Battle of the Sexes

If you’re a guy worship leader, especially of the tenor variety, you’ve likely been complained to about the key of songs and how unreasonable they are for the ladies in the room. If I had my way, I’d do everything in the Tomlin-esque range – the higher end suits my voice. However, as leaders we’re servants first and there has to be some kind of balance struck, right?

I try to keep things as reasonable as I can, key-wise. I try. I also try to defer some songs to one of our strong female singers and give them the melody for a particular song on occasion. There are some great tools out there for helping you transpose chord charts if that’s not your strong suit. I’ll be talking about some of those resources as part of an upcoming post on planning tools.

In the meantime, I thought I’d use this topic to point you toward a resource that speaks directly to it. Worship artist Vicky Beeching has started an online community called The Women in Worship Network, geared towards…well, women in worship. (Well said, Jeff) The site features interviews with other prominent female worship leaders and other pertinent resources.

As an example, check out this post where Vicky talks about options for transposing songs into female-friendly keys. Hope it’s helpful.

- Jeff