Frequently asked questions

Worship planning is pastoral work. The songs your congregation sings are shaping their faith week after week, and picking those songs deserves the same care as a sermon.

Vestry is the planning app built from the ground up for worship leaders who want to be more intentional about how they choose songs. You tell Vestry what your service is about. It then surfaces songs that fit, both by the theology in the song (not just the theme) and by the posture the song asks your congregation to take, like Adoration, Surrender, or Wrestling. From there, Vestry helps you sequence those songs into a worship journey — a cohesive narrative across the service — so what you lead on Sunday is not just a setlist but a story that draws your congregation toward God.

Vestry is built for worship leaders across the full range of churches and roles. The volunteer who plans on Sunday night between dinner and bedtime. The bivocational worship leader with a full-time job alongside a worship ministry. The worship pastor at a mid-sized church or a multi-site campus. The music director, the band leader, and the seminary-trained worship director who wants shared vocabulary with the rest of the staff.

Most of the worship leaders we have talked with sit somewhere between volunteer and full-time: serious about the craft, short on time, and uncertain whether the next song they pick is doing what they want it to. If you have ever finished a setlist and quietly thought "I think this works, but I cannot say why," Vestry is for you.

Pricing scales with the size of your worship-planning team and how many service types you run (Sunday morning, youth, midweek, and so on). There are plans for solo planners, small teams, and larger ministries running multiple kinds of services across the week. A founding-church program offers a discount to early-adopter churches who help shape the product. The current pricing table lives on the pricing section of the landing page.

Yes. The first 30 days are free. No credit card up front. If Vestry is not the right fit, the trial ends on its own and there is nothing to cancel.

Services you have already published stay accessible after the trial ends. The full song catalog is included in the 30-day trial and becomes part of the paid subscription after Day 30. And the Vestry community is free for every worship leader, paid plan or not.

We suggest taking your time the first few times you plan a service — you're getting familiar with a new way of thinking about how songs get chosen, and it's worth a slower first pass. Once it starts to feel natural, your song bank fills out, and your preferences are set, planning a service takes about 30 minutes.

Speed isn't the goal; it's a side effect of a clearer process. Vestry's goal is to help every worship leader plan and pastor their churches more intentionally. Most worship leaders who start working with Vestry say it changes how they approach the craft of song selection, not just how fast they do it.

The time you save goes back to discernment. Choosing between a handful of well-matched songs is more formational than picking the first one that comes to mind or scrolling through Spotify or top-100 lists. Search time goes down so prayer, contemplation, and pastoral leadership time can go up.

A 2023 study by Worship Leader Research found that across the entire decade from 2010 to 2020, only 38 unique worship songs ever reached the CCLI or PraiseCharts Top 25. Nearly all of them came from just four churches: Bethel, Hillsong, Elevation, and Passion. And those 38 songs have largely become the soundtrack guiding the theology of many congregations, intentionally or not.

These communities have written songs the global church genuinely loves. But the distribution path the church relies on — CCLI charts, Spotify Christian playlists, YouTube recommendation feeds, and dedicated marketing initiatives — promotes songs that already have large reach. The set of widely known worship songs is much narrower than what the church writes.

Vestry's framework has been applied to over 12,000 unique English-language worship songs spanning centuries of hymnody through 2025, drawn from over 1,500 artists and over 3,500 credited songwriters — and growing. Most of those songs never reach a worship leader's attention. Vestry helps make them findable not by popularity, but by theology and posture.

While a song's popularity is one component that influences the default ordering of songs, it never enters the match rating itself — every match rating is calculated purely from theological topic and worship posture fit. You can sort by popularity, by pure fit, or by Vestry's default blend. A song from a smaller ministry that genuinely fits your service can outrank a Top 25 song that does not.

Over a year, a regular attender sings 150 to 200 worship songs, mostly drawn from a smaller pool the church returns to again and again. That is one of the most repeated bodies of theological content in the life of the church. A line often credited to Gordon Fee captures it directly: "Show me a church's songs, and I'll show you their theology." James K.A. Smith built out the same argument across the three books of his Cultural Liturgies trilogy. Liturgical practice forms what people love long before it shapes what they think. What a congregation sings becomes what a congregation knows about God.

Researchers have surfaced specific gaps in the contemporary repertoire. Lester Ruth at Duke Divinity has documented, across decades of CCLI charts, that the Holy Spirit is dramatically underrepresented relative to the Father and the Son. Walter Brueggemann has argued that the absence of lament from corporate worship weakens a congregation's ability to sing through suffering. Our own analysis of 12,000+ worship songs agrees with both findings. Theology Proper (the doctrine of God) appears in 99.3% of those songs. Pneumatology (the doctrine of the Holy Spirit) appears in 19.6%. Songs of Wrestling (voicing doubt and weariness before God) account for just 1.9%. Songs of Reconciliation (confession and turning back to God) account for just 0.3%.

No one, however gifted, holds 52 weeks of song selections in mind. Vestry's 165 theology tags across 8 doctrinal domains make the cumulative pattern visible week by week. And the tags go deeper than broad themes — within Pneumatology, you can target songs tagged Comforter or Charismatic Gifts specifically. When you find a gap, you can search for it. Songs of Wrestling about God's faithfulness. Songs of Reconciliation about God's mercy. Those songs exist. The framework helps you find them and put them where they belong in your service.

Four songs in a row can transition smoothly through keys, build energy beautifully, and "flow" in every musical sense while leaving the congregation in the same posture for 25 minutes. Musical flow and formational journey are different things.

A worship journey is a structured sequence of postures that gives a service a deliberate story arc. Vestry includes 21 prebuilt journeys; Scattered to Sent, for instance, moves a distracted congregation from gathering, through the Word, to commissioning. Worship leaders can also build their own custom journeys for their own contexts. The historic shape of Christian worship has always carried this logic. Constance Cherry writes about it in The Worship Architect: worship reflects the structure of a conversation, where you do not commission someone before you have spoken to them, and you do not share a meal (communion) before you have gathered. The sequence enacts the gospel in its form, not just its content.

A setlist is five songs surrounding a sermon. A journey is a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Vestry helps you plan the second.

A worship posture is what a song asks the congregation to do when they sing it. Not what the song is about.

There are 20 postures, grouped into four families:

• Praise & Thanksgiving: Adoration, Reverence, Exaltation, Deliverance
• Prayer & Petition: Invocation, Intercession, Illumination, Provision
• Relationship with God: Trust, Surrender, Commitment, Belonging, Yearning, Reconciliation, Wrestling
• Self & Others: Declaration, Call to Worship, Exhortation, Assurance, Benediction

Take one theological theme, God's faithfulness, and watch what happens to it across five different worship songs:

• "Where is Your faithfulness in this darkness?" — Wrestling. Voicing honest struggle.
• "I will trust Your faithful hand" — Trust. Relying on God through hardship.
• "Your faithfulness set me free" — Deliverance. Celebrating a rescue God has already accomplished.
• "Thank You for Your faithfulness" — Adoration. Expressing love directly to God.
• "God is faithful in every season" — Declaration. Proclaiming truth to the congregation.

Same theology. Five completely different worship moments. Five different ways God forms the congregation through song. Read together, they tell a cohesive story that moves the congregation toward God's faithfulness.

This pattern is not new. The Fourfold Order — gather, hear the Word, respond, be sent — has shaped Christian worship for centuries, and worship leaders have been sequencing songs into formational arcs for as long as the church has sung. Vestry's contribution is to name the postures within those arcs clearly enough that the work becomes more intentional and shareable across a team.

The idea also borrows from a branch of linguistics called speech act theory: every sentence does something (a force) and says something (a content) at the same time.

The full posture-and-theology framework has been accepted for presentation at the Conference on Contemporary Praise and Worship at Belmont University in July 2026.

A worship journey is a sequence of postures that moves the congregation through a service. Scattered to Sent is one example. Exaltation gathers scattered people through God's mighty works. Belonging claims the congregation as one body. Declaration proclaims truth about God. (The sermon is preached here.) Assurance remembers God's faithfulness in response to the word. Adoration sends the congregation out in love. Five songs, five distinct postures, one holistic journey.

Vestry includes 21 starter journeys drawn from three historic approaches to worship design: the Fourfold Order (Gather, Word, Response, Send), the Isaiah 6 pattern (Vision, Confession, Cleansing, Commissioning), and the Vineyard / free worship tradition. Each is a starting point, not a script. The expectation is that worship teams build their own journeys for their own contexts. A team that can name 20 distinct postures has more range than a team working from a vague sense of what feels right.

Sequence matters practically as well as theologically. Reconciliation exposes vulnerability; it belongs after the congregation has been drawn into God's presence, not at the opening of a service. Assurance matters more after vulnerability has been expressed. Benediction belongs at the end because it sends the congregation out. Vestry encodes these patterns in the starter journeys so a new team can begin with the historic logic and grow from there.

Theology tags name what a song is about, doctrinally. The catalog uses 165 of them, organized into 8 doctrinal domains and 35 subcategories. The 8 domains are Theology Proper (the doctrine of God), Christology (Jesus), Pneumatology (the Holy Spirit), Anthropology (humanity), Hamartiology (sin), Soteriology (salvation), Ecclesiology (the church), and Eschatology (the last things).

Tags describe the theology in each song. Yet Not I But Through Christ in Me by CityAlight expresses Union with Christ (Christology) and Blessed Hope (Eschatology); Same God by Elevation Worship expresses Immutability (Theology Proper) and Dependent Creatures (Anthropology); and Holy Spirit by Jesus Culture expresses Filling (Pneumatology) and Immanence (Theology Proper). Each song holds multiple tags, weighted by how prominently each appears.

Vestry's tags tell you whether a theological topic is present in a song. They do not tell you whether the song's specific doctrine matches your denominational context. A song about salvation may lean toward sovereign election (the Reformed conviction) or universal invitation and human response (the Arminian conviction). A song about the Holy Spirit may say the gifts are still active today (the continuationist conviction) or that they ceased with the apostolic age (the cessationist conviction). Which side a song takes is for your church's leadership to evaluate. Vestry surfaces what is there; your church decides whether it fits.

Not at all — you describe your service in your own words, and Vestry takes it from there.

When you plan a service, tell Vestry whatever is already in your head: the sermon topic, a scripture passage, the season (Advent, Lent, Eastertide), a holiday, or a short description of what the service is about. If you already know a theology tag or a posture you want to build around, you can start there too. Vestry takes whatever you give it and suggests relevant worship journeys (covered in Question 10) and theology tags (covered in Question 11). You pick from the suggestions. The vocabulary is there when you want it and out of the way when you don't.

Another easy way in is to look up a song you already love. The catalog will show you the posture and theology tags Vestry has assigned to it — the framework applied to a song you already know. After a few weeks of planning this way, the 20 postures and the doctrinal categories stop being a list to memorize and become a way you think about songs.

The catalog includes over 12,000 unique English-language worship songs spanning centuries of hymnody, praise & worship and gospel classics, and modern favorites. All eras are equally searchable in the same system — Great Is Thy Faithfulness, In Christ Alone, Goodness of God, The Blessing, and Holy Forever are all classified by the same framework.

The catalog is locked during Beta and will keep growing as we approach full launch.

Send us a feature request in the community tab — tell us the artist, writer, or song you want to see in Vestry, and our team will look into adding it for the next catalog addition.

Yes. Your team can:

• Chat about songs in context. Each song has a real-time chat thread tied to the service type you're planning, with the song's posture and theology tags visible alongside the conversation.
• Build the song bank together. Team members can add a song to Consider, vote on it with thumbs-up / thumbs-down, and move it to Approved — or to Avoid with a written reason. Song bank statuses can be set workspace-wide or per service type.
• Edit services with handoff. One person edits at a time; everyone else sees changes live. Edit-handoff passes control cleanly when someone else is ready to take over.
• Use roles that map to how church teams work. Admins, Leads, Members, and Viewers — with Leads and Members optionally scoped to specific service types.
• Direct-message teammates. Inbox threads link back to specific songs and services.

Yes. There's a community space inside Vestry, free and open to every worship leader, whether you pay for the planning tools or not.

Worship leading can be lonely work. You lead the same room every Sunday, often as the only person at your church doing what you do, and the peers who'd most understand the craft are usually at other churches.

Burnout research is consistent: workload isn't the whole picture. Community and peer support are among the strongest protective factors. A 2026 Worship Leader Research study of more than 3,300 worship leaders found they are 8.5× less likely than U.S. adults to rate their mental health as "excellent," and most don't have regular mental health or spiritual direction support.

Vestry's community isn't a fix for any of that. It's just a place where worship leaders can talk to other worship leaders who know what you're going through. What do you do when the pastor overrules your song choice the week of the service? How do you lead a congregation that is tired of contemporary worship but resistant to liturgy? What does healthy sabbath look like for someone whose job is Sunday? Many worship leaders never get the chance to regularly talk with other people in the same role, or even to find them. Inside Vestry, they're already there.

Vestry is a natural companion to them, not a replacement. Planning Center, Elvanto, OnStage, and similar tools handle the scheduling and logistics side of a service: assigning the band and volunteers, sending reminders, managing rotations, and building the order of service for everyone on stage. Vestry handles song selection and the worship journey: what songs to sing, why, and in what order, based on the theology in each song and the posture it asks the congregation to take.

Vestry has an order-of-service builder of its own, but only because mapping the worship journey requires it. The workflow is: plan your songs in Vestry first, then move the song list over to your logistics platform for the scheduling work. The two don't overlap. Direct integrations with Planning Center and other platforms are in our development pipeline before full launch, so you won't have to copy the song list manually.

One thing none of these platforms do automatically: they don't tag songs by topic, theme, or theology. You would have to categorize every song in your library by hand. Vestry already does that classification. Every song in the catalog comes pre-tagged with theology and posture, across 12,000+ worship songs, 165 theology tags, and 20 postures.

Vestry doesn't touch chord charts. When you need a chord chart for a song you've picked in Vestry, you go to SongSelect or PraiseCharts. That's what they're built for, and they do it well.

Both platforms let you filter songs by theme, but neither was designed to help you plan a service formationally and intentionally: what a song asks the congregation to do (covered in Question 9), how songs sequence into a worship journey (covered in Question 8), and how the songs you pick across weeks shape what your congregation believes (covered in Question 7). That kind of intentional planning is the question Vestry was built around.

The workflow: use Vestry to plan what songs you'll sing and why; use SongSelect or PraiseCharts to pull the chord charts your band needs.

Vestry is a planning tool — we help your team choose songs, not distribute them. We don't host lyrics, chord charts, or audio.

When you want to listen, the Spotify player on each song plays directly from Spotify. When you want lyrics, chord charts, multitracks, or other resources, we link out to fully licensed and official sources such as SongSelect, PraiseCharts, Genius, and Multitracks.

Your CCLI or One License reporting works the same way it always has.

Spotify and YouTube recommendations are opaque. You don't know why a song is being served to you, and you can't control what gets recommended next.

Many worship leaders use these streaming playlists for song discovery, but streaming algorithms surface what's popular or what's similar to your listening history. That's not the same question as what your church needs this Sunday.

Vestry's discovery works the opposite way: you describe your service (sermon, scripture, season, holiday, theology you want to surface), and Vestry returns songs that fit, including songs from ministries and writers you'd rarely see on a streaming playlist. You can see exactly why each song surfaced, which theology tags matched, and which posture it carries. You can adjust the inputs to change what you get.

Asaph, Verseable, Weave Worship, Worship Planner, Worship Ministry Training's Worship OS, and WorshipTeam.ai's Nova are our closest peers in this space. Each is a meaningful attempt at solving real problems in worship planning, and the worship-tech ecosystem is healthier for having them. They fall into two patterns, each with its own tradeoffs:

• Some are tied to your Planning Center song database. Suggestions come only from songs already in your PCO account. That could be a fit if your library is already large and current, but it's a consistent constraint: you can't discover or search for new songs through the tool itself.
• Others are AI agents or wrappers. They call ChatGPT or Claude with worship-specific prompts. Question 22 and Question 23 cover the structural and design issues that come with that approach.

The underlying feature set overlaps with Vestry in places, but our goal is fundamentally different: to help worship leaders intentionally guide their congregation toward formation through song selection.

Every tool makes a choice about where to invest. Two things in this space take real investment over time: the architecture and infrastructure of the data itself, and the design of the planning experience around it. Most tools commit deeply to one or the other. Vestry was built on the conviction that worship pastors need both: depth in the data, and a tool that feels good to return to every week.

Within that approach, AI is a tool, not the objective: formation-first, not AI-first. We use AI with precision in a few narrow places inside our data pipeline rather than as the main driver. The product is a 12,000-song catalog with 165 theology tags and 20 postures, built through research grounded in speech act theory and worship-as-formation scholarship. Question 28 and Question 29 go deeper into our reasoning.

You'll feel the difference the moment you use the tools side by side.

ChatGPT and Claude are real and useful tools for many ministry tasks: sermon prep, communication drafts, lesson outlines, brainstorming. But when you ask ChatGPT or Claude to plan a worship setlist, you run into two real problems: AI hallucinates (inventing song titles, making false claims about what real songs say, describing theology in vocabulary that does not match what the song actually contains), and its training data over-represents the songs and ministries that already get the most online coverage. Verifying every suggestion takes longer than building the setlist from scratch. Question 28 covers the structural reasons in more detail.

Reliable classification of what a worship song does and what it articulates doctrinally requires specialized knowledge — a classification system tested against human validation at the rigor expected of academic research. That work has been done for Vestry. It has not been built into general-purpose AI tools.

A growing pattern in worship and church tech is the conversational AI agent: a chat box that builds your setlist for you and acts on its own. These tools answer a real frustration, that planning takes hours of hunting for songs across scattered tools, and they are sold as the more advanced choice because they do more on their own. But what matters is not how much AI a tool uses; it is whether it actually solves the core issues worship leaders face. We could build a full agent in a week or two. We chose not to, because the one part of worship planning we will never hand to AI is choosing what your congregation sings.

That choice is pastoral work, not busywork. The songs a congregation sings slowly shape what they believe about God (Question 7), so deciding which ones, and in what order, is how a worship leader pastors people through song. An agent that picks for you does not lighten that work; it quietly takes it over.

An AI agent answers instantly and sounds sure of itself, but that confidence is only an appearance. These tools make things up, inventing facts and getting the meaning of real songs wrong, and they sound just as confident when they are wrong as when they are right (Question 22, Question 28). They also lean toward whatever is already popular, because that is the information readily available for them to train on (Question 6, Question 28). They get most things correct about well-known songs, but dig a little deeper and these models hallucinate significantly.

We use AI selectively in building Vestry, and people check its work (Question 30). What it never does is choose your songs. It does not quietly study you to keep you coming back, and it never sells itself as an oracle or a magic pill. For worship planning, an AI agent is not a more advanced tool; it is AI in the wrong place, doing the one job that should stay yours (Question 21, Question 28).

Yes. Vestry only classifies two things about each song: what posture it asks the congregation to take, and what theology is in the words. It's descriptive of the songs, not interpretive or prescriptive for your church. How those fit your church's tradition and context is your discernment.

The Spirit is in the songwriters, in the worship leader's prayer over the setlist, in the team's discernment as they plan, and in the congregation's encounter with God on Sunday morning. Using Vestry doesn't change any of that.

Vestry describes songs: what posture they ask of the congregation, what theology is in the words. It doesn't try to engineer what the Spirit does through any song. We can help you place a song of Wrestling in the right moment of a service. Whether to choose that song, or a song of Reverence or Surrender instead, is your discernment. What happens in your congregation's heart when they sing it is the Spirit's work.

Vestry never picks a song for you. What it takes off your plate is the hunting: the hour you used to spend across 15 tabs trying to find a song that fits both the sermon and the response moment. The discernment, the sequencing decision, the moment of "this is the one for this Sunday." Those stay yours.

Vestry is descriptive. It shows you the landscape; it does not pick the song. The discernment muscle still gets exercised every time you choose between three suggestions, and the conversation among your team uses better vocabulary than it would otherwise have.

A worship leader who learns to think in postures and theology tags uses that way of thinking in every service, with or without Vestry on the screen.

Yes. Vestry's preferences feature lets you set prioritization at the church, workspace, or personal level — across worship styles by era (modern praise & worship, classic gospel, traditional hymns, etc.) and for specific writers and artists. Those preference settings hone what songs surface for your team.

When a worship leader asks ChatGPT or Claude for songs about grace, the model returns a confident list. Most of those songs are real, but some songs or details may be fabricated for more difficult requests. That pattern is not a quirk of any one tool. Two structural facts about general-purpose AI tools and AI wrappers — apps whose core function is asking an AI model a question and showing you the answer — make them unreliable for worship-song matching:

AI hallucinates. Models trained on the open internet generate confident-sounding text whether or not it is true. The result for a worship leader is invented song titles, false claims about what real songs say, and theology described in vocabulary that does not match what the song actually contains. The error rate is meaningful and does not announce itself.

Training data is spiky. What an AI knows depends on what has been written about on the internet. Songs from Hillsong, Bethel, Elevation, and Passion have orders of magnitude more text written about them than songs from a worship pastor at a 200-person church in Tulsa. The result is recommendations that skew toward songs you already know, which is exactly the problem worship leaders have been asking us to help solve.

Vestry was built differently in five ways.

The framework comes from the people who use it. Worship leaders, musicians, pastors, and theologians contribute to the framework and the growing data set. AI works behind the scenes. It did not invent the framework, and it does not decide which songs you see.

The matching asks two questions, not one. Every song carries both a posture (what the words ask the congregation to do) and theology tags (what the words are about). You get relevant matches across the entire 12,000+ song catalog instead of returning the top results of a single-theme browse — so "songs of Reconciliation about the work of Christ" surfaces every song in the catalog that matches both, not just whatever a "grace" theme browse happens to feature.

The scoring is repeatable and visible. The same inputs always produce the same songs in the same order. When Vestry suggests a song, you can see exactly which theology tags matched and which posture aligned. Nothing is generated. Nothing is hidden.

Customization and control are built in. Vestry was designed from the beginning to give worship leaders detailed control over song matching, filtering, journey design, and team workflow. Worship leaders who use Vestry tell us it is the most control they have ever had over how they choose songs — the opposite of a tool that hands you a setlist from a single prompt.

Every song has a "did we get something wrong?" button. The worship leaders who use the catalog correct it. The framework and the metadata are not finished, and are meant to be a living dataset.

Most conversations about AI focus on what users see and use. The infrastructure that makes AI possible has effects beyond the app itself, and those are worth knowing about when you choose a tool for ministry.

Training and running modern AI takes enormous amounts of water and electricity. The infrastructure has to be built somewhere, and the data centers that house it have concentrated their consumption in specific communities. In Northern Virginia, where data centers cluster most densely in the United States, the state's own legislative audit reported in late 2024 that residential electric bills are projected to rise by roughly $14 to $37 per month by 2040 to subsidize transmission infrastructure built largely for those data centers. Memphis residents have raised concerns about groundwater use and methane gas turbines at a new AI data center. The cost of the AI industry is being paid in part by neighbors who never agreed to share it.

The race to build bigger AI models multiplies all of this. Each new generation needs more computing power, more cooling, more water, more land.

Vestry was built for restraint instead. We use AI in a few narrow places in our pipeline rather than calling models constantly. We do not push the catalog to grow for its own sake. The result is a tool efficient enough that the energy in roughly half a tank of gas in your car could power every church in the United States planning their weekly services every week for a year.

Stewardship of creation has been a Christian virtue for centuries, in every tradition. Loving our neighbor includes the family living downstream of a server farm. Vestry uses only what is needed to match songs and run service planning. We believe that is how technology serving the church should be built.

Vestry is not an AI wrapper. We use AI in specific portions of our data pipeline alongside free and paid APIs, curated theology and music databases, public commentary, and direct input from the worship leaders, musicians, pastors, and theologians who contribute to the framework and the growing data set. AI is one input among several. It is not the centerpiece.

Where AI is used, the catalog was tested extensively over hundreds of hours for human-machine agreement at the rigor of published computational research.

The point that matters most for a worship leader: when you build a service in Vestry, no generative AI is producing your song suggestions. The matching is repeatable, transparent, and adjustable (see Question 28 for the full breakdown).

We never assume we have everything right. The catalog stays open to corrections from the worship leaders who use it (see Question 28).

Your services, song banks, team data, and authentication are all stored and managed through Supabase, on US infrastructure. Payments run through Stripe. Both Supabase and Stripe are SOC 2 Type 2 certified. Encryption is industry standard, in transit and at rest. We don't sell your data. Your service data is never used to train an AI model.

The word has two meanings, and both matter for what we are building.

The vestry is a room. In many churches, it's the small space off the sanctuary where leaders prepare for the service — putting on vestments, reviewing the order of worship, saying pre-service prayers. It is where someone prepares, symbolically and practically, for the responsibility of leading worship before the congregation gathers. In churches without a physical vestry, the closest analog is the greenroom where the worship team prays together before walking on stage. (The same room is sometimes called the sacristy when it's used to store communion vessels.) The word comes from the Latin vestiarium, meaning wardrobe.

The vestry is also a council. Across many Christian traditions, the vestry is the church's lay leadership body — people elected by the congregation to help lead it. Their work is to make meaningful decisions on behalf of the people they serve.

Choosing songs is one such decision. Vestry the app holds both meanings: the preparation that happens before Sunday morning, and the responsibility shared by those who lead a congregation in song.