Writing new songs

A couple of years ago I wrote an article about searching for new songs. Over the past few years, many Bible-teaching churches have been asking for new congregational songs that take the emphasis off self and onto Christ. They have also noticed huge gaps in the subjects covered by contemporary Christian song writing — God’s grace, judgement and transcendent majesty to name just three.

We found that individual churches had been writing their own material to try and fill these gaps, so we formed a small group through which to cross-fertilise our material. We take apart each other’s songs musically to try and make our songs singable and suitable for every style and age of today’s congregations.

At the end of that article I said, ‘Watch this space’. If you’re still watching this space, then I’d like to apologise — two years is a long time. You can stop now and go and mow the lawn.

Gentle nudges

Thanks to gentle nudges from loyal and patient friends to get on with things, we’ve finally come up with some songs in a format which we hope will make it as easy as possible to use and learn the songs we’ve written.

It’s a website called http://www.songsfortoday.com. I’m not a computer geek, and even I find it easy to use. It shows the latest songs we have written, with a page on the theology behind each song and suggested placement within a church meeting (e.g. before the sermon, after confession, etc.). On the next page, each song appears as a freely downloadable PDF. I don’t even know what ‘PDF’ means — all I know is that if you click on the PDF file, the song appears. Ker-Pling. Then you can print it off and photocopy it as many times as you like. It’s all free, no strings attached, and it’s not a carrot to entice you into buying anything else. We’d just love Christian congregations to use these songs to sing praise to Jesus.

There’s also an mp3 recording of each song so that you can hear how they go (does anyone know if there were ever mp1s or 2s?). These recordings are never ideal, because whichever style is recorded, not everyone will like it. We didn’t want to spend thousands on a professional studio recording — sometimes that can frighten people off. We want the songs to sound manageable by small forces, so we (the royal we) settled for voice and piano until we come up with something else.

At the same time, we don’t want to create the impression that we are the only ones writing biblically faithful songs (or that we hold the key to defining what is good stylistically). We want to promote songs that we think would be useful for today’s congregation and will still be useful for years to come. I’m personally grateful to Keith Getty and Stuart Townend in answering many of the deficiencies in contemporary congregational song writing. We’re certainly not in competition with other writers. If we become aware of new songs that others have published, which we consider to be worth a look, we’ll try our best to put in links to the websites where they’re available. This means that if it’s new and it’s good you’ll find it on songsfortoday.com, even if it’s not written by us.

Quality not quantity

If you visit the website, you may be disappointed to find only five songs there. This is because we’ve opted for quality rather than quantity. Hopefully, this will mean more encouragements like the following: ‘I have begun to prepare the song book for our church weekend away in September and have logged on to “songsfortoday” and found five already that we will use. Am thrilled to bits with the quality. So thank you for the initiative and help that this is going to be. So amazingly simple to be allowed to use these songs without the hoops of permission that we usually have to go through.’

Future plans are to build the website into more of a database format so that you can search for keywords and Bible references. We thought it would be a bit of overkill to do that with just five songs!

The name of the website was inspired by the first four chapters of Hebrews, where the writer, via Psalm 95, refers back to the rebellion of God’s people in the desert: ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts’. Therefore, our first prayer is that these songs will give us the opportunity, today, to sing the Word of God. Our second prayer is that, as those songs are sung, the hearts of the singers would respond and not be hardened to God’s Word.

At the same time, we’d very much appreciate your prayers as we seek to continue this work, along with Christian songwriters from all over the world, helping us all to respond to his voice today.

Gentle nudges

Quality not quantity

Richard Simpkin

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