Kings Church Worship Blog

Hi everyone – sorry it’s been such a long gap since I posted anything – basically we have just launched a new site at lee and that has somewhat exploded my diary! Anyway here goes;

Well we seem to have quite a lot of feedback on the whole thing of songs – so here are a few more things that I think we have learnt.

Basically music and worship can be very controversial in church – everyone has an opinion. Probably more than anything, people have a strong view on style – the style of music. Actually having a strong opinion is fine, it can be a really good thing, the problem in church is when we dress it up as something spiritual. All of us like different types of music and often therefore different worship music styles – that is totally fine. The key however is that we remember that these are simply preferences. I don’t believe that any one style of music is more spiritual than another – I think God created all of it. Like all things it can be turned and used in the wrong way – but fundamentally all styles are a gift and reflect something of God’s remarkable creativity.

Ok – so the big question is what style of music should we use in worship in a church? I have thought a lot about this over the last 15 years or so, and have a view which I want to share with you.  Basically I believe that there should be 2 main things which influence the style issue.

Firstly – if the worship team are here to serve the people in the church (rather than themselves and fulfilling all their own musical ambitions) we need to look at who is in the church. Our church is extremely diverse in age, background and ethnicity – that means I believe that our style of music needs to reflect this. Now we are still growing in this one and have definitely not arrived – but our aim is to try and pitch it somewhere, so that everyone can relate and connect to the music we use in some way. To a degree it means everyone needs to compromise. One of the things this has meant for us is a leaning towards learning to play more gospel songs – this is often more musically challenging, but it’s good. It doesn’t mean that we end up playing straight ahead gospel all the time – it means we need to broaden and incorporate that more and more. What’s really interesting is that a lot of the new material we are writing is a real blend of styles – I know it sounds a little cliché, but I am believing that we will find something of a new sound which fits our church.

Ok – that’s the first big influence, however its not the only one – I will tell you about the other one in the next post

Cheers

Phil

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 at 10:46 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.