Songwriters Forum – stage 2

Back in September we hosted our first Songwriters Forum and I wanted to give you an update on what’s happened since then.

To give you some context, we have talked alot recently about the idea of “local worship expression” – not only using songs and art from the historical and global church but also to be developing our own worship repertoire that would encourage and inspire worship from within our own congregation.

After meeting together back in September, we did a follow-up meeting in November and then got together again last week. Here’s a quick recap so far of what’s happened -

Stage 1 – Songwriters Forum
This was open to everyone from our church and was held on a Saturday morning. We talked about songwriting concepts specific to congregational worship – form, range, lyric, etc. We had about 20 people come to this – only 3 of whom were from our worship ministry.

Stage 2 – Songwriters Roundtable
This is the stage we’re in now and we’ve met together twice. At our first meeting we had 9 people and last week we had 10 or 11. At this meeting we started brainstorming ideas on themes for songs and at our second meeting we split in to two groups and actually began working on writing our first songs.

Stage 3 – Songwriter Groups
The next stage will be to break our writers in to smaller groups of 3 or 4. We’ll get together for our “roundtable” again in May and then each of the smaller groups will be expected to meet together once or twice before we get together again in the summer. The idea is that we will see these individual groups bring drafts of songs to our roundtable gatherings for the others groups to hear and give input.

So there you go. It’s been pretty awesome to see how this has gone so far and I’m excited to see where it will go next. At the end of our roundtable last week each of the two groups had a theme, lyric and melody idea which will hopefully be developed in to songs that we’ll be able to use with our congregation on Sunday morning. Obviously there will be lots of pruning – each of the songs that will come out of these writers will be subject to the same criteria as every other new song that’s available for me to choose from, but there is something really special about people from our own congregation writing songs specific to our experience.

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This is my Watercooler Wednesday post. Check out my other posts in this series –
If I Was Commissioner Of The NHL
Worship Leader Magazine Thoughts
Productivity Helper
Oscar Peterson & Count Basie
Fredo Viola – The Sad Song
Absolut Quartet