28 Ways to Make Great Segues During Worship: An Introduction

The worship team ends the song.

A smattering of applause from the congregation.

Singers are smiling.

The band looks at the acoustic guitar player.

The acoustic guitar player looks at the keyboard player.

The keyboard player gives him a twitch of the head that says, “you’re playing the intro, not me.”

The singers continue smiling, but now are glancing over their shoulder to see who’s starting the next song.

The guitarist shuffles his charts around and gives the worship leader the universal “just one moment” sign with his right index finger.

The worship leader wants to give him back a universal sign of his own, but instead says to the congregation, “let’s move into a time of prayer.”

That took far longer to read than it did to take place. But if you’ve ever been a part of a moment like that, especially as a worship leader, it felt like you could have clocked it with a sundial.

Transitions happen. Song to song. Music to preaching. Prayer to offering, etc. They happen. And they can happen just how they happen, or they can happen according to a plan. An unplanned transition is at best a speed bump; at its worst it’s a train wreck. When we don’t plan a transition, we put a period in where a comma should be. Or a gasp where a gentle inhaled breath should be. Or a fence instead of a gate. Or a…well, you get the picture.

The Unplanned Transition: “And Now, Let’s Take the Offering…”
An unplanned transition can cause a screeching halt to your service. But more often, the unplanned transition will result in an off-the-cuff attempt at continued forward motion. Frequently it’s just a verbal cue from the pastor or worship leader: “And at this time, we are going to collect offering.” Sure, it gets the job done, but I’m wondering if there’s a better way to move people through the experiences of a worship gathering.

The Unplanned Transition: A Bone
Look at it this way: I’ve got a great skeleton. It’s held me up for over 30 years. It’s been broken a half a dozen times or so, but those were pretty much all my fault. (Skateboards, jungle gyms, bike meets curb—by sixth grade the ER staff knew my name.) So my skeleton is a good one, but I don’t want to see it. If I do see it, other than through an x-ray, something’s really wrong. And you can bet that I will be a little pre-occupied with that particular bone sticking out of my body. That’s what a poorly-planned transition does: it distracts people with an exposed bone (albeit much less gross and icky). It abruptly calls attention to how we are moving to a new element, versus focusing on what the element is. It plucks us out of the moment created by the previous element and plops into a new one. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want “plucked” or “plopped” to be action verbs of my worship service. (Unless it’s Jesus doing the plucking and plopping—in that case, just hold on.)

So transitions happen, but intentional planning helps us create a seamless movement from experience to experience. I refer to planned transitions as segues. You can still create a “bad” segue, but the odds for a smoother transition exponentially increase when some thought is put into it.

In this article series, we’ll be looking at several different segues that cover various elements of the service. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but hopefully it’ll get your wheels turning about different methods to make great transitions in your worship service. See you at Part One .

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