June 20 2008
Letting the congregation write worship songs…literally
Tagged Under : church, grace, Life Connection Church, songwriting, worship
At Life Connection Church we very much value songs written specifically for the local congregation. That doesn’t mean that they won’t have any relevance outside of our church, but just that it was written with our body prayerfully in mind. I believe that’s not only how the best songs are written musically, but spiritually I think that’s where the greatest gift is to the kingdom, in building of the local church.
Recently I’ve been examining ways to get my church body even more involved in our songwriting process. As a worship leader and elder I’m aware of the larger spiritual issues impacting the body, and as my role as discipleship leader I’m privy to more personal issues on a smaller scale as well. But in order to bring in everyone something else had to be done.
The idea is this. We will write a song around a theme and ask everyone in the body to submit a 1 sentence response to a question around that theme. The song’s lyrics will predominantly be made up of these responses. First up we will tackle grace. The question to the body is this…
How has God’s grace changed your life specifically?
Huge question I know, so many aspects to grace so I expect a wonderful wide spectrum of answers. The goal is to answer personally(can be anonymously) and not generally. An example of a general response would be, “He took this sinner and made me clean“, a personal response would be, “He took my life of drugs and death, and gave me a life of purity and hope.”
I’ll then take these answers and shape them poetically to fit musically, rhyme etc… I’ll probably write a chorus that captures the entirety of the submissions, but if someone submits something that God puts heavy on our hearts then we may very well use it for the chorus as well. I don’t really know what to expect out of this exercise, this is new ground for me.
By God’s grace at the end we’ll have a skillfully crafted song of worship that glorifies God by demonstrating the life saving, transforming, empowering impact of God’s grace in our church body, by our church body. I’m incredibly excited to get started on this. I’ll keep everyone up to date on how well or poorly this experiment goes, should be fun.
Let me know what you guys think, am I nuts?
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I think this is a sick idea, getting people connected to the songs in a very personal way. If not connecting to the style or lyrical content is an excuse for not worshiping, (which is stupid, and shows a complete lack of devotion to God) then what a great way for them/us to get that connection by writing their/our own song? I hope people run with this if they are searching for a way to make that connection. Enough with the excuses of why they dont and get involved when the invitation is there.
That is a great idea, I love it! Like Mark said, getting people connected on a personal level to worship is a huge part of what we are trying to do as a worship team and this is a great way to do that, if people take on the challenge. I think God is really going to do something amazing through this and I’m excited to see what the end result will be.
I, for one, do NOT think you’re nuts.
We’ve been doing this for about ten years in our community. We also have facilitated a seemingly “unrelated” songwriting game which teaches the skill of free-flowing musical/lyrical ideas in a safe, supportive environment. When we did this in a “non-spiritual” (i put it in quotes because i don’t personally that anything is really NON-spiritual) context, people were able to bring their confidence in contribution to the process of songwriting to a whole new level. You can hear 200 musical ideas we did together here.
Todd
[…] few weeks back I wrote a post here about an idea I had for our church and that was to let our congregation write a worship song, literally. This was sort of a group songwriting exercise taken to the extreme. I value worship […]