Worship Matters

Recently I was talking to Jon Payne, the worship pastor in the Sovereign Grace church in Gilbert, Arizona. He brought up a question he had been asked about how to handle membership on a team. The particular issue was managing how long people should be on the team, given changing church size, addition of new [...]

I’ve been part of Sovereign Grace Ministries since 1981. We’re a family of churches committed to planting and supporting local churches. We support our churches personally and relationally, as well as through a variety of training opportunities and resources. One of those resources is music. That’s because for the past twenty five years we’ve written [...]

For those of you who have been following this blog for a while, you know that I’ve been working on a book for over a year now. I’m happy to report that I’m finally done. The book will be called Worship Matters: Leading Others to Encounter the Greatness of God and will be published by [...]

If you tried to log on to Worship Matters in the past 24 hours or so, you may have seen this: Since you don’t own Worship Matters, you may have thought that you had done something wrong and I suspended your access to my blog. In fact one guy e-mailed me to ask who he [...]

Last year we produced our first “Christmas” CD, called Savior: Celebrating the Mystery of God Become Man. It contains twelve original songs that celebrate the incarnation of our Savior, and I think it’s one of our strongest projects. We wanted to put this album out because every Christmas a worship leader’s dilemma is finding new [...]

Sovereign Grace Ministries has just released our 5th recording in the Overflow series. Overflow began because we simply weren’t able to put out enough projects to keep up with the songs that were being written by Sovereign Grace songwriters. Produced by local churches using local instrumentalists and vocalists, the Overflow highlight emerging songs that encourage [...]

Here are two more outlines from messages I gave at the Christian Musician Summit in Overlake, Washington. On Saturday morning, I had the privilege of speaking to the entire group on the topic of “Does God Even Like Our Music?” I figured in a conference of almost 3000 musicians, it’s important to know whether or [...]

I had the privilege of teaching two seminars at the Christian Musician Summit today. The first was on Healthy Tensions, the second on A Worship Leader Job Description. The folks I addressed were both great groups – attentive and encouraging. That was really commendable because my voice hasn’t quite recovered from my cold earlier this [...]

Last year I had the privilege of speaking at the Christian Musician Summit, held at Overlake Church in Redmond, Washington. Amazingly enough, they asked me back again this year. Bruce Adolph and Matt Kees have been running the conference since 2002, and it’s grown to around 3000 musicians. I so appreciate their desire to “improve [...]

A few Sundays ago, I led worship at my home church. One of the songs we sang was Before the Throne of God Above. I’m posting an audio of what we did because I wanted to make a number of points with it. Feel free to listen as you read. [Audio clip: view full post [...]

I’m getting questions every week now on topics related to worship and music. I wish I had time to answer each one, but I can’t get to them. But thanks so much for writing and assuming I might have an answer to your question. I received this question from Stephen: What effect do you see [...]

Last year we released our first CD for Christmas, Savior: Celebrating the Mystery of God Become Man. It’s made up of twelve original songs that explore and respond to the miracle of the incarnation. When I say the songs are “original,” I mean that we didn’t include favorites like “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” Although, [...]