With a new Sr. Minister starting we have a lot of people getting exctied about where they need to be in order to funciton more efficiently.  Especially in the area of worship on Sunday morning.  Our previous minister was not worried about themeing out a worship service or even creating any sort of creative elements.  He was an evangelist and he preached.  Anything outside of that was really up to the worship minister.  The other struggle previously was that the team often did not know where they were going from week to week.  So, the new guy is more proactive in creating a preaching schedule and creating an environment.

So, you can imagine some people on this team are trying to find ways that they can collaborate and start bringing ideas together from a broader base of individuals.  They want the new guy to come in and raise the level so to speak.  They are ready and willing to go wherever he leads, but they are trying to catch up and be on the forefront of the options out there.

Student ministries tend to set the tone for where the church is going to be and often weeds out all the bad ideas before the rest of the church adapts them.  We (student ministers) tend to be early adapters of new ideas and creative genisuses in a lot of ways compared to the rest of the church.  So, when this group realized what they were up against they came to the student ministries department to gain an understanding of what we do and the methods that we use for creating worship services.  Here are the basic elements that we use in developing a series and creating worship experiences.

1.  Brainstorming – several months ago I wrote about this check it out here.

2.  Planning Center Online – this is a tool that really helps you see a worship service planned out and gives you the chance to begin to look at the service wholistically.  If you do not use this you can get it for free.

3.  Basecamp – this is an online project management tool that can be used with multiple users and really opens the door of communication.  You can run multiple projects at once, create todo lists, writeboards, up load files, milestone tasks, messages and even leave comments on any of these.  This is a tool that can be set-up to help you and your team collaborate and stay ahead of the task.  Check it out here.

4.  Evernote – with evernote it can be a little more difficult to set up.  It does allow you to share information across the board.  It is accesible from you computer, the web or even your iphone.  It is also a great way to organize your personal notes and to jot down ideas quickly.  You can check it out here.

While these are all web based tools I am certain there are lots of other ways to collaborate.  Share some of the ideas that you have used and the thing that you think work the best.