Mark Tiddy » tim hughes

Worship?

Mark Tiddy — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 13:20:15 +0000

In the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about the church and how trapped the majority of it has become. The format of church hasn’t changed majorly in the last 25 years at least…it certainly hasn’t changed in the 15 years of church I actually remember.

Alongside this I’ve been pondering the topic of worship…I love music but more and more I find myself feeling unsatisfied by ‘worship songs’ that the likes of Tim Hughes, Matt Redman and Stuart Townsend have to offer. In the case of Tim and Matt there’s some nice upbeat stuff but nothing ground breaking when it comes to lyrics and where Townsend makes up for this with lyrics they tend to be pretty traditional and jargon sounding and the tunes sound exactly the same as pretty much every hymn ever written.

The church has adopted a fairly standard pop-rock sound about it’s worship and I’m sure we’re missing something!

Someone said at a day I was on a while ago that ‘when you turn your mind back to God it’s an act of worship‘ yet the church is trapped in this attitude of worship meaning ‘to sing a few jargon filled pop-rock songs’.

Why is it that God has made us all very different yet we all have to fit the same worship mould? When was the last time you were in a church service with ‘different’ sounding sung worship or perhaps even a service with no songs at all?

In my thoughts on worship I’ve been thinking about songs which I find really help me connect with God so I thought I’d post a couple of youtube videos of them for your viewing pleasure.

In the meantime comment this post with your experience of church worship and ways which you connect with God and I shall continue these thoughts soon!

Five Iron Frenzy – Suckerpunch – Lyrics

Paramore – We Are Broken - lyrics

Profound Music

Mark Tiddy — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:13:42 +0000

Recently I’ve been leading more worship at church and also I’ve been listening to a lot more Five Iron Frenzy and it strikes me that worship songs tend to be very similar, all full of the same kind of language and all making very similar (yet worthy) points about God, however very rarely do you find a worship song with anything profound….I should add that by worship song I’m thinking of people like Matt Redman, Tim Hughes, Stuart Townsend, Ben Cantelon etc.

Although musically Tim Hughes and Matt Redman’s current albums are brilliant and will set a new goal for quality in Christian worship music the lyrics lack anything new.

This is where Five Iron Frenzy come in….I’ve been listening to a lot of their ‘Electric Boogaloo’ album which I believe is one of their best and the lyrics of the song ‘Far, Far Away’ have really struck me, they’re not overly profound but they seem to take a very different angle than the lyrics our average church songs take…so here they are:

Staring at the shoreline
wishing for some hope
the weight of empty fishing nets
is more than twisted rope
And underneath stern faces
they wait with baited breath
with broken hearts from hoping
while casting out their nets
See the figure on the shore
He speaks His words like plain men sing
His hands they still have holes in them
glory to the King

[Chorus:]
Can you hear the bells are ringing
far, far, away?
Can you hear the voices singing
far, far, away?
I know that one day soon a song shall rise
you’ll hear it with the sleep still in your eyes

And Peter was a liar
a traitor just like me
and Judas was a hypocrite
and Paul a Pharisee
When truth can be so distant
and hope evades our reach
Peter swam across the water
and found it on the beach

I hear they’ll hang you upside down
stretched across two boards
for hearing distant voices
and crossing to the Lord

The thing with this song is that theologically it’s brilliant, at the same time I think it puts things in a very different way….I hope you like the lyrics as much as I do.

I wonder if there’s a place for songs like that in church worship?

My Top 5 Albums Of 2007

Mark Tiddy — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:06:08 +0000

So as far as music goes 2007 has been a pretty good year…here are my top 5 albums that have come out in 2007 in no particular order!

Relient K – Five Score & Seven Years Ago (March)

It feels like I’ve had this album forever yet it never actually came out until march this year, but ‘Five score & seven years ago’ by Relient K is an amazing album, mixing catchy pop-punk with a more serious piano side of things. Every song on this album is awesome and I could listen to it over and over again!

Best Songs: The Best Thing, Must Have Done Something Right & Deathbed

Angels & Airwaves – I-Empire

Following their previous album I was pleasently surprised by the added punkiness of the angels and airwaves second album, listening to it left me with that warm fuzzy ‘Tom still has punk in him’ feeling. With some amazing lyrics and catchy, atmospheric and sometimes punky tunes this makes it into my 2007 top 5

Best Songs: Rite of spring, Everything’s Magic, Secret Crowds

Sum 41 – Underclass Hero

2007 also saw Sum 41 surface again with a new album, the Canadian punk rockers return as a three piece with the most surprising album I bought in 2007. I expected them to be as heavy as ‘Chuck’ which although was a good album was dissappointing however Underclass Hero is a cross between ‘All Killer’ and ‘Does this look infected?’ seeing Sum 41 return to their roots with what I think is their best album ever!

Best Songs: Underclass Hero, Walking Disaster

Serj Tankien – Elect The Dead

One of my favourite new albums in 2007 and now one of my favourite albums of all time came to me whilst watching Kerrang TV when Serj Tankien’s video for ‘Empty Walls’ appeared on screen…not knowing the SOAD singer had done a solo project I googled him, myspaced him and bought his album. Elect the dead is as heavy as early System yet at the same time relaxing and melodic. Tankien plays all the instruments except drums and has truly written a masterpiece.

Best Songs: Empty Walls, Unthinking Majority, Saving Us

Tim Hughes – Holding Nothing Back

2007 has also been a brilliant year for Christian music and the final album in my top 5 yet by no means least is Tim Hughes 3rd studio album ‘Holding Nothing Back’, unlike pretty much every other worship solo album out there is not a single rubbish track on this album, Tim Hughes has written what I think is the best Christian Worship leader studio album ever. So hats off to Tim Hughes!

Best Songs: Happy Day, The Highest & Greatest, Take my life

Worship Leading

Mark Tiddy — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 15:00:00 +0000

I guess it must be around a year and a half since I first led worship, it was at Park Road Baptist Church in Peterborough and I didn’t really know what to do, I had mental pictures of Matt Redman or Tim Hughes in action, and didn’t think I matched up to that. Here I am a year and a half on and still I don’t think I’m much of a Tim Hughes, however I think I am beginning to grasp what it means to lead worship but at the same time wrestling with various things. This is a blog on worship leading.

Firstly leading worship can mean very different things from church to church, some it means having a set of songs, deciding when to repeat chorus’, build up again etc, in others it might just mean playing a set of songs given to you, I daresay that in others it might not even mean singing!

The Audience Of One
I’ve been to churches and witness idolatry. By this I mean a church where the band appears to be performing, where they stage-dive, leap around and generally look like muppets, and it seems to come across like the congregation are an audience, on the other side of the spectrum I’ve been to churches where the band are a bunch of miserable old people (or just miserable people), not a smile to be seen for miles, often they look like they are in pain.

The fact remains that when we lead worship, play in a band or are even just in a congregation our worship should be aimed at one person and that is Jesus. We should play like Jesus is stood in front of us, sing like he is in front of us, we should be worshipping with all we’ve got and I admit that sometimes that can look like performing but I think we often forget the power of the words we’re singing, when we sing ‘Jesus, my everything, be my everything’ for example do we actually think what it means to sing that, do we actually realise that by Jesus being our everything we are dying to ourselves, accepting that we may go through suffering because of it?

There’s a fine line between giving it everything for Jesus and getting caught up in performing and I don’t know where that line is, I guess it depends on how the congregation see the band, for example when a band is the background on the screen which the words are displayed doesn’t that distract from Jesus? I personally find it difficult when that happens not to try and suss out the make of guitar the leader is using, or what the fills are that the drummer does are. I find myself focusing on the band by mistake.

So the first key to worship leading is remembering that there is an audience of one and that is Jesus, so no matter how much the congregation do or don’t get ‘into the worship’ you are still worshipping Jesus.

Leading The Songs

Of course it’s easy if you’re busy singing along to the audience of one to forget that you are meant to be leading, after all the purpose of a worship leader is to lead a congregation in worship so whilst it’s important to make sure you are worshipping through it I think it’s important to remember that you need to listen to God’s spirit and where he wants to lead a song, it might turn out that the 10 chorus repeats and 2 breakdowns you had planned aren’t where God is leading the worship. Being open to God’s spirit and where it is leading you as a worship leader is important.

To upset or to not upset?
People in churches get upset easily, whether it’s because their pew was touched by someone else or whether they didn’t know any of the songs. In fact it’s one of the most ridiculous things about churches, we have a group of people who claim to have found new life in Jesus Christ yet instead of celebrating that, instead of looking at the words to the new song and embracing the power of them and echoing them to God through singing they grumble. Jesus Christ is good news, we should go to church to celebrate good news! Even if we’ve had a rubbish week we should still go to church to celebrate Jesus Christ, the songs I relate the most to are the ones that cry out to God in times of trouble, a while ago I wrote some lyrics that never found music but part of them was ‘I want the bad times, and the dark times, Just so I have to put my trust in you, I want the sad times and the broken times, then my heart will cry out to you‘. I sincerely believe that it’s in the dark times when we cling onto God that we develop the most in our faith, it’s easy to worship a God when everything is good but when things get crap how easy is it to say to God ‘you are good’. It takes faith to cry out to God in times of trouble singing ‘you are good’

But back to my point, how open should we be to the congregations needs when we lead worship? I think the answer to that is ‘fairly’, personally I find it difficult to worship to an organ, however I am aware that others don’t and that others find a band difficult to worship to, trying to find a balance is a good idea, afterall in Romans Paul talks about trying to not make others fall and although someone finding it difficult to worship isn’t exactly a fall it makes them find things that much more difficult.

Conclusion?
My long rambling blog hasn’t gone into very new territory, it has got me thinking more about lament (lament = crappyness) and how perhaps we should have more of it, but I hope my ponderings on worship leading help your thinking, obviously there’s a lot more I could write but this blog is already huge, perhaps I’ll start a series on worship leading…maybe!