Gary Durbin looks for three qualities:
As constructing a sermon is to a pastor, so constructing a worship set is to a worship leader. You want to have solid content and memorable hooks that will stick with your church as they walk away.
For a worship leader, song selection is a very important and delicate, weekly task.
I don’t view myself as an entertainer, therefore I want my church to be able to easily engage, participate and sing the songs every week. That being said, I try to select SINGABLE songs! Novel idea, right? It doesn’t sound very profound, but it seems to be somewhat of a lost art.
What I’ve found is that the songs that seem to be the most accessible for the church are those songs that are timeless. They are those new or old songs that have that timeless, ageless quality. Timeless songs are songs that could have been written this week or 300 years ago. If we as worship leaders embrace them, I believe we can more effectively help our churches embrace God in corporate worship.
Here’s some qualities I look for in a timeless song:
1. SIMPLE MELODY – Think of the most popular songs that have been passed down from generation to generation. Most of them have a memorable, simple melody line. The melody is the key to a great song. The more complicated the melody, the harder it is to sing. I’m not saying that every great song has a simple melody, but if you want most of the people in your church to sing a song, a simple melody will enable that greatly. I was in a work shop at the National Worship Leader Conference one year, when I heard Nathan Nockels critiquing a song. He talked about keeping the melody simple, which means to limit the fluctuation in the notes of the melody line. I think the reason the Beatles’ songs have stood the test of time so well is because of their gift for writing memorable, yet simple melodies. It doesn’t have to be complicated to be great and when it’s simple, more people will be able to sing it. Keep it simple!
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