up the song just as fast as you can type:

Here comes the cool part. Select “Background” and type “city”; Proclaim will look for slides and videos tagged with the word “city.” In seconds, you can find a background that matches your song choice.

Find the perfect background for every song by using the powerful Proclaim search box. You’ll save time so you can focus on the things you love. Download Proclaim today and test it for yourself.

J. D. Greear is the lead pastor of The Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, NC, and the author of several books, including Stop Asking Jesus into Your Heart. We had a few minutes to chat with him about how they approach worship at The Summit Church.

Worship artist Matt Papa also calls The Summit Church home, and given how much we value leadership-team collaboration, we were curious to hear about how the team works together.

The multisite approach The Summit has embraced carries its own set of challenges, like keeping eight different campus pastors and eight different worship leaders on the same page each week. What does the service-planning process look for you? 

God tells us in John 1 that He reveals himself to us through Christ. That’s why we strive to make all our worship and teaching “layered,” repeating the same content multiple times, but in multiple different ways—through my sermons, small group curriculum, worship songs, video clips, blog posts—all together pointing to the cross. A lot of preaching in the church today says, ‘Now go and change,’ but Gospel preaching changes you on the spot. Worship is a rhythm of revelation and response. God reveals aspects of his character to us, through the cross of Christ, and we respond to it.

Ideally, I can let the team know what aspect of God’s character I plan to highlight far enough in advance to give us time to make plans. Then, every Wednesday, the whole team, all the worship leaders and campus pastors, meet about the current week’s service. By that point, the message is pretty much done, so we’re able to refine the details.

We treat the whole 80–90 minute service as a single unit of revelation/response. Communication is more effective when it is layered, and we really try to frame the whole thing as a single unit. Scripture reading is always an important part of what we do—sometimes the specific passage I’m preaching from, sometimes not. There’s almost always a moment when the worship leader points out the connection between the Scripture and the songs which we’ve either written or chosen.

Where do the series ideas come from? Is that something you do on your own, or do you have a committee or team?

We don’t have an official committee, but I’m in constant dialog with the campus pastors to choose passages and topics.

There are always two kinds of planning going on at once: long-term and short-term. The short-term refinement and detailed planning is done in our Wednesday meeting. In the long term, though, we’re mapping out the big picture of a sermon series several months ahead of time.

I love John Stott’s portrait of a preacher. He says that a preacher is a steward. The Father decides what the children eat, but the steward arranges it into meals. We’re aiming for a balanced diet, so in a given year, I want to cover something from the life of Jesus, teach through a book, and cover a Christian living or wisdom series like marriage or finance or something like that.

As I listen to Matt Papa’s albums, I noticed that his songs are generally more outreach-oriented than those of a lot of other worship artists, which isn’t surprising, given the values of The Summit. Do you commission him to write toward a specific topic/theme, or does he bring songs to you after they’ve been written?

Yes to both. We’re friends, so a lot of it happens organically. As we hang out at my house, watching a basketball game or something, he’ll often ask me, “Hey, what are you thinking of preaching about in the next year?” I’ll tell him, and he’ll latch on to specific passages or ideas. Then, when it comes up in planning, he’s ready with a song that he’s written. Other times, we’ll get together and I’ll say to him, “We really need a song that captures the heart of this series, and there’s not really one out there. Could you or one of the other worship leaders write one?” He just did that recently for a series that we did called “All In.” He wrote a song that I believe was just called “All.”

Easter is a major outreach opportunity for most churches, and you’ve capitalized on it using on-the-spot baptisms. Could you share where that idea came from and the rationale behind it?

I don’t mean this to sound trite or sarcastic, but the idea really came from the New Testament. Every baptism recorded in Scripture happens spontaneously, so we just modeled our Easter service after that.

I grew up in a tradition that placed value on the altar call. I remember a Gospel invitation every week, and every week we did the walk-forward thing. That can be dangerous because it can create an artificial environment for salvation, but the golden nugget there is the call for a moment of decision, and baptism is the action that God has given us to mark a decision to trust Christ.

We don’t do it every week, and when we do, we try to be really responsible with it, and send every person who responds through some really systematic counseling. We aren’t afraid to turn people away. If we feel that someone doesn’t quite understand, we say, “let’s revisit this in a week or so.”

This Easter, the theme seemed to be “Jesus in My Place.” I saw it on baptism T-shirts, and of course I’ve heard the song that Matt wrote by that title. Where did that start? Was it proposed, or did it evolve organically?

That’s a phrase I repeat a lot. “Jesus in my place”—it’s in the Gospel in four words. I preached about it three or four years ago, and it really stuck in the minds of some of our worship leaders. Actually, we theme all our baptism services, not just the Easter ones.

What advice would you have for aspiring worship leaders?

Learn outside your camp. Figure out what your base is, but celebrate the diversity of gifts in the body of Christ by learning from those outside your own circle.

For more from J. D. Greear, pick up his new book Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart.

Today we welcome guest blogger Wisdom Moon. He is the founder of AllAboutWorship.com, a resource dedicated to equipping, encouraging, and inspiring worship leaders and teams.

Most of us know the importance of having a worship-team rehearsal during the week to go through the setlist together, go over transitions, etc. But how much time and attention do you allocate for the spiritual development of your worship team?

No matter your official title, we as worship leaders have the responsibility of shepherding and pastoring those involved in the church’s worship ministry.

What if we took the first 15 minutes of rehearsal time to read and discuss a passage from the Bible together? Or read through a devotional and pray for each other?

I have found that when I take the first 15 minutes to connect with my team spiritually, it is far easier to connect with them musically. It builds unity and helps prevent negative attitudes or egos. It also gives the team an opportunity to get to know each other—more than just what instrument each person plays. Even the rehearsal seems to go much smoother!

Do you do any sort of devotion with your worship team? What format do you prefer?

Marking seasons and holidays can be a meaningful spiritual exercise in the life of a church. Some of the holy days on the traditional church calendar are familiar to us, like Christmas and Easter, but some of the lesser-known seasons can be just as meaningful. Here are three church holidays you might be missing, and how you can celebrate them with your church.

Advent | a season of hopeful waiting

The four Sundays prior to Christmas are traditionally carved out as a season of preparation and patience called Advent. Scripture has much to say about the discipline of waiting. Taken from the Latin word for “coming,” Advent celebrates both of the comings of Christ, looking back on the first and forward to the second. Christmas celebrations are regularly full of hope, but they usually focus on the hope of the characters in the nativity story, rather than our own hope of Christ’s return. Use Advent to underscore the trustworthiness of God’s promises. He promised to return, and we can trust him because he kept his promise to come through a virgin in Bethlehem.

Epiphany | a celebration of Incarnation

There is some debate about where exactly it falls (somewhere in early January) because of the differences between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, but Epiphany is a feast day that celebrates the revelation of God’s Son as a human being in Jesus Christ. Epiphany commemorates the visit of the Magi, but most evangelicals miss it all together because Christmas has grown to include many of the surrounding events. January 6 is called “little Christmas” and celebrated as the true birthday of Christ in many places around the world. Without abandoning Christmas, Epiphany could be a great time to celebrate some of the theological nuance that gets neglected in the shuffle of December.

Lent | a season of repentance

Much like Advent, Lent is a season of preparation for a major Church holiday: Easter. Unlike Advent, the Lenten season is not hopeful. It is a solemn time of confession and repentance. Many churches remove decorations from their sanctuary to signify a return to the basics. Sometimes avoided because of its Catholic undertones, Lent has tremendous spiritual value.

These holidays are celebrated by some and ignored by others (Colossians 2:16–17). Even if your church has never marked these lost church holidays, consider adding them to the calendar next year and see what happens. After all, “without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” —Frank Zappa

To get you started, may we suggest a two-volume collection of meditations for Lent and Advent? Pick it up today and start planning something unexpected for your church next year.

You’ve built the greatest church presentation ever experienced by mankind. The visuals are stunning. The transitions are seamless. The videos make everyone in the room lean forward and gasp. Everybody loves it. Until the WiFi dies.

Then what?

Our customer-service staff gets this question more often than almost any other. Because Proclaim is built to run in the cloud, storing all your media and service plans securely in your own little corner of our server, it’s a reasonable thing to ask. Does Proclaim work in places where the WiFi is slow, buggy, or altogether absent?

The short answer: yes.

No, seriously, all the schedules you build will be stored locally on the machine where they were created. They’ll also be available on any machine that’s been synced with the Proclaim server. Because they’re stored locally, you don’t need an active Internet connection to go live.

There are a handful of features that require WiFi—Signals, Survey Signals, importing third-party content and embed content—but Proclaim’s core features work with or without Internet.

Leaders are readers. If you hold a position of spiritual leadership, you ought to be reading regularly, even if you don’t enjoy it. If you’re not sure where to get started, we have some suggestions. Here’s our list of the four things you should be reading all the time.

The Bible

We used to take this for granted. We used to assume that people of faith read the Word of God, preserved for us by the Holy Spirit. Now, it seems, that’s assuming too much. Only 19% of respondents to a recent Lifeway research study reported that they read the Bible every day. Thankfully, that number is higher among church leadership. A survey by Worship Leader Magazine tells us 94.8%, but that still leaves a large chunk of us not in God’s Word every day.

You can get back on track with one of our Bible reading plans on Faithlife. We have reading plans on a variety of topics, lasting anywhere from a week to an entire year. You really can’t go wrong, but we’d recommend “14 Days on Glory” and “21 Days on Promises.”

Biographies

In a letter to his rival Robert Hook, Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” (Click to tweet) We have the opportunity to learn from the lives of spiritual giants across history. From St. Francis of Assisi to Mister Rogers, we can learn something from everyone.

Again, there are many great options, but we would recommend that you start with David Brainerd: Pioneer Missionary to the American Indians. Though Brainerd’s life was cut short by tuberculosis, Jonathan Edwards had his journals compiled and published posthumously, giving us a rare insight into his inner monologue.

Worship Leader Magazine

Of course, you need to keep tabs on new music, and the best way to do this is by subscribing to Worship Leader Magazine. Be sure you’re getting the most bang for your buck by subscribing to both Worship Leader Magazine and Song Discovery—16 issues & 16 albums for less than $0.32 a piece. We dare you to beat that deal.

Blogs

If you’re reading the Bible, a biography, and Worship Leader Magazine, you should be pretty well set. The only thing we would add is, of course, the Proclaim blog and a few other online sources.

•  The Proclaim blog—hear the latest about the worship arts, Proclaim’s new features, and tips.
•  The 99U—because it’s not always about having the best ideas, but about making your ideas happen.
•  Jon Acuff—inspirational Christian writer and speaker Jon Acuff writes about a few issues all worship leaders face, like fear and hustle.

I have only a few service layouts that I use all the time. Instead of starting from scratch each week, I simply copy one of my templates. Here’s how to do it: build an order of service that you are likely to use again, and name it something like “TEMPLATE: Main service” or “TEMPLATE: Wedding.” Then, when you type “Template” in the search bar, all your most commonly used formats will be one click away.

Right-click on the template you’d like to use, and select “Duplicate Presentation.” Rename the template to the current week’s name (I use the date and type of service to keep myself organized). Drop in the songs, sermon notes, announcement slides, and any other resources that you plan to use and voilà! You’re done.

Likewise, you can name your images and video files with searchable words and find them later.

Proclaim lets you create dynamic, interactive church presentations while saving time for the things you love. Did we miss any time-saving tricks? Let us know in the comments. Then download Proclaim to try it out.

Proclaim is proud to partner with Worship Leader Magazine to offer you 10% off your admission to the National Worship Leader Conference with coupon code PRO10.

We had a great time at the NWLC event in Pennsylvania last week. Many of the same superb communicators and musicians are on the lineup for Leawood, KS (July 15–18)—plus a few others.

• Ian Morgan Cron led us through a liturgical experience in Pennsylvania that we won’t forget anytime soon. We’re not sure what he has up his sleeve for Kansas, but if it’s half as good, we can’t wait.
• James MacDonald speaks with passion no matter the venue, but he has an especially important message for worship leaders.
• The Vertical Church Band is a collective of worshipers, leaders, and musicians from Chicago who believe that worship is best when we sing to God about God. As transportive as their album can be, they’re even better live.

The NWLC website has a complete list of who’s coming.

Be sure to download the Faithlife app before you arrive, because all the general sessions will be sending signals using Proclaim. Check out FollowNWLC.com for more information.

The early-bird pricing expires May 31, so if you want the best price, you’ll need to act quickly. Visit NationalWorshipLeaderConference.com/KS to register today, and don’t forget the coupon code PRO10.