Converge 2012 – One Heart, One Voice

It’s been a pretty full-on couple of months for me helping out with the Converge organising committee. Never in my life would I have thought that I’d be trying to bring in worship teams from all over the city for the one purpose of exalting the name of Jesus over our City. There have been […]

Sometimes Bossanova Just Happens: Lessons from Your Worst Nightmare

I love this clip of Martin Smith leading worship, because it goes to show that no worship leader is immune from the silliest of mistakes: I remember one time when I was leading worship and we had just transitioned into the song “At the Cross”. As we started singing, it was clear to me that […]

Asian Worship

A few years ago, my then drummer Samson Tan said to me “it’s about time the church started singing Asian worship songs”. I had previously listened to albums by City Harvest Church and New Creation Church, but never really taken to them. But since Sam suggested it, I thought I’d indulge him and we started […]

Authenticity Attracts

Here is another brilliant thought from Pastor Benny Ho’s sermon yesterday at Faith Community Church: Authentic people attract. Weird people distract. And he was talking about the church! I think we’ve all seen our fair share of weird Christians. I certainly have, especially because in most of my early years growing up in the church, […]

The Church in Visible Unity

Last night, I was chatting to a friend of mine who is part of the worship ministry of a young thriving church. He told me how he took a phone call from the worship coordinator of a small church who had a heart for worship ministry, but struggled with manpower and resources. We were actually […]

Why the Distinction Between “Praise” and “Worship” Matters

In an earlier post entitled Defining Worship, I introduced Harold’s Best definition of worship as continuous outpouring. If worship encompasses all of our life, then “worship” is a much bigger concept than “praise”. In fact, we can think of “praise” as a subset of “worship”. Robert Webber once said that “worship is a verb”, but […]

What Type of Worship Leader Are You?

Years ago, I came across John de Jong’s catalogue of different types of worship leaders (from his book Riding the Storm), which I thought was rather amusing. It’s tongue-in-cheek, but in the process, he makes some quite incisive observations about worship leading methodology. So here are the categories, but I want to just make the […]

Converge 2012 Day of Worship on Saturday 26 May 2012 – Save the Date

I’m excited about the Converge 2012 Day of Worship. From 6 am to 10 pm, teams from different churches will gather to exalt the name of Jesus in the centre of Perth at the historic Wesley Church. We’ve got on board teams from a wide-spectrum of the church, including an American Gospel team, the Salvation […]

The Art of Midflight Song Changes

This post (like the previous one) was also inspired by my emerging worship leader friend whilst unwinding after a game of tennis. He made the remark that he really doesn’t like it when worship leaders make a habit out of changing songs at the last minute (e.g. on the morning of the worship service). I […]

Worship Leaders Who Talk Too Much

I had just finished a couple of hours of tennis with some friends of mine, some of whom actively serve in church worship. One of the guys (a young, upcoming worship leader) made the observation that sometimes, worship leaders spend too much time talking at the start of the service. In fact, he said, at […]