If You're Trying to Think More Pastorally About Worship...

If you’re trying to think more pastorally about worship, then you should read this interview.  It is both a model of what pastoral thinking looks like and a display of some application of thinking pastorally in the local church context.  Bobby Gilles, over at My Song in the Night has a great set of Q & A with Bruce Benedict of Cardiphonia.  My favorite two parts of this interview:

Bobby Gilles: What do you say to a pastor or worship leader who says “Hymns won’t work in my context. People here want new music”?

Bruce Benedict: I’ve been reading through Jamie Smith’s book Desiring the Kingdom getting ready for the Calvin Worship Symposium coming up.  In the book he talks a good deal about how our world does a better job of recognizing and forming our desires than we often realize.  And how the church needs to begin to treat people as more than heads on sticks.  Our worship/music ministries really reveal this.  People want new music in church constantly because that is largely what we are used to being fed by the world.  Even my work-week is typically filled with the latest album and records coming out…

Bobby Gilles: What do you think is the relative importance or balance in the relationship between singable tunes and interesting tunes? 

Bruce Benedict: Great question! This is something I’ve been wrestling with a lot lately. Especially as I’ve realized that what will sound great on a recording isn’t always what will work well for corporate singing…and I think we have to be honest about how each approach requires a different mindset when we sit down to song write.

Because so much of what we are writing is also what we are thinking about, in terms of recording, we can get ourselves into trouble. I think this often provides much of the rub, too, between what we like to sing and what we want to write to record.  This is a tension we need to talk and think about a lot more…especially in terms of being intentional about how we write.

So much of our life is spent listening to music and we are often hard wired to think about what kind of music sounds interesting to us.  Thinking about what is singable is a lot harder.  I often chart out songs I’m working on in a notation software as part of helping me to think through ‘singability’.  I also preview a lot of new songs in monthly potlucks with my musicians where we talk through new songs.

Read the whole interview.

The Christmas Song to End All Christmas Songs

Surprise and Merry Christmas!  We’ve recorded a single for the Advent and Christmas seasons.  It’s sloppy and joyful, just like the Incarnation.  And it’s available for you for ninety-nine pennies—the definition of “no brainer.”

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Is the Lord’s Supper a Funeral or a Feast? (Injecting Communion Repertoire with an Upbeat Song)

I’m not trying to sound crass, here, but Communion often feels like a memorial service for a deceased loved one.  I remember growing up in my (wonderful, life-giving, Christ-shaping, God-exalting) church back at home in Hawaii.  The Lord’s Supper came once a quarter, and up front would be a table covered with a large cloth.  When it came time to receive Communion, the church leaders would come forward.  I remember a lot of them wearing black suits.  Two gentlemen would ceremonially lift and fold the table’s cloth, revealing the elements beneath.  The suited men stood reverently in a line, hands folded in front, as the pastor would talk seriously and somberly about what we were about to do. 

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Worship Songs Need to Be More About God’s Love for Us, Not Our Love for God

Bobby Gilles reminded me of this truth recently: Worship songs should say far more about God’s love for us and far less about our love for God.  Certain strains of modern worship are prone to what some call “triumphalism”…the “I can do it,” “I give it all,” “I will live my whole life for You,” “I’ll love You forever,” “I’m running after You,” etc.  This language is not all bad. 

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Want to Be a Better Worship Songwriter?

I love it when I find a good online destination that “free-sources” quality material to the public.  Last week, I highlighted Fernando Ortega’s post calling out modern worship to embrace a more lofty vision for songwriting.  If you are or aspire to be a songwriter, and if you agree with Ortega’s assessment and admonition, I can think of no better site that will serve as a resource for you than My Song in the Night.

Its masterminds are Bobby & Kristen Gilles, a husband-wife, songwriter-singer combo, who know well the sometimes disconnected worlds of songwriting, recording, writing, and church music.  It’s not easy to find individuals so evenly informed in all these areas.  Bobby & Kristen are part of Sojourn Community Church’s dynamic arts team in Louisville, KY.

BUT…the site is actually much more robust.  Bobby describes its goal as six-fold:

1.  Teach people how to write and share their testimony. I’ve also included Sojourn’s guidelines for writing the salvation testimonies that we share at our baptism services. 

2.  Show the ways in which I work with Sojourn Pastor Daniel Montgomery and his pulpit team to encourage interaction among our members with our sermon series, vision campaigns, scripture memory challenges and more.

3.  How we use social media, the arts and amateur photography at Sojourn to tell the story of our community, as a small part of God’s story.

4.  How your church members can use the Psalms as models for telling the story of God at work in their life, and express their longings, questions, and pain. 

5.  Show the ways in which I work with Sojourn Worship Pastor Mike Cosper to help our people see the full gospel in our weekly worship service liturgy, and their place in the gospel story.

6.  Songwriting instruction, from how to write simple scripture memory songs to the poetry mechanics behind hymn-writing, and how I’ve worked as a songwriting workshop coordinator to foster collaboration & community and train songwriters in the Sojourn Music community. 

Finally, the site has a theme song, recorded by the Sojourn band, based on a sermon by Charles Spurgeon and centered around Psalm 42:8, which says: “By day the Lord directs his love, at night his song is with me—a prayer to the God of my life” (niv).  You can get it for free through NoiseTrade.

CCM Artist Challenges Modern Worship to Write Better Songs and Embrace Liturgy

Fernando Ortega has always behaved as one cut from a different swatch of the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) cloth.  His instrumentation has almost always been a bit more folky and “classical.”  His melodies have always been a bit more lyrical.  His albums have always shown an awareness and embracing of the Church’s hymn tradition. 

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All About Our New Album, Without Our Aid

Without Our Aid is the second full-length release of Zac Hicks + Cherry Creek Worship, out of Cherry Creek Presbyterian Church in Denver, CO.  Their debut album, The Glad Sound, was their first hymns project, released in 2009, and between that time and the present, Zac has contributed to three other compilation projects with Cardiphonia: The Psalms of Ascents (March 2010) , Hymns of Faith: Songs for the Apostles’ Creed(October 2010), and Pentecost Songs (June 2011).

VISION

Without Our Aid is an experiment in songwriting for the sake of building bridges between two current camps in modern church music—the so-called “hymns/rehymn movement” and mainstream modern evangelical worship.  The album’s aim is to combine the energy and vitality of the modern worship sound (made most popular by groups like Passion and Hillsong), with the depth, theology, and historical connectedness of Christian hymnody across time.  From a songwriting perspective, the two do not easily go together: hymns are usually written in through-composed verses, while modern worship songs tend to have three and sometimes even four unique sections (verses, choruses, bridges, and “surprise” refrains or endings).  Though hymn purists might decry the liberties taken in bending and arranging the original hymn-texts, and though modern worship connoisseurs may consider the texts too verbose and archaic, our passion for greater growth and unity convinces us that Without Our Aid is a unique and worthwhile project.

STYLE & PRODUCTION

The goal of Without Our Aid was to create an album which sounded live in order to capture that more tangible “moment” of corporate worship.  It is not a live album in the true sense, mostly because our current setting does not have the bandwidth to be able to pull off a live recording.  However, the recording was pieced together in the “live” setting of our reverberant, 900-seat, traditional sanctuary, employing ambient mic techniques for all the major instruments.  A backing choir of approximately 20-30 voices sang through the album multiple times; those sessions ended up being powerful times of worship themselves.
Stylistically, Without Our Aid is best characterized as a “modern arena-worship” record—big drums, driving electric guitars, layered synths, crowd noise, and a live “congregational” sound.

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FREE Pre-Release Song from Our New Album - Get it Now!

FREE PRE-RELEASE SONG
FROM WITHOUT OUR AID (9/13/11)

Hello, Readership.  In an effort to drum up support for our new album, Without Our Aid, we're asking you to pass this link along to anyone and everyone you know (tweet it, FB it, email it).  We're giving away one of our best songs on the album, "Hail, Thou Once Despised Jesus," absolutely free...we just ask that you tell others about it. 

"Hail" is probably the best all-in-one representation of the musical, philosophical, and theological aim of the Without Our Aid.  It has a live feel, energetic rhythm, great drumming, layered electrics, modern worship-styled vocal melodies, and unbeatable lyrics (I can brag, because I didn't write them). 

GO GET THE SONG HERE (this link will only be available until Tuesday, September 13, so get it while you can!). 

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