Songs for small churches

Many of the places where we go to do music training have the same problem - how to make congregational singing work well in a small church.

Small churches have a big passion for singing about Jesus, but not always the music resources to make it happen.

We're conscious that often people who put out worship CDs put forward a sound which can be intimidatingly complex -- I remember at one training event in regional NSW I was playing some worship pastors tracks from a new CD and one of them said 'it's a great song, but we can't do it at our church, we don't have two guitarists!'

It seems that we need to do better to show how a song which is recorded with many instruments can be played with much simpler arrangements. After all, most of our songs begin life on an acoustic guitar or piano in a lounge room - that's how we begin writing a song!

In fact, this doesn't have to be a disappointing compromise - simple, acoustic music can be spine-tinglingly beautiful!

Some songs work better than others acoustically, but here are a couple of ours I can think of (and have recordings of acoustically). Some of these were recorded as part of an EMU music project a few of us were involved in called 'Songs for Little Rooms'.

Garage Hymnal - Fairest Lord Jesus from Hope Media Ltd on Vimeo.