Friday, September 19, 2008

Worship Evaluation Form

In my attempt to grow the worship ministry in my church I decided to implement a short 5-minute debriefing session after each service. I wanted to minimize some of the mistakes that we were making (on a regular basis). I have had this idea for some time now (about 6 months ago) but have only recently implemented it (about 2 months ago). I have been weighing out the pros and cons and really thinking it through and how I should approach this.

So to facilitate the debriefing session I decided to come up with a simple "Worship Evaluation Form". It's so simple, it only takes 5 minutes to fill up. This was VERY important as I do not want to keep the worship team from their chance to catch up with other church members. My church's worship team has used the form and it has been so beneficial to us. It helps us as we prepare, it helps us as we play. It just makes us more conscious and more intentional in whatever we do. I would recommend worship teams do this. But please be careful to keep it short and sweet (KISS), and also to make sure your team is ready to take criticism. If you have taken these two steps you can gently introduce a debriefing session for your worship team.

Last Sunday I took it one step further. Apart from the debriefing session with the worship team. I also passed out another "Worship Evaluation Form" to certain members in the congregation and asked them for their honest feedback and comment. When we first introduced the debriefing we wanted to get feedback from people who were not part of the worship team as well. However I was careful to take it slow as musicians are often emotional people and I wanted to see if they were really ready to be criticized before getting random people to give us their thoughts. I also did not want to instill a critical spirit into the church members where they constantly judge and evaluate the team, nor did I want to distract the church members from worshipping to be judging or watching the team. I passed out the forms immediately after the worship session. However I am considering passing it out to them before the session next time so that they can be more detailed and accurate in their assessments.

It turned out very well, the members were honest and commended some efforts and criticized some others. I showed it to the team during the debriefing and they were all opened and receptive to what the members thought. We instantly made two decisions based on ALL the evaluations (even previous ones), that we 1) need to select more familliar songs and 2) more importantly, was that we needed to pray harder for the worship ministry.

The forms are available for download here (at the end of this post) if you would like to use them for your own church.

I'm sure some of you who read my blog are involved in the worship ministry as well. What do you think of this idea of a debriefing session or evaluating the team? Can the forms be improved?

Or perhaps you are also a member of Canaan Church and would like to give your opinion on the worship ministry, download the form, fill it up, and let me hear your thoughts.

My ultimate goal is growth.


Download the forms here:
Worship Evaluation Form (Team)

Worship Evaluation Form (Congregation)

7 comments:

Jordan Quah said...

Forms are great, feedbacks are good, but dont' forget who we're really worshipping though. If the worship leader ever feels compelled to change the direction of the worship as the spirit commands, by all means, don't let the crowd determine the path. In situations where you know not what to do, seek for His wisdom. God bless.

JoelWho said...

bravo jordan!!

Lemuel Yee Ngan Foong said...

I realized that many people (especially those from USA) have been to this post and downloaded the forms.

Please let me know if the forms have been helpful to you and your ministry. Let me know if you have made any changes or if the forms can be improved.

I want to grow too!

Anonymous said...

I'd love to see your forms, but when I tried to download them I got an error that said they were unavailable. If you are still willing to share them, I've been looking for some kind of evaluation form for my church's worship ministry and would appreciate looking at yours.

E-mail me at levite247 [at] gmail.com

Lemuel Yee Ngan Foong said...

My mistake! I moved the files but forgot to update the link. This post is kinda backdated now. But it looks like this post is still red hot.

Anyway, the links are repaired. Thanks for letting me know, and my apologies for any inconvenience.

Let me know if you guys have any comments on the forms (notice that there are TWO forms).

Thanks!

Unknown said...

hi, can you update the links? thanks

Lemuel Yee Ngan Foong said...

Try this new link instead:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/b5n2f5k9sp84wbq/vG3Gu_DTsM