The David Crowder Band looking very dignified for its "Church Music" photo. Six Step Records.

The David Crowder Band Performs with Seabird and Danyew at 8 p.m. Nov. 6 at Southland Christian Church.

For David Crowder, there is a master plan.

That would seem to be a natural position for Crowder, one of the most popular Christian music purveyors of the past decade. But we’re not talking master plan in a cosmic, God is in control of all things sense. We’re talking about Crowder’s music. Specifically, we are talking about his albums, which have been custom-designed in title and content to follow a trajectory to … to … well, maybe we’d better let Crowder explain:

“I’m gonna geek out on you for a second,” Crowder says, when asked about the title of the David Crowder Band’s fifth studio album, Church Music.

“We’re in a three-record cycle,” he said. “We have three records, and then a second set of three records that are sort of mirror images or reannunciations of the first three records. Before we got into all of this, we had an idea for a seven-record kind of thing.”

Crowder grants that there have been EPs and remix albums thrown in. But for the band’s studio albums, they are executing the master plan of seven albums.

“We’ve been sitting on this title, knowing that it was coming as the mirror of the second title in the first three,” Crowder continues, referring to the band’s 2003 release, Illuminate.

Within all of this geekiness are things like number games: The first three albums were four syllable titles and the second are all three, because four plus three equals seven.

Out of all that complexity, the band has created numerous hits that contemporary worshipers know by heart, including Foreverandever Etc. and Oh, Praise Him. And writing songs for people to sing is, at its essence, what the band is trying to do.

But the structure, Crowder says, keeps them engaged and gives them direction.

“Having this title already really helped shape the record,” he says. “We started researching church music history and figuring out when the significant moments occurred. Most of the time it was something contentious. There was a moment of contention and then something would explode out of that.”

So, far from being a recitation of old hymns or various classical forms, Crowder’s Church Music is one of the band’s most stylistically diverse offerings, giving listeners doses of sampling, guitar heroism and even some disco.

Crowder says the band has a distinct advantage in getting the pulse of popular culture because it is based in the Baylor University community of Waco, Texas, where indie rock and college radio are dominant.

The band also was conscious of structuring the album like a church service, with it moving from a time of confession and reflection to adoration and celebration — which is where the disco comes in.

“Before we make a record, we sit down and make all the rules about it. We build an outline of what we want it to do, and then we follow the outline,” Crowder says. “That would be one of the structures that we followed, a traditional, orthodox church setting.”

In following those forms, Crowder finds a kinship with classical composers such as Bach and Mozart who would “use a Mass as a container for what they wanted to do. We like that too, to have the container or structure to put the stuff into.”

Not surprisingly, Crowder says there already is a plan for albums six and seven.

So, after seven, will the band start over? Will that be it?

“It’s been a long time we’ve been at this stuff, so we just know we’re working toward that end and we’ll see what happens when we get there,” Crowder says.

No doubt, there is a plan.