The long and winding road of worship

I came up with an idea the other day for the 50th Anniversary weekend. Seeing as we are trying to celebrate 50 years of St Cuthberts, perhaps we should sing songs from throughout the 50 year history of the church at the services next Sunday.

Now thats easy enough for the 9.30 am - since almost every song we ever sing is at least a hundred years odl and we are consciously trying to use hymnody that is, to coin the phrase, 'traditional'.

But its an entirely different matter for the 11.00 am, largely because there has been such a change in the music that we use for worship over that relatively (in the context of the whole history of the church) short period of time. It got me thinking about just how far we've come over the past fifty years!

Back in 1959 there really only was 'the hymn book' - largely consisting of tried and trusted stuff from previous centuries. It wasn't until the mid 1960's that we started to see new material emerging. Songbooks like 'Youth Praise' might look a bit dated now, but they were incredibly radical and groundbreaking back then - with songs set out for...shock horror...guitars!!! Most of the songs from that era have long since passed from popular use, and in any case I suspect that few were ever sung at St Cuthberts, but we owe those writer a great debt in that they broke the mould for what followed. And what followed was books like 'Sounds of Living Waters' and 'Fresh Sounds' - gentle folks songs, many from the venerable 'Fisherfolk' group, that gradually started to come into popular use. Many churches - and I hear that this happened at St Cuthberts - produced photocopied booklets of songs for use in home groups, evening services and so on. And so it was that 'Seek ye first', 'Freely Freely', 'We really want to thank you Lord' and many others started to find their way into use.

The next big thing to hit the worship scene was 'Mission Praise', boosted by the Billy Graham missions in the mid 1980's, closely followed by the first 'Songs of Fellowship'. Many churches were now using a blend of hymn book and 'chorus book' in their services, and the trickle of worship songs became a massive torrent with the arrival of worship-producing outfits like Vineyard, Integrity Music, Soul Survivor and Hillsongs through the 1990s, and the explosion of events like Spring Harvest and New Wine provided the focus and showcase for new worship leaders and worship songs.

It's hard to remember just how subversive we felt back in the late 1970's with our badly-produced stapled together booklets of 'choruses', singing in someones front room led by a guitarist who possibly could only manage about three chords!! Ah...those were the days...

We've come a long way...