Graham Kendrick’s Guide to Psalm Surfing

By Marie@Musicademy | January 11, 2010

  We’ve been looking recently at ideas for spontaneous worship, inspired almost entirely by a seminar I attended by Graham Kendrick. In the last post I described how Graham uses a basic groove and perhaps a chord sequence to provide a foundation for singing in an improvised style from the Psalms. I’ve done a bit […]

A Magi-cal Approach to Worship – a reflection for epiphany

By Guest Blogger | January 4, 2010

  What are the Magi doing in the Christmas story – they’re a bit mysterious, don’t you think? And for that matter, what is a magi, or a mage? Probably best to clear up a bit confusion first. We tend to lump the Magi in with everyone else in our nativity scenes. It makes for […]

Creating fractal images for visual worship

By Guest Blogger | December 16, 2009

Here is an explanation for creating “fractal images” like the Christmas ones we published yesterday. Richard created the Christmas fractals using a freeware fractal generating program called Apophysis.  To read more about fractals, visit here. Apophysis generates random images using fractal mathematics. But the maths is completely hidden behind a friendly interface, so don’t be put […]

Beautiful Christmas Images – free for use

By Guest Blogger | December 15, 2009

Our friends at Engage Worship have come up with some more wonderful free worship resources. These are a set of 10 “fractal” images suitable for adding some visual creativity to Christmas services. Click through to Engage Worship, create an account and you can download all 10 images for free. They are created under a Creative Commons License […]

Inward looking or inside out?

By Guest Blogger | December 10, 2009

I just got off the phone with a friend, who is a passionate worship leader and yet at the same time has been struggling lately because she finds areas of what we call ‘worship’ so inward looking.  She said “At my most cynical moments I have felt like I am just there to make church […]

Advice from Graham Kendrick on spontaneous improvisation in worship

By Marie@Musicademy | November 24, 2009

  I recently attended a seminar which Graham Kendrick was presenting on the subject of learning how to improvise in worship. He had a number of really helpful Biblical and practical suggestions which I thought I would share with you here in a 2-part blog post. Describing improvisation as “Going off piste”, Graham said that […]

Alternatives to guitar led contemporary worship

By Jonny Baker | November 16, 2009

Given the recent somewhat controversial posts and discussions here about whether contemporary worship music was theologically shallow, boring or even annoying I thought it would be good to look at a totally different expression of worship. Here Jonny Baker considers some alternatives: In an old gothic church in South London, images of the city are […]

Practical ideas for working with a novice worship band

By Andy@Musicademy | November 12, 2009

Even without huge experience and musicality there are numerous things you can do to help your band work better together. Here are just a few practical tips you can try. Simplicity. Any band can vastly improve purely by playing the simple things well and avoiding songs or styles that are too complex for them to pull off […]

Five Confessions: Annoyed by Worship

By Guest Blogger | November 4, 2009

I found this post at Jason Boyett’s blog and thought we would share it with you. I know its controversial but he does have a point! 1. I play the drums in the worship band at my church. One reason is because I love to play the drums. It makes me happy. The other reason is […]