Worship Matters

One of the drums I will never tire of beating is this: All biblical worship is rooted in and made possible by the cross of Christ. In my experience, the contemporary church (and any church, for that matter) is always in danger of neglecting the gospel in its songs. I said it this way in [...]

Whatever you believe about the timing of the return of Christ, orthodox Christians all agree on one thing: Jesus is coming back.
Scripture tells us that when Jesus finally returns, all wrongs will be made right, the unrighteous will be judged, and those who have trusted in Christ will enter into the immediate presence of God [...]

If you lead worship, you may not think of yourself as a biblical counselor. Maybe that should change.
Last month I had the joy of leading the singing at the CCEF conference. While I was there David Powlison asked if we could chat about the relationship between singing congregationally and biblical counseling.
There are a number of [...]

Over at the Gospel Coalition blog Kevin DeYoung gives 25 reasons why words are so important in our corporate worship. Here are some samples:
All the corporate worship we know of in the early church is saturated with words. While there are many things we don’t know about the worship of the early church in the Bible, [...]

I first met Matt Redman in 1997 when I was over in England for a worship conference. In a few minutes of conversation a few things stood out to me. He was a young man passionate about impacting his generation with worship songs that communicated biblical truth about God and not simply emotional responses. He [...]

In his book, Christian Leaders of the 18th Century, J.C. Ryle (1816-1900) spends a chapter on August Toplady, the gifted but often contentious hymn-writer/pastor who penned “Rock of Ages.”
I appreciated Ryle’s comments on the effect of writing good songs for the church to sing. It makes me more aware of the importance of leading and writing [...]

Ben Neumann, a member of my church, told me about an interview with Matt Redman that was recorded a couple years ago. I’ve had a number of opportunities to hang around with Matt, and each time I walk away encouraged by the grace of God in his life. He’s a diligent theologian, a devoted husband [...]

After last year’s WorshipGod conference we received some feedback that we had introduced too many new songs. I agreed. So at WorshipGod09 we tried to include  more songs that people would be familiar with, while also including songs from our recent projects. Here’s what we ended up with.
Song list from Wednesday PM:
1. Come Thou Fount [...]

Chris recently wrote me to ask a question about the tension between congregational-friendly keys and leader-friendly keys.
I have a upper-mid range tenor voice and though I can sing lower fairly easily, I find that if I transpose a song to a “congregational friendly” key the song loses energy, sometimes significantly. I want to serve the [...]

This past Sunday I had the privilege of leading the singing at my home church. At Christmas time there’s sometimes a tension between choosing to sing songs that are “comfortably Christmasy” or songs that help people glory in the miracle of God becoming man. So here’s what we went with:

Hark! the Herald Angels Sing
Glory be [...]