Services are the heart of Swerv. And every church’s services are a little different than the next. We try to provide a robust platform that can accommodate your church and the way it does its services.

Repeating services

Given that most of our churches follow a pattern for services, it would be tedious to have to create every service individually. Swerv let’s you create repeating services so that your structure is automated.

Setting up

Clicking Service under the Admin section of the menu on the left will take you to the repeating services set up. In it you can add services, specify frequency (weekly, monthly, and yearly), and set a start date.

Viewing

If you have several repeating services, you may find it helpful to filter which ones you are looking at on the service list page. You can do that by clicking on the ‘Show All’ menu at the top right of the list. It will allow you to show only a specific type of service in the list.

Editing

If you have a one-off service that strays from the normal time, you can still fit that in. For example, if your normal morning service is at 10:30AM on Sunday, and you had an extra service one Saturday that you wanted to include in your morning services, you can just specify that in the Type field while entering your Saturday service.

Extra service fields

We’ve given you the basics to get you started, but it’s quite likely your church may want to track other things in relation to its services. You may want to track who is welcoming or whether or not there is lunch after the service.

If you need to add more fields to your services, go to Service under the Admin section of the menu on the left. Click on the tab labeled Fields and you’ll be able to add fields to your services. There are five types of fields that you can add to a service.

You can add as many fields of these types to your service as you would like. There is no limit of any sort on how many you can add. We want it to be as useful to you as possible.

Order of service

To add songs, liturgies, or other special items to your service, just start typing them in the field below Order of Service and Swerv will find them for you. If the one you want doesn’t exist yet, there are options to create a song or liturgy on the fly. Just click the one you want and it will be added to the service.

You may also want to add special items to a service like communion or readings. Swerv comes with a default list of these things (Welcome & Announcements, Prayer of Praise, Prayer of Confession, Pastoral Prayer, Reading, Congregational Reading, Sermon, Communion, Benediction). Like everything else, these can be customized by going to the Service link under the Admin section of the menu on the left and then clicking the Items tab. These can be added to a service the same way a song or liturgy is added.

Some things (like songs or special items) will allow you to track extra data with them in the order of service. For example, songs will show up in your order of service with their default key. But if you wanted to do them in a different key, you can specify it in the order of service without changing it in the songs entry in the library.

In the picture below, the key of the song was changed from its usual key of D to C without changes the song’s key in the library.

You can also rearrange the order of service by clicking and dragging the icon.

Musicians

Scheduling musicians works similarly to your order of service. Just start typing in the name of the person you want to add and select their name from the list. If the person you want to add isn’t in Swerv yet, you’ll be given the option to add them. Once you have added the person you want, you can select which instrument they’ll be playing.

If your church uses any instruments beyond the default ones, or you want to remove some from the default list, you can do so by clicking the Service link under the Admin section of the menu on the left and then clicking the Instruments tab.

Statistics

Currently you can see a breakdown of how often songs and liturgies were used between two dates or during a specific series. To see these, click Statistics under the Planning section of the menu on the left. Select the Song + Liturgy usage totals chart and then tweak the inputs to find the answers you’re looking for.