Tags
Advent, Community Outreach, congregational participation, Lent, Music, Music playlists, Spotify, The Village Church
Many years ago when I was in local church ministry, I had a colleague who read Rolling Stone magazine each week in order to find titles for his sermons from the songs that were popular on the radio at the time. Mind you this was long before iPods and iTunes, let alone e-mail and blogs, so he had to rely on the weekly worship bulletin to inform the congregation that the title for the next week’s sermon would be, say, “Cosmic Debris”, along with a suggestion to give a listen to the Frank Zappa tune prior to the next worship service. He knew that he was on to something when teenagers started attending Sunday services more often than their parents and asking for cassette tape recordings of the songs that he referenced in his sermons. I remember him expressing a desire to add an audio/visual element to the sermons, but that was rather cost prohibitive in those days. Enter the World Wide Web, mp3 digital music files, streaming audio/video, inexpensive projectors and screens, and what was once but a dream is now common.
If you are not familiar, Spotify is a social music application that allows users to listen to and create customized playlists for every genre of music imaginable. It is also a platform for artists to upload their songs and receive financial compensation making it a legal file sharing service. Users are not allowed to download songs and artists are paid a small royalty each time one of their songs gets played. The social element comes into play when users subscribe to playlists and artists, create and share custom playlist, and/or allow their Facebook and other social media friends to see the songs to which they are listening. Spotify offers both a free and premium platform with the former being more like listening to commercial radio as advertisements are aired every few songs. The premium platform dispenses with the ads and includes other services such as multi-device syncing of playlists for a monthly fee.
I searched Spotify for “church”, “Methodist”, “Presbyterian”, and “Episcopal” and found a few albums of church choir recordings, but only one congregation that seemed to be using the platform as a means by which to connect congregational members. The Village Church, with multiple campuses in the Dallas area, has created three playlists on Spotify one of which has more than 500 followers and includes 26 songs for more than 2 hours of playing time.
Congregations and clergy members might want to experiment with Spotify as yet another means by which to encourage congregational participation and connection, to enhance worship preparation, and to reach out to the broader community. The first step is to create a free account in the name of the congregation in order to generate a user profile that people will be able to find and follow. Then use Spotify to create playlists on various themes or for different church seasons. For example, create a playlist of Advent or Lenten related songs and add new songs to the list each week of the season to coincide with the theme of the upcoming sermon. Develop playlists on other themes and aspects such as devotion, service, justice, hope, and more. Advertise the profile name and playlists through Twitter, Facebook, etc., as well as the printed worship bulletin. The development of playlists is as simple as clicking on the “New Playlist” button on the left side of the user screen then searching for songs by title, artist, or keyword. Simply drag and drop the resulting song(s) to the playlist which you have named by theme or season. Encourage certain groups such as the choir or youth group to get involved and create their own playlists for the congregational profile.
If you are already using Spotify or another such social music platform in your ministry, please share the information and link in a reply to this posting. If you give Spotify a try, please share the results in similar fashion.
Thanks for reading!