Worship-song trend is "exhausting and limiting"

How do you resist the pull of worship chart algorithms in your Sunday services? How can a worship leader be a good theologian? Graham Kendrick went viral when he talked about healthy song selection last year, so Direction put some of his big questions to two Elim worship leaders.

Graham Kendrick wasn’t expecting his comments to go viral. He’d referred to the worship trend for emotionally intense “me loving God and God loving me” songs and the difficulty in finding ones on other themes.

“Beautiful as these moments are, I argued that too much focus on this was ultimately exhausting and limiting,” the songwriter wrote in an article for Premier Christianity.

“I asked, ‘where are the songs of community, mission, joy, etc?’”

The issue resonated with readers and podcast listeners, perhaps because it relates to a question for every church every week: what should we include in our worship set this Sunday?

This got us thinking: how do Elim’s worship leaders take a healthy approach to song selection? How do you balance chart favourites with lesser-known songs and hymns to bring good theology and support your church’s teaching themes?

We put a few of the points Kendrick made to Kensington Temple’s Sam Blake and Elim Northampton’s Donna Akodu.

Donna and Sam, Graham Kendrick talks about the need to be intentional about song choice. What’s your start point when you’re choosing worship sets?

Donna: One thing is remembering who’s in the congregation – asking what’s good for the room and what people will connect with.

Sung worship should impart something for the week ahead, so we don’t just go for the most popular songs but the ones the Spirit leads us to, because he knows who wi l l be there singing them.

The other thing is keeping your leaders in the loop.

I review songs with our leaders first, and when they give me the thumbs up we’re good.

That’s because our team isn’t just serving the body but the vision of our leadership too.

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