We rehearse weekly whether we are scheduled to minister or not. And over the years I have studied to make each rehearsal more efficient. I will share what we do, what works and what doesn’t and why. Some things are great conceptually, but not an exact fit for every ministry. Vision plays a great part in how your rehearsals will flow.

1. Pray – We issue our prayer requests, and thank God for bringing us together again. We also update our prayer lists as we lift each other up during the week and any special needs we may have.

2. Praise Reports – I believe that we ought to praise God on a daily basis. Our lifestyle should reflect His praise and be present in us. If we are ministers of praise we should reflect that in every place.

3. Announcements – Any news, changes, information that needs to be shared is done at this time.

4. Stretching and ‘Across the Floor‘- We do a general stretching warm up, and then across the floor exercises; focusing on balance, flexibility and strength.

5. We go into choreography – Learning and perfecting our movements so that when we are up dancing, we can forget the steps, and focus on ministering from our spirits while our bodies execute the motions.

This is our general schedule, which is altered slightly once every other month when instead of working on choreography, we focus solely on technique, and improving our balance, flexibility and strength.

Agenda items 1 through 3 are in general done within the first 30 minutes of rehearsal and the next hour and a half we are in motion. This system has worked for us for many reasons. One, my vision was to create a community of dancers that fellowship with God and one another. Another reason is, we do not minister every week, so we have the luxury to take things a bit slower, which allows us to have dancers with various skill levels, and everyone (in theory) ministering on the same page.

One of the things that becomes challenging with this schedule is that once every other month is not quite frequent enough to focus on technique, which makes progress slow. But progress is still progress.