Why Score Worship Songs?
While evaluating or "scoring" worship songs may seem controversial, this is not intended to unjustly criticise. The goal is to ask: Is this song helpful for the gathered church to sing? Worship is a spiritual act (John 4:23-24) and scoring songs based on a set of objective criteria can't fully take that into account. Context also matters - you will also want different types of songs for different parts of your service. So there's no guarantee that a song that receives a slightly higher rating is definitively "better" than another song.
Nevertheless, I hope that this can aid you in selecting songs that are suitable for congregational church worship, highly biblically accurate, theologically rich, broadly God-centred, and singable for the average person (1 Corinthians 14:15, Colossians 3:16). Let's try not to use personal preference or popularity as the main criteria for our song selection.
Of course, this won't be as exhaustive as a resource like Praise Charts, but the songs listed here are either high-quality options found during extensive research, or those that are widely-used.
Low suitability means a song may be less useful for congregational worship - it doesn't mean the song is inherently bad. Many songs that receive a lower suitability score are still useful in other contexts, such as times of personal devotion. Like many of the Psalms, which were written as personal expressions rather than for corporate use, these songs serve a different purpose. There are some songs that receive a lower score that I think are great, but not in the context of congregational church worship. Again, the aim is not to criticise, but to offer criteria for identifying songs that are most appropriate in corporate worship.
I've also tried to take into account that, while corporate singing is an important part of our worship to God, some people don't engage with sung worship as deeply as others. While, as musicians, that can be easy to forget and hard to understand, let's ensure we provide potentially diverse congregations with powerful words that they can use to worship, rather than turning some people off by using too many songs that are repetitive and shallow (relatively-speaking).
Songs are scored based solely on their lyrical content. The alleged theological positions of churches or songwriters haven't been considered. But if you're interested, songwriters can be viewed by clicking on the song title. If you want to ensure a certain writer isn't included in the list, use the search filter and add a 'minus' before your search terms: -writer -writer.
Finally, this system isn't set in stone, and as I continue to review songs (and potentially include more categories), I may update the suitability ratings.