I play mostly in church settings, and we need to have a little variety in our drums/percussion approach. getting away from a standard kit, what are you favorite additional percussion pieces, other than congas and djembes? I've seen a cajon used to great effect as well as tube drums. Any other ides?

Really depends on how creative and artistic your percussionist decides to be. As you listed any hand drums are great to add a low laying rhythmic line. For those songs that have a ballad feel to it I always like to finesse my cymbals a lot and see what I can contribute. I actually have a list of toys that I use a lot.

Wooden Agogo - Which produces a real earthy hollow tone kid of like a heavily choked cowbell.

Bell Tree - Just a small set of small brass bells that are chromatically tuned.

Blocks - Wooden and Plastic. The wooden ones are tuned at chromatic halfsteps, and the plastic "gock" blocks are loud and annoying haha, but I usually use them when playing something Latin.

Castanets with a handle.

Chimes

Devil Chaser - Set of tunable bamboo sticks that when struck against something creates a wicked buzzing sound..really neat stuff.

Gong/Tamtam

Guiro

8 inch Monkey drum - Animal skin head drawn over a hollow shell with two small beaters attached to strings that are attached to either side of the head. The monkey drum has a handle that when you twirl it between your hands, the beaters will hit either side of the instrument.

Rain stick - hollowed out peice of wood that has beads inside, when tipped slightly, it sounds like rainfall.

Ratchets

Shakers

Spring drum - Small tube with a fyberskin head and a long spring coming out of it. This thing is awesome. It can provide some really amazing sounds from rolling thunder to a washboard scrape

Tic Tok Clapper - small instrument that sounds like a clock ticking

Triangles - these are always over looked but you can create cool rhythms by choking it and striking and then letting it ring.

Brake Drum - an actual break drum I got off an old truck, put it on a snare stand I wasn't using and fell in love. Has a real metallic ping that cuts above the melody.

So, yeah man I hope this gave you some ideas

So ends the toys and now begins the drums

Ashikos - which is an Eastern Indian take on the conga

Darbuka - a tunable djembe type drum

Doumbeks - a smaller djembe type drum

Ghatam - a wide jug-drum that is played by taping on the outside of the jug.

Log Drum - hollow tube with three slats cut into it that creates different earthy sounding pitches when played.

Tabla/Bayan - Small ethnic drums

Timbales

Nobody's gonna mention a talking drum? For shame! haha

I'm going to have to look some of these up. I did a course on Brazillian percussion at college, as well as Bata percussion, but less then half of these are even in my vocabulary.

Oh yeah!! African talking drums haha, man I forgot all about those. Meinl has a pretty decent range of talking drums. I guess the reason I never thought of them was...I don't own any yet haha, I was just trying to go down my personal list of accessories. Bata, and Brazillian percussion would be a really cool course to take man. I am a little bit envious.

Great suggestions, drumguy. I'll pass them along.

I have a 12" Remo Fiberskyn Djembe that I love and it's always with me on acoustic gigs. It sounds great and because of its size, it's very portable. I like to have a small set up with a couple of splashes near by, something I got inspired by Shakerleg, who is one of the coolest percussionist I have seen. I had the chance to see him perform in a subway station in NYC a few years ago when I was living in Queens.

Check him out:
http://www.shakerleg.com/av/doc2.html