Lifeway not plans to shut down its online music ministry resource lifewayworship.com .
In July 2023, the corporate announced its plan to retire the platform—a “digital hymnal” that gives users with chord charts, vocal arrangements, and orchestrations—then paused those plans per week later after a robust response from customers. After a 12 months of reevaluation and interviews with worship leaders within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) who use the positioning, Lifeway has modified course and decided to proceed maintaining and updating the resource.
“Lifeway is a curriculum company,” Lifeway Worship director Brian Brown said. “These worship leaders reminded us that music is their curriculum. It ministers to the entire body.”
Lifeway arranged panel discussions with greater than 200 worship leaders between July 2023 and May 2024. The ministry was surprised to find out how lots of these leaders—who served in churches of many various sizes and with a wide selection of musical styles—relied on lifewayworship.com .
“We undervalued a few of the unique things we provided, and we didn’t see how much support we were giving these churches. Much greater than we realized,” said Brown.
Will Bishop, associate professor of church music and worship at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said that when Lifeway announced the tip of lifewayworship.com a 12 months ago, he didn’t think it will be controversial.
“I form of thought, Who’s going to ever miss this?” he said.
But six months ago, Bishop began leading worship at a small SBC church in Louisville, Kentucky, and says the experience has completely modified his mind; the resource is invaluable to his ministry.
“I actually have spent a few years in larger ministries with larger budgets, but now I’m leading a church with a choir of about 18 people, a piano, organ, flute, violin, and trombone. I’d absolutely miss it.”
Bishop says that lifewayworship.com is exclusive because he can find quality arrangements à la carte. Instead of buying a full orchestration of a hymn for $70, he should buy individual parts for his team of musicians for about $8 total. And for small and medium-sized churches on limited budgets, that makes a giant difference.
“The majority of Southern Baptist churches are small ministries with possibly 15 people within the choir and three–4 instrumentalists,” said Bishop.
Services like MultiTracks, PraiseCharts, and SongSelect offer tools that allow big churches to copy the recorded versions of recent worship songs. Bishop says that for larger churches with the teams and budget, those resources are ideal. But it’s not what most smaller churches need.
“Lifeway doesn’t need to be every little thing. No one tool might be everybody’s tool. It’s an exquisite thing to be focused on small and medium-sized churches.”
Brown says that along with hearing from users that lifewayworship.com provides a singular set of musical tools, his team found that most of the worship leaders look to Lifeway not just for resources but additionally for theological guidance—something they will’t get from other non-SBC resources.
“One of their key concerns was the theological vetting of the lyrics of songs,” Brown said. “They desired to be certain that that the songs have been theologically vetted from a Southern Baptist perspective.”
Lifewayworship.com was originally envisioned as a digital SBC hymnal. Launched in 2008 under the direction of Mike Harland, the positioning started off with the 674 songs within the Baptist Hymnal and regularly expanded its offerings over time. But it wasn’t designed to be a groundbreaking tech resource; it was designed to make it easier for congregations to have access to recent, approved music.
“We were a music company first, we weren’t a pc company,” Harland told CT last 12 months. “There were actually other firms that had more user-friendly platforms, but we aspired for our content to be the best possible.”
SBC congregations don’t need to utilize music approved by Lifeway, but some church musicians said they’re overwhelmed by the quantity of recent worship music they need to pick from, based on Brown. For them, trusted curation is welcome.
“Ultimately, worship leaders and senior pastors are going to make decisions about music of their local context. But these leaders depend on us so as to add some guardrails,” Brown said.
Lifewayworship.com also offers orchestrations with simplified, readable rhythms and emphasizes congregation-friendly arrangements and key selection. Those services are crucial for time-strapped worship leaders or those with limited formal musical training. Some worship leaders told the ministry they don’t feel well-equipped to rearrange songs or select singable keys.
Moving forward, lifewayworship.com will proceed to offer arrangements of recent music but may even seek to offer guidance and create community amongst worship leaders across the denomination.
“We want this to be the start of more regular communication with our churches, and we’re trying to proceed talking more intentionally and more recurrently with our worship leaders,” said Brown. “This is only a start line for us.
