SCBO Partners with “Practice to Platform” to Offer Free Training for Worship Teams

How do churches develop worship team members from scratch?

SCBO is launching its next major worship resource to address this issue with Practice to Platform (PTP)—eight online worship courses that are designed to take new musicians from scratch to their first worship audition and prepare them to be ideal worship team members. 

I’m convinced there are people who don’t think they can learn worship roles but are capable with the right resource. That’s why I created this program. 

Practice to Platform offers courses for acoustic, electric, bass guitars, piano, drums, and vocals, as well as music theory to teach Nashville numbers by ear. It also features an introduction to leading teams in a way they will love and the theology undergirding effective leadership, incorporating the fruit of the Spirit. 

PTP has video lessons, summaries below the videos, quizzes, and critical thinking questions. However, there are no song tutorials, it is all skill-based, so it can apply to a variety of contexts-- even ethnic/international churches using Google Translate. This resource has been vetted, winning an award from Next Level Worship  in 2019, as well as testimonials you can read on practicetoplatform.com.

These courses are normally available for $79/apiece or a subscription fee, but SCBO has partnered with PTP to make these available for free to our churches for as long as I am on staff at SCBO.

Ways you can use PTP:

Make an announcement in your church offering this resource using the slide provided. You might be surprised who is willing to learn instruments if they know there are resources to help them.

Give access to your youth worship teams. This has already proven to be beneficial at large churches like Spring Hills Baptist, Granville.

Give access to your Sunday worship team and have them skip the content they already know. There are eight modules per course, and the last three are perfect for team members already serving.

I use this as a take-home resource for new musicians that I’m teaching weekly lessons. I have a keys player at my church who is about 16 years old and learned piano from scratch in ten months. One of my bass players used it to learn bass in about three months, and he’s serving in his late 60s.This works for all ages.

Or someone auditioned, and they aren’t quite ready for the team yet. This is a great tool to give them next steps instead of just saying “no.”

There is only one requirement to get access to PTP, and Dr. Jeremy Westbrook, SCBO executive director, and I are in total agreement on this. PTP access will only be available to members of SCBO churches that have given to the Cooperative Program in the past year. 

It that’s your church, head to the landing page at scbo.org/PTP with a list of names and emails. There you’ll find a contact form so we can set up your students. You can either type in the names and emails via the contact form or put them in an Excel spreadsheet and attach it to the contact form. You will not receive marketing emails.

If you want to learn more, visit our partnership landing page at scbo.org/PTP or reach out to Zac directly at zjames@scbo.org.