Sunday's Song Selection

I thought I'd post up some of the factors that go into choosing the music for a Sunday gathering.

For the core team launch on Sunday we sang Let Your Kingdom Come (Sovereign Grace, Valley of Vision), Holy Holy Holy (the old hymn, inspired by the arrangement by The BCG from Mars Hill), Rock of Ages (with the 1998 Ruth Buchanan arrangement) and Never Alone (Emu Music).

Some of the factors in choosing these songs were:

1. Size of band/size of congregation/size of room. We had just acoustic guitar + piano + 1 singer leading around 30 or so people in a room that didn’t have much space to spare, so we needed songs that would sound ok without the Hillsong stadium treatment.

2. Make-up of congregation. We have mostly people in 20s and 30s, with a sprinkling of 70 plus-ers. You can’t make everyone happy all the time, but the plan is to make everyone feel that they have been taken into consideration at least some of the time.

3. Flow. We lead off with Let Your Kingdom Come, which seems appropriate for a fresh church plant trying to reach lost people, and is also a bit more upbeat to get us going. We paired this with Holy Holy Holy in a 2-song bracket up front. HHH hits a more reflective vibe (which is why it needed to come 2^nd), but builds to be quite anthemic. We finished with Never Alone after the sermon, which keyed in to the part of God’s word we were looking at (not as well as I’d like, but it’s something to work on), and then built up at the end to finish on a rousing and positive note.

4. Variety. I wanted to flag our major sources of songs up front, and to have a mix of recently written songs and older hymns (in various stages of contemporary re-arrangement).

Got any thoughts on choosing songs?

Well, well… look who’s come crawling back

(Me.)

I was going to apologise for the long silence here on The Rules, but then I realised that I’m not really sorry – I just had other stuff to do.

Since we last spoke, faithful RSS application, things have changed a little for me. I am no longer at St. Dorcas’, sitting on the musical sidelines and complaining about things. I am co-ordinating the music at Erskineville Village Anglican Church (a freshly planted/re-potted church in Sydney’s Inner West), so from this point on The Rules will actually contain some reflections from practical experience, and at some point the facts may even get in the way of a good rant (perhaps).

Stay tuned.

(Or don’t, because you know what I’m like with posting.)