ChMeetings just released a centralized Worship Planning feature that brings together everything you need to prepare meaningful and organized worship services; from planning to song selection and volunteer coordination. This tool sits within the main menu and integrates with events you already manage in the platform. Let’s dive into what Worship Planning is all about and how it could be helpful for your church:

Worship Plans to Organize Every Service

The Plan area is at the heart of the Worship Planning feature. It allows you to see the events you organize, and associate Worship Plans and Volunteers to each event. This central planning interface lets your leadership build service elements efficiently and ensures nothing essential is overlooked before your event takes place. Let’s look at what you can do with this functionality, in more detail: 

• View and create worship plans tied directly to your church events. These plans serve as structured outlines for your services and can be shared with everyone involved, from attendees to volunteers, to managers, so everyone is on the same page.
• Add detailed items to a plan (e.g., songs, Scripture readings, notes) so everyone on your team knows what happens and when.
• Filter events with or without a Worship Plan so you know where planning is required, much faster.

Volunteer Management to Get People Together Effectively

ChMeetings integrates volunteer coordination directly into Worship Plans so you can easily access and manage volunteers for each event, right from your Worship Planning area. You can access all the Volunteer Management features you’re already used to if you’ve been with ChMeetings for a while, but in a much faster and easier interface. Here’s how Worship Planning helps manage volunteers more efficiently: 

• Easy access to Volunteer Management: just click the Volunteers button next to your event. 
• Fast filtering for events that do or don’t have volunteers assigned.
• All the features you already love, such as role assignment, volunteer push notifications for reminders, signup sheets, and more, all helping your church organize events more smoothly, by communicating easily and facilitating volunteer engagement. 

Song Library to Keep Your Music Organized

The Songs Library within Worship Planning is a powerful organizer for your musical resources. It lets you store media files and organize them by adding details such as tags, key, artist, etc. Keeping the song list unified with your planning workflow means musicians and leaders always have quick access to what they need, making your planning much smoother for everyone.

Here’s a look at what you can do with the Song Library: 

• Add and manage songs in a central catalog that can be linked to Worship Plans.
• Store metadata and references (titles, keys, tags) that make it easier to choose appropriate songs for each service.
• The library is searchable and accessible from within the worship planning interface.
• Adding songs to plans is flexible: Songs can be added to Plans both from the Worship Planning > Plans area and from under Events > Worship Plans.
• Various file formats that you can attach to a song item – where you can add multiple files, including of different formats: Here is what you can attach: 
  • Documents: pdf, doc, docx, 
  • Spreadsheets: xls, xlsx, csv, 
  • Text: txt, rtf, 
  • Archive: zip,
  • Audio: mp3, wma, aac, m4a, mp4, ogg,
  • Multimedia: mpg, avi, 3gp, mov,
  • Image: jpg, jpeg, png, gif,
  • Presentation: ppt, pptx.

Plan Templates to Save Time with Reusable Structures

ChMeetings lets you build reusable Worship Plan templates so you don’t have to start from scratch every time. This makes planning more efficient, especially for recurring services that follow a similar flow. Here’s what you can do with Plan Templates:

• Save plans as templates that reflect your typical service format.
• Apply templates when creating new worship plans and maintain consistency for future events.
• Templates can be managed and updated in their own section of the Worship Planning feature and are synchronized with the Worship Planning areas under the Events feature. You can load templates and save a plan as a template in both these areas.

The goal of these tools is to make the church service experience better for everyone involved: attendees, leaders, volunteers, and everyone else. Community gets better built and leadership becomes more effective with well-planned gatherings, which is why this feature exists: to help you accomplish your mission and make a difference for your people. 

If you have feedback about Worship Planning, please get in touch. We would be grateful to know your thoughts.