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 […]

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 […]

Qualities to Look for in a Worship Leader

I believe that an essential, but often difficult, aspect of successful worship ministry is to “get out there” and see what’s happening outside our own church. It’s essential because we often risk getting too insular or tunnel-visioned ministering week-in, week-out at our own church without seeing the bigger picture of what God is doing in […]

The Metroworship Academy Summer School for Worship Leaders // 16 January 2016

Happy New Year friends. Things had gotten a bit busy towards the end of the last year and it meant I didn’t end up writing as much as I would have liked. I’ve just returned from holidays and I’ve just spent the last couple of days tidying up around the house, so everything is neat […]

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 […]

The Beginning of Our Church’s Songwriting Journey

I have been part of Faith Community Church for about three and a half years now. Over its 20-or-so-year history, the church has grown from about 80 people to over a thousand in strength. Our worship team now has nearly 50 members. For a church of that size, I have always wondered why we weren’t […]

Week 5 Chronicles: The Worship Leaders’ Living Room

In our church, we try an experimental worship format once every quarter, during a month when there are 5 Sundays. The reason for this is that we used to roster four bands on worship, i.e. a different band each week and took the opportunity to try something different when there was a fifth Sunday. We’ve stopped […]

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. […]

How Worship Leaders Should Respond to Compliments

In Faith Community Church, Pastor Benny has initiated our mentoring phase as part of our 2-year DNA campaign. Quite amazingly, there is a strong mentoring buzz now in our church with heaps of people getting connected into mentoring relationships. Yesterday, I had the honour of launching our worship leadership mentoring group with worship leaders from […]