Recommended Resource - Songs of Fellowship 4

We bought this songbook for our church earlier this year and have found it to contain some great songs. The difficulty with songbooks is often that you pay for 500 songs and can only use a quarter of them.

On the other hand, in order to legally use a lot of songs in your church, your church needs to own the original music as presented in a songbook.

The latest book from Songs of Fellowship has a number of great tunes to use.

After a brief squiz this morning, I came up with 8 crackers that could give you a taste of what this book has:

• Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)
  
• God In My Living
  
• Here I Am (Majesty)
  
• O Christ, Be The Centre
  
• Praise is Rising
  
• Sing to the King
  
• The Splendour of the King
  
• Strength Will Rise
  

These are just the new ones that I would like to introduce. Other great songs include numbers like O Church Arise and Everlasting God (Yesterday, Today and Forever).

For a full song list, click here 

Message in Song - be there!

The Essential Worship Chillout Collection

I thought it would be wise to do some research on the albums I refer to in the previous post. Theses albums are on sale through Kingswaysongs.com. Kingsway do a great job of distributing and selling all sorts of fantastic Christian resources, and I would be quite at a loss without them in ministry. So the problem's not with Kingsway.

If you click here, you will go the page for the Essential Worship Chillout Collection. It was as I suspected. The blurb is as follows

"Our lives are filled with speed and pace, work pressures and family responsibilities, motorway journeys and diary essentials. Finding space to renew, revitalise and relax can seem elusive. We all need to learn to 'chillout', a state of being that has become a new musical style characterised by mellow, atmospheric arrangements with laid back beats and cool grooves."

Listen to the sound samples and tell me what you think. Especially interesting are Here I Am To Worship (Faithless meets Matt Redman, anyone?), and Jesus, Lover of My Soul (I hope heaven is an island paradise!).

Chillout Worship? Do you want fries with that?

This morning in my inbox I received an email about two "chillout worship" albums on sale. Now this got me thinking, "Why on earth do we need to chill out whilst we worship?

This actually follows on from a previous email I received about worship albums that are designed for runners and walkers - the songs are selected and/or remixed to match the approximate tempo of a walking or running cadence so you can stick it on your iPod and 'worship whilst you walk' - you'll never miss a step!

It's great for us to use music to encourage us spiritually in our everyday lives. God's gift of music allows us to call to mind spiritual truths and express ourselves emotionally as we respond to God in worship.

But I believe that there are two fundamental problems with the market for these types of CD's: firstly, it is a symptom of a consumer based culture amongst Christians, and secondly, it is a symptom of faith which holds music as the primary expression of worship. (Perhaps a third issue could be the money that we waste on such things, and even a fourth issue could be the Christian subculture created by such things, but those are perhaps for another post). Both of these are evidence that we have our Christian faith upside-down and inside-out.

In Ezekiel 36 (click here to read it, it's great!), God says to Ezekiel that he is going to deliver Israel from exile and renew and restore their faith and obedience to Him in spite of them and their inability to give him the worship and honour He commands. His reason for this is that 

he wants to glorify His name, and rightly so, because He is God. We must never, ever buy into the myth of the song, "He took the fall and thought of me above all." God's concern is for His holy name, and he shows that by saving people who cannot save themselves. Jesus went to the cross for God's glory, not for our happiness.

Firstly, we must be very careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that 'my Christianity revolves around me'. We should run screaming from anything that supposes to allow us to 'worship' whilst we go on serving ourselves as we chill out or exercise. Let me not be misunderstood, it is great to keep our minds focused on God and the truth of his Word at all times, and to continually praise God (Heb 13v15) - this is the Christian life; but that shouldn't ever fit around other things, other things should fit around our lives of worship.

Secondly, music is not the primary mode of worship. If I could worship God by having 'worship music' on my iPod 24/7 then I'd do it, because it's really easy. Biblical worship is hard. It's hearing God speak through His Word, and then responding appropriately. When God says, "Love one-another" our worship is to put those around us first and put ourselves to one side, with no promise of any return, but only for God's glory. But that has lasting value. It is building with costly materials that won't burn up (1 Cor 3v11-13) when it is tested. I have feeling that a 3min praise tune with the drum-loop at 132bpm will go 'woof' like a can of gasoline.

Listen to Christian music. Do whatever it takes to focus your mind on our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Worship God by respond seriously to His Word. Just don't think it's all about you, 'kay?