Developing creative worship – just how interactive are we?

By Sam Hargreaves | October 29, 2009

All around us media providers are scrambling to make their products interactive.  You don’t just watch the News – you email your opinions and photos.  You don’t just listen to the radio – you text what you are up to, and what you thought of that song.  You don’t just view TV talent shows – […]

Empowering young people into worship – part 3

By Guest Blogger | October 15, 2009

In the first post of this series we looked at the early stages of working with young people and then we looked at a number of key challenges. In this final post we consider a further 5 issues. 1. GRADUALLY RELEASE THEM. This should go without saying, but generally speaking, don’t unleash a young band or individual […]

What on earth is contemporary worship anyway?

By Marie@Musicademy | October 13, 2009

We had a challenging question posed by Nick Woodburn from Bedford UK where he asks us to describe the defining characteristics of contemporary worship music. Here is Nick’s preamble to his question. “I have a question, loosely connected to the guest blog by Kim Gentes, titled “Has modern worship become corrupt?” I could relate very […]

Has modern worship become corrupt? Guest post by Kim Gentes

By Kim Gentes | October 5, 2009

Have We Lost The Heart of Modern Worship, Are Things as Pure as They Once Where? or  Has “Modern Worship” Become Corrupt? In the early days of praise and worship growing up in the church, it was popular for “defenders of the faith” (those who preferred the established style of music at the time) to […]

Empowering young people into worship – part 2

By Guest Blogger | September 28, 2009

Last time, we looked at the early stages of working with young people. We saw that the issues are the same as working with any band, but with some extra caveats. In this post, we’ll look at a 5 more key issues. In all these, we’re assuming that the young people are musically gifted to some […]

X-Factor worship? Honour thy mentor.

By Andy@Musicademy | September 21, 2009

I just found this clip on YouTube of something my original guitar tutor put together and thought you might like to see it – it gets pretty impressive from about 1 minute in… What’s really interesting is that when I started to take lessons with Paul about 20 years ago he had moved from being […]

Empowering young people into worship – part 1

By Guest Blogger | September 15, 2009

So. You’ve worked hard with your band to improve your musicianship, teamwork and Biblical theology of worship. You’re all set. But then comes the moment you’ve dreaded. Yep, it’s the 13 year-old who always wants to play your guitar after church every week, driving your Fulltone overdrive to wig-blasting levels towards your elders. This mysterious […]

The Mandy Test – Romantic lyrics in worship songs

By Guest Blogger | September 14, 2009

  In discussion about worship with a youth group recently we compared different secular song lyrics that expressed love and the group put them on a spectrum of how usable they were in worship to God. Some struggled with the ‘cheese factor’; some pop songs have a more obviously different style to the songs we […]

Let the church lead worship, not worship leaders

By Marie@Musicademy | September 9, 2009

  We had a really interesting but potentially controversial comment yesterday on one of our blog posts on worship leading about interactive worship. We’re publishing the quote here in full as we’d love to hear others’ views. Please do continue the discussion below. Frank Viola and George Barna write in chapter 6 of Pagan Christianity:Exploring the Roots of our Church Practices: […]