Sunday Service Run Sheet Template
For worship pastors, service producers, and the volunteer in the booth
This is a normal Sunday morning: doors, worship, announcements, a 28 minute message, response, out. Just under eighty minutes, door to door. Adjust the songs and the sermon and it fits most rooms.
The durations matter more than the clock times. If your service starts at 9:00 and again at 11:00, you want one sheet with lengths in it, not two sheets with times in them.
The rundown
| # | From | Length | Cue | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | +0m | 10 min | Pre-service / doors | Hold music, countdown on the screens |
| 2 | +10m | 4 min | Welcome and call to worship | Host mic, band holds pad |
| 3 | +14m | 18 min | Worship set | 3 songs, last one lands quiet for confession |
| 4 | +32m | 4 min | Confession and prayer | Lights down, no lyrics on screen |
| 5 | +36m | 5 min | Announcements and giving | Video roll, then live from the host |
| 6 | +41m | 3 min | Scripture reading | Reader to lectern during the video |
| 7 | +44m | 28 min | Message | Wrap cue at 25, hard cap at 28 |
| 8 | +1h 12m | 5 min | Response and closing song | Band back on, prayer team forward |
| 9 | +1h 17m | 2 min | Benediction and dismissal | Raise house lights on the amen |
The From column is an offset from your start, not a fixed time. Pick a start and the clock times follow.
Take it with you
Copy gives you tab-separated text, which pastes straight into Google Sheets or Excel as proper columns. The same clipboard pastes into PilotCue's importer, so you can start in a spreadsheet and move later without retyping anything.
Opening it in PilotCue creates the event with these cues already in it. Free to run, and the crew, backstage, and speaker screens are free on every plan.
Put the slack where the overrun happens
Every service has one item that runs long, and it is almost always the message. Do not spread ten minutes of padding evenly across nine cues. Give the sermon a wrap cue a few minutes before its hard cap and leave the rest of the sheet honest.
The pre-service block is your real buffer. Ten minutes of countdown absorbs a late band, a dead battery, and a guest speaker who is still parking. If you start on time, you started on time; nothing downstream moved.
The person on stage needs a number, not a note
Volunteers tend to communicate time by walking to the side of the stage and waving. It does not work, and it teaches the speaker to ignore you.
Put a confidence screen in their eyeline showing minutes remaining on the current item, and agree on exactly two signals before the service: a wrap cue, and a stop. When the preacher has seen the same countdown every week for a month, the wrap cue starts working.
Two services are one sheet
If you run 9:00 and 11:00, resist building two rundowns. Build one, in durations, and start it twice. Anything you learn in the first service (the video was 40 seconds longer than anyone thought) you fix once and it applies to the second.
This is also why the template below has no times in it. You supply the start; the running order does the rest.
Debrief with numbers, not memory
The most useful ten minutes of your week is the conversation after the second service, and it is wasted if it runs on impressions. "Worship felt long" is not actionable. "Worship was planned 18 and ran 23, twice" is.
Keep the planned length next to the actual length for every item, and a month later you will know which parts of your service are honestly timed and which are fiction.
Questions people actually ask
- How long should a Sunday service be?
- Most contemporary services land between 65 and 90 minutes. The number matters less than hitting it consistently, because families plan their morning around when you actually finish, not when the bulletin says you will.
- How do you keep a sermon on time without being rude?
- Agree the wrap cue before the service, not during it, and always deliver it the same way: a visible countdown in the speaker eyeline plus one wrap signal at an agreed number of minutes remaining. Surprise signals feel like criticism; expected ones feel like support.
- Can volunteers run this without training?
- Yes, if the running order lives somewhere everyone can see the same version of it. The failure mode is a printed sheet that is one revision behind what the worship leader changed on Saturday night.