Customer Reviews

God Songs: How to Write & Select Songs for Worship

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There's a growing trend in contemporary Christian churches where the worship pastor(s) introduce original songs to their congregation. While not obligated to, many worship pastors have a creative side that bubbles up in their private worship and other times and for many there is a difficult bridge to cross to take their God-inspired and God-driven musical ideas and melodic prayers and put them in a form suitable for corporate worship; that's where God Songs comes in.

As a musician and worshiper who is not a worship pastor (but very interested in the subject), I feel the book does a good job of laying a foundation for the basics of what makes a good worship song and how a great worship song may differ from other forms of popular music and does (for the most part) a good job validating the ideas presented. It also has a chapter on music theory that focuses in on theory in relation to contemporary worship songs, I found this part of the book especially interesting. The stories behind some of todays most famous worship songs were also very good.

The book assumes you know how to play an instrument (piano or guitar) and you already know the basics of music theory; it assumes you're already a songwriter looking to expand your knowledge of worship songwriting.

If you want to hear these techniques applied, check out Paul Baloche's latest album A Greater Song. Paul is an worship pastor trainer, worship pastor and recording artist.

Length:: 0:41 Mins

God Song Book Review - April 2011

While this book is full of good advice and many concepts that I would never think of on my own, the only thing I found it lacking was that it was very rigid in it's concepts about what sounds good. But I suppose after you've mastered many of these concepts you'll be able to emulate the great Christian songwriters, who probably never learned this stuff.

I think the previous review was great, so I will only add a few things from my perspective. I loved this book. I have been a church music director for the past two and a half years, and absolutely love Paul Baloche's music. It was such a joy to read this book, to learn about how some of the most popular Christian songs came to be, and to just hear from some of the greats in CCM. I would say that the book is dominated with how to write songs. That wasn't really what I was looking for when I started the book, but I definitely feel inspired to start trying.

I wish there were a sequel to this book about how to select worship songs and put them together into sets. Of course I know the basics: similar keys, similar themes, etc. However, I would have liked to hear from these great worship leaders about their methods on how they put together a worship list on a given Sunday. I really do think that it could fill another whole book!