By Donna Johnson
The WUUC Worship Team is committed to ongoing evaluation and improvement. At our retreat last fall we talked about the limitations of what we had been doing for evaluation and developed a new approach. We determined that the overall purpose of our evaluation was to optimize the quality of our worship. Team members developed an evaluation template that asks:
- Were there opportunities for emotional response, spiritual connection, deepening, and transformation?
- Did the service elements combine in a cohesive flow?
- What worked? What might be? What should be?
The Worship Team schedules an evaluator from the team for each week. The evaluator uses the evaluation template to draft comments about each element of the service. After the service the evaluator, Worship Associate and others who were involved in the service meet to discuss the things that went well, things that could have been changed, and any lessons learned that can be applied to future services. After the post-service meeting the evaluator finalizes the template, and it is stored on google docs. The whole team reviews the completed templates at our monthly meetings and note important take-aways in the meeting minutes.
We started this process in November 2019, and so far, the team is pleased with how the process is going. Worship Associates appreciate being able to talk about the service with colleagues when the experience is fresh. The team’s monthly discussions seem more helpful and focused because there is a designated person to lead the conversation about each service, and the completed templates are a great way to capture things that might be forgotten if we just relied on our memories.