Week 5 Chronicles: Gospel Sunday

In our church, we try an experimental worship format once every quarter, during a month when there are 5 Sundays, to push the envelope of how we do worship; to add freshness; and to teach the church that worship should be embraced in all its expressions. I love Gospel music. I love it because it is simple. In […]

Worship Sunday 2016

Worship, even at its most subliminal, is at the core of Christian discipleship and the purpose of the church. It must be because worship is about giving God utmost priority. Tozer once said: Worship of the loving God is man’s whole reason for existence. That is why we are born and that is why we […]

Podcast: The Priests We Were Destined To Be

I had the privilege of preaching last Sunday 24 July 2016 at my home church, Faith Community Church. It was the first time I had preached from such a hallowed pulpit. It was daunting because (and perhaps I am a bit biased here) some of the best preachers in town live here! Like Pastor Benny […]

Returning to the Heart of Worship 2: Worship and the Transformed Heart

In my previous post, I introduced the topic of Returning to the Heart of Worship and why I think such a message is of critical importance to those in worship ministry, especially in this time and season. In this post, I want to begin with this proposition: true worship emanates from a transformed heart. And transformation […]

Returning to the Heart of Worship 1

In about February this year, the worship director of our campus ministry asked me to share at their worship team retreat about the Heart of Worship. When I crafted the message for the retreat, I prayerfully considered what God would have me say to this group, without thinking much more about the impact of that […]

The Songwriting Journey: The First Release

Moving houses can be a stressful process. Someone told me recently that it is rated as the second most traumatic event a person can go through. I’m not sure traumatic is quite the word, but it was constant low-level stress that was enough to make you feel unsettled, but not enough for adrenaline to kick […]

The Songwriting Process Behind “My Shepherd”

In my earlier post this week, I described how our worship team began our journey into songwriting. In this post, I want to reflect on the process that I personally went through with my team in writing our song, “My Shepherd”. The songwriting process is quite foreign to me. Prior to the New Song Cafe, I can point […]

Converge 2015

About this time fours years ago, I had the honour of participating in Converge, a whole week of worship and prayer which was planned by the Commonwealth Prayer Initiative to coincide with the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting taking place in our city. At the time, I was in-between churches, and not heavily involved in a […]

Carefully Curating Your Congregation’s Song Catalogue

I love the word “curate”. It used to conjure up images of stuffy old men in tweed jackets with leather elbow patches carefully displaying artefacts in a museum. These days, the hipsters have taken hold of the term, and you can curate almost anything you like – magazine articles, photographs, ideas, images, conversations, recipes. […]

Time for Breakthroughs

I love what God has been doing in our church lately. The only way I can put it is that God is bringing us into a season of breakthroughs. Glass ceilings are being broken through. Things which we thought could not be done are being done – and so naturally as well, without strain or […]