You live in a world where you have unparalleled choice at your fingertips when it comes to what your church sings.
CCLI (Christian Copyright Licencing International) boast a library of over 600,000 songs that you can access. By way of contrast, when Songs of Fellowship Book 1 was first published in 1979 (less than 50 years ago) it contained only 53 songs – and even at the height of its popularity only had 640 songs in it!
Today’s vast choice can be paralysing for those of us who choose what music to sing week by week in our local church gatherings. Do we teach this new song? Do we do an old favourite? How about the hymns? In the internet age, it has become normal for each church to develop its own repertoire of songs. Yes, there is some common ground between churches from a similar stable – but my experience is that new people to our church take about six months to get their teeth into our particular set of songs.
Faced with such overwhelming choice, the temptation can be to abandon the thoughtful, careful and prayerful choice of songs and either just adopt what’s new (riding the CCLI Top 100 list), or retreat to what’s comfortable (there were some really good songs written when I was twenty-something).
But let me encourage you to press on in the work of choosing songs wisely, with this reminder: Your songs are forming God’s people theologically. Singing is a means by which the “word of Christ” dwells in people richly (Col. 3v16), it is one of the ways in which we behold Jesus and are transformed into His likeness (2 Cor. 3v18). Which is to say, your songs are shaping people’s theology and therefore their lives! What a privilege to choose songs that will give people a true, right, beautiful and expansive vision of the Lord Jesus! What a joy to build a library of songs that will help people express their love for their Saviour! What a service to curate a collection of songs that are singable, musically approachable and stylistically appropriate for your context.
Dear reader, press on in this task! Or if that task doesn’t belong to you – find that person and encourage them, thank them and pray for them!
