‘P.S. Are you singing any good new songs lately?’
This is a phrase that often comes at the end of emails sent to me. I don’t know if it’s just me, but there seem to be more and more asking the same question, which is odd, because there are hundreds of songs being written every week and disseminated on the internet from all over the world.
What’s more, the theology of the songs being written is much more solid than in the mid-90s, but I’m still struggling to find new material that a normal congregation finds easy to sing. Even at the London Music Ministry Conference (which I help run) I haven’t been bowled over with confidence in the new songs we’ve presented during the ‘New songs’ session.
Ten million YouTube hits
What about ‘10,000 reasons’ by Matt Redman? Extremely popular, over ten million views on YouTube, two Grammys, lots of churches trying to sing it. But (and please don’t burn me at the stake — it’s only a song, not the Word of God, and this is only my fallen opinion…) it’s actually quite hard to sing when there are only 50 in the congregation, and it’s hard to play by the average Joe church muso. There, I’ve said it. It’s a good song to listen to and to sing along to, and it has helped literally millions of people delight in the goodness of God. That’s not the issue — it’s wonderful that songwriters are writing faithful songs that are being sung by so many people. The issue I want to address is the lack of strongly congregational songs being written these days.
