Building a Music Education Program in Your Church

Jim Cammack and Cathy Butler, 2009

A music education program in your church can be a wonderful ministry. It can bring people together, spark interest in music, and grow your church. We call our program “Picking and Praying” and we have found it to be a great asset for our church. Here are some steps we have found useful for starting and growing a music education program in our church. We hope it helps in yours!

• Identify a person (or persons) to play & sing
• You’ll need a guitar player and/or keyboard player and a singer.
• Two ways to get a guitarist and/or keyboardist

1. You can “grow your own” It is easier than you think to learn to play the basic chords you’ll need. An average adult can learn the basics in a few weeks.

2. Find musicians in your church. Ask! You may be surprised at how many people in your congregation already play an instrument. Note: your keyboard player needs to know how to play using chords. Often, traditional pianist/organists do not play in this way. So, you’ll need to either find a keyboard player who already knows how to play this way, or, find one who is willing to learn.

• Nurturing first, musician second. When identifying people to help, concentrate on finding people who are good teachers/nurturers. For example, you might use a good Sunday school teacher who might also sing in the choir. It is often easier to make a teacher into a musician, than to make a musician into a teacher. Ideally, of course, you would look for people who are great musicians and great teachers, but, that’s not always easy to find. If you have good musicians who lack the nurturing talent, consider coupling them with a nurturing person.
• Eventually, you will also need a bass player and a drummer. If you don’t have someone who plays already, see if you can get someone to take some lessons or get someone from outside the church to come in and teach.
• Find Music
• If You Already Have A Contemporary Service. If you already have a contemporary service, use the songs you are singing in that service. Your music director will already have music, but, you’ll need to make sure it’s simple enough for your purposes. If your church sings Praise and Worship music, you probably already have a license to use music from CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International). If your church doesn’t have one already, you should consider getting a SongSelect subscription from CCLI (see below)
• If You Don’t Have A Contemporary Service. If you don’t have a contemporary service, a great resource to use is ccli.com. CCLI maintains a list of songs and how often they are used in worship in churches. Start with the CCLI top 50. If possible, get a subscription to SongSelect (it is part of CCLI.com). With a SongSelect subscription, you can download transposable chord sheets. Although you can also find chord sheets in various places on the Internet, the chord sheets you get from SongSelect are provided by the publisher and so are more likely to be correct. Start with the songs which are easiest to play (and in the key of G --some of the ones we start with are “Every Move I Make,” “Holiness” (AKA “Take My Life”) and “Lord I Lift Your Name on High.” If you don’t know what a “transposable chord sheet” is or what “key” means, ask a musician or your music director. The music aspect is not as difficult as you might think.
• If you don’t know the song already, you’ll need to get the recording to listen to and learn it. Good resources for this are itunes.com, amazon.com or youtube.com. Myspace music is also developing an extensive library of free music which you can organize into play lists for various purposes.
• Start Classes
• Our classes start with second grade and older. Start teaching adults as well. Depending on your resources, you can split people into separate classes for different age groups and instruments. We first make announcements for people to let us know if they are interested in taking classes. We then schedule classes for them based on the response we get. We have learned that classes need a definite start/end time—so we usually aim for 8 week sessions.
• Teach them the common praise and worship songs. In the beginning, classes should learn the same songs at the same time—for example, you might have your beginning keyboard and guitar classes, learn “Every Move I Make” in the key of G. This will allow you to combine them into a band to play in your service.
• Play in Church
• Once they have learned a basic song, let them play it in church. This provides motivation and encouragement. It will also let your congregation see how a program that is bearing fruit. You will be surprised at how many will see these initial efforts and then want to be a part of it
• Form Regular Band(s)
• Once your budding musicians are able to play basic chords, you can start the band. Add singers and let them begin to practice and play as a group. At first, you’ll need to keep fairly tight control. Over time you can allow them more freedom to make decisions—for example, let them decide how often to repeat a chorus, or let them have control over song selection—you’ll need to ensure the songs are in a good key and not too difficult to play. This will give them some creative control.
• Pay attention to instrumentation and age. As a rule, younger kids like to be with older kids, but, not visa versa. However, your instrumentation will likely dictate how you make up your bands. For example, we recently started two new bands—one band is from 4^th to 6^th grade. This is because we had a drummer in 4^th grade and a guitarist, keyboardist and bassist in 5^th and 6^th grades. At our church, our normal youth age is 6^th grade and up, but, because our instrumentation feel in a different age range, that’s how the band is structured.
• Use The Musicians You Have Taught.
• When you have a basic program established, involve those you’ve taught throughout your music program. At our church, kids who were in our original classes--some of whom were in elementary school at the time--now regularly participate in our chancel choir and in our Praise Band. We now have six drummers who play on a regular basis in our services! Our last Christmas cantata was directed by 16-year old and our Easter Cantata will be directed this year by an 18-year old--both of which learned in our original Picking and Praying classes. We also have a gospel band (the Glory Train band) which is now has about twelve mostly older adults (all over 40) —some of these started in our picking and praying classes and some of them came “out of the woodworks” once we gave them an opportunity to play.
• Repeat the Cycle.
• The kids who learned in our original Picking and Praying classes are now helping teach and direct our newer groups. Additional musicians are stepping forward and volunteering to help in our program. Once things get started, you may find it takes on a life of its own.
• Formalize the Process
• Although we have been offering classes and building bands for a number of years, it has only been recently that we have begun to formalize the process. We have created a position of Coordinator of Music Education (COME) and are now making a concerted effort to get others involved in leading the various groups within our program.

We hope these steps are useful to you in helping you build a successful program in your church. If you have any questions or need additional info, feel free to contact us.

Jim Cammack

Cathy Butler