We interview Dave Gobbett about why he is backing the Sovereign Grace conference in Bath this month
en: How did you get to know and what do you like about the Sovereign Grace work?
DG: I’ve known and loved the work of Sovereign Grace Ministries (SGM) since 2000, when I spent a year in the US. I was on staff at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington DC with Mark Dever, and in the previous year Mark had become friends with C.J. Mahaney, a local charismatic church pastor 40 minutes from DC as well as the then head of SGM. In Dever’s typically contagious style, that friendship spilled over into our respective church staff teams, and I especially enjoyed getting to know Bob Kauflin (director of Sovereign Grace Music) and Jeff Purswell (head of Sovereign Grace’s Pastor’s College, and former teaching assistant to Wayne Grudem).
While lots has changed within the structure and leadership of Sovereign Grace in recent years, what I continue to love about their work is their unrelenting commitment to proclaiming the glories of God’s grace with both head and heart and to helping others do the same.
They are perhaps best known in the UK for their worship music, which has been a thrill for me to see (in fact when I was at Oak Hill College I had a rather bootleg ministry importing large volumes of Sovereign Grace CDs and selling them on to my fellow students – it was all above board, I assure you!).
I love their combination of rich doctrine – often updating long forgotten hymns – and strong, anthemic melodies. I imagine that, for generations, believers will be grateful to Sovereign Grace for giving the church Before the Throne of God Above (1998), I Will Glory in my Redeemer (2000), O Great God (2006), Behold our God (2011) and Now Why this Fear (2013), to name but a handful!
en: How is this conference likely to help the churches in the UK?
DG: The conference circuit is increasingly crowded, so it’s a good question – why this one? As a local church pastor, alongside the teaching of God’s Word, the corporate worship life of the congregation is one of the most important public things that I’m responsible for. How we sing, what we sing, why we sing, how corporate prayer fits in, how we shape the worship service, how ‘gathered’ worship relates to ‘whole life’ worship, how the vertical relates to the horizontal, what it means to serve out of the overflow of one’s own worship life: these are all crucial issues that need thinking through, and constantly submitting to the Scriptures.
The Sovereign Grace Worship God UK conference is a great help in doing all that! I was privileged to go to one of their first conferences in the US 15 years ago, so I was delighted when Bob Kauflin’s team organised one in the UK last year.
True to Sovereign Grace form, WGUK was cross-centred, Bible-saturated, gospel-filled and Spirit-fuelled. A range of church traditions were represented – Evangelical Anglican, Reformed Baptist, FIEC, New Frontiers and so on – and it was supported by the local SGM church, Grace Church Bristol, pastored by Nathan Smith. It was also a remarkably generous conference, with such a low conference fee: I don’t imagine it was cheap to bring the whole event – musicians, tech, fantastic speakers, admin – in from the US. There was a tangible sense that here were people who evidently wanted to bless every single delegate.
If you can’t make WGUK, Bob’s book Worship Matters is a great resource explaining the theology behind their practice, as is his blog of the same name. I highly recommend them too.
en: Let’s ask a more difficult question. Sovereign Grace Music tends to be very professional. If churches adopt much more of this, it will only widen the gap between the ‘big church’ experience and small churches who can’t compete. What do you think?
DG: I suppose if you’re recording and producing CDs of worship music for the wider church to use, then you will want them to be high quality. And its true that fewer UK congregations will be able to replicate the style. But that’s the case with most equivalent music by a Townend, Getty or Redman!
However, what I love about Sovereign Grace Music is that many of their songs (perhaps even most) work as well with a single piano and a room full of voices, or even a solitary guitarist and a house group, as they do with a Word Alive band or a Prom Praise orchestra! Certainly my parents’ previous ‘small church’ with their single piano and 60 people who loved Jesus sang the most Sovereign Grace songs of any church I’ve ever been to! If you want to experience that kind of musical style (admittedly up a few thousand voices) why not check out the two wonderful Together for the Gospel Live CDs produced by Sovereign Grace where the musical accompaniment is a solitary grand piano (played by Bob Kauflin).
