The first song I heard that I thought would be on our most recent album, The Gathering, was Have Mercy on Me. Co-written by Dale Bischof and Pat Sczebel, it combines grief over sin with an assurance of God’s mercy in Christ. Even though as Christians all our sins are completely forgiven (Col. 2:13), we [...]
At WorshipGod11 I presented this seminar I simply called “Putting Songs Together.” It was an attempt to give people a better grid for choosing what songs to sing in a gathering. Back in 2004 I gave a similar seminar, Choosing Songs Wisely, and thought it was time to update my thoughts on the topic. Despite the [...]
My top recommended book on a biblical theology of worship is David Peterson’s Engaging with God. If you’re responsible for leading in your church, either as a pastor or a musician, I think you’ll serve people more faithfully and biblically if you read it. I go through it every year with my interns and never [...]
Here’s our latest video from The Gathering: Live from WorshipGod11. As You Go was written by Mark Altrogge, who has been writing songs for Sovereign Grace Music since the early 1980s. That’s a long time. It amazes me how he continues to write such theologically rich, relevant, singable songs. What you may not know is [...]
Last month I posted two sessions from the pre-conference workshop I taught at WorshipGod11 on the Piano in Contemporary Worship (Part 1 and Part 2). We finally finished editing the third session. This one took a little more time to edit because people were regularly walking past the window of the door in the video, [...]
We had our 10th songwriter retreat this past October. In a previous post I shared some details from our 2010 retreat. Since a couple guys have asked me about these recently, here’s a little more info. Sovereign Grace is a family of over 90 churches. We’ve been producing albums since around 1984. At first, we were simply getting [...]
A while back I held a contest asking people to send us their arrangements of songs from the Sovereign Grace album, King of Grace. Joshua Spacht won the contest with his version of Behold the Lamb. He recently sent me a version of another Sovereign Grace song, Behold our God, from Risen, written by Jonathan, [...]
This past August we recorded The Gathering: Live from WorshipGod11. It’s a collection of 15 songs that progressively tell the story of the gospel and our response to it. From my perspective, it’s one of the best albums we’ve done to date, both in terms of song content and creative musicianship. I’m happy to announce [...]
Yesterday, I posted some of the workshops from WorshipGod11 for leaders, songwriters, and tech teams. Here are a few more that focus on instrumentalists, leading kids to worship Christ, dealing with burnout, and the leader’s prayer life. Donald Whitney shared on simplifying your spiritual life and using Scripture as a basis for your prayers. There’s [...]
Last August at WorshipGod11 we offered 40 seminars for pastors, musicians, leaders, vocalists, instrumentalists, and tech teams. Today and tomorrow I’m posting the descriptions of a few that might serve you and your team in the coming year. Right clicking on the title will download the MP3, and of course, right clicking on the outline [...]
