Recently, our church has been introducing some new songs. Some of these were written by members of the congregation and some are from other churches and worship bands. As a bi-lingual church we have some added issues of learning new songs as we usually have to learn all the lyrics in two languages and this can be confusing for church members who only speak one language. Still we’ve been using three simple tips to help our church members learn these new songs quicker.
1. Share the Songs on Social Media
We have a Facebook page that we use to share notices and prayer request, but recently we’ve started sharing YouTube and SoundCloud links to videos of songs we are introducing. This includes songs that we’ve written and put on SoundCloud. This allows people to hear songs and research the lyrics beforehand. It’s not perfect as it’s still hard to find polish translations of the songs to share which aren’t our own.
2. Play the Song in the Background Before the Service Starts
One of the things we always did at my youth group and we’ve recently started doing is playing new songs just before the service starts as people come in. This might be a last minute practice of the band as people are grabbing a glass of water or putting their coats away, or it can be over the stereo as people walk in. It really helps people get to know the songs.
3. Used Spaced Repetition When Introducing a New Song
Spaced repetition is a memorization technique. It basically says that you increase the gap between times you look at things or revise things and you will remember it forever (more or less). People have used this technique for years to learn new vocabulary in a foreign language and the navigators Topical Memory Verse system uses it too, but it works for songs too.
When you have a new song, make sure you play it the following week too, then you can wait a couple of weeks before you play it again, then you can increase the gap even further to a month, then a couple of months. Now, whether you’d actually want to wait that long before playing it again (I’m guessing not as there must be a reason you are playing it in the first place). The most important factor is to make sure you play it again the week after you first introduce it.
Have you got any other tips?
These are three things we’ve been doing recently but I’d love to know any other tips you’ve got for how to help introduce new songs.
[Image via Open Church]
John Horne says
Greetings,
Not really different but here’s what we’re trying. In addition to serving as the webmaster of our church website, I also serve in A/V by manning the camera and generating HD videos of the services. We have been using contemporary worship songs as an outreach to our younger members. One problem was that the older members (of which I am one) had never heard the songs. I began making videos of songs we planned to use and added on-screen lyrics. Recently I began putting the videos on our website and placing a post on our FB page to announce the song for the coming Sunday. This gives the older members an opportunity to hear and become familiar with the song before ‘springing it’ on them.
Here’s a link to the site: http://www.kallamgrovechurch.org/connecting-in-community/music-video