I am the oldest of 12 grandchildren on my mother’s side of the family. Naturally, I was the director. My grandparents’ house had a large brick fireplace—a perfect, potentially hazardous stage. The youngest cousins served as central casting. Every Christmas, we’d all scurry to the basement to plan our living-room performance.
After squabbling about roles, songs, and costumes for what seemed like hours, we emerged, calling all the adults to attention. We played bells and sang “Frosty the Snowman” and “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Depending on our commitment level, there might be a choreographed dance number or one-act play. Somewhere in a storage room, video recordings of our performances are gathering dust.
It’s always seemed obvious to me that families should create things—silly, corny, half-baked—together.
These days, I spend a lot of my time writing about music. I am not a songwriter or a performer; I’ve left my Christmas pageant days behind. But last year, I was invited to Nashville for a songwriting camp at Belmont University, part of the In Every Generation project focused on creating music for multigenerational congregations.
I showed up to speak at a workshop—not to put lyrics or notes on a page. So when the facilitator asked me to join a writing group, I felt a mixture of embarrassment and terror. Had I accidentally given someone the impression that I, the world’s most middling pianist and retired living-room performer, was a musician who belonged in a room with professionals? Not just any professionals—Nashville professionals.
I came away from that camp believing that collaborative songwriting might be one of the scariest things we can do together—also one of the most generative. In an age of highly produced, hyperpolished worship music production, this humble process requires vulnerability and laughter, deference and generosity, the relational connectedness so many of us crave in our atomized online world.
Of course, songwriting isn’t the only creative work that pushes us toward deeper community. But in the church in particular, it might be just what we need right now.
To prioritize local, congregational songwriting isn’t to wholly disregard the worship music industry and its producers of today’s most popular contemporary hits (think Elevation Worship, Brandon Lake, or Phil Wickham). Some of these songs—“How Great Is Our God,” “The Blessing”—have deeply formed countless believers. Historian Molly Worthen recently reflected on the surprising role of contemporary worship music in her own conversion: “the incongruity between smooth harmonies, uncomplicated lyrics, and the shock that comes if you pause to grapple with the words’ meaning.”
But this kind of professionalized worship often comes with expectations about production value and polish. Enter the worship-tech industries supporting the local churches who make this music on Sunday mornings. Platforms like MultiTracks and Loop Community, for example, offer congregations instrumental and vocal tracks to fill in parts that can’t be covered by their communities’ musicians.
Tools like these can make life a lot less stressful for overworked worship leaders trying to wrangle volunteers for weekly practice. Short one guitar player this week? A track can fill in that part. Drummer calls in sick on Saturday night? There’s a track for that.
These programs have made it possible for churches to have sophisticated music without rehearsal or musician recruitment. But what’s lost when it’s possible to have the product of communal music making without the process?
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Church leaders and musicians who use contemporary worship music—and the latest tools to produce it in their contexts—are often techno-optimists. This cheery outlook is, in some ways, admirable. It resists the impulse to panic or descend into doom-and-gloom moralizing about modernity. On the other hand, though techno-optimists tend to talk a lot about what new tools afford, they may not anticipate what those tools—in-ear monitors, a click track, or live auto-tuning—might take away.
After all, making music together isn’t valuable solely because of a perfect final product. For the musicians on stage, there’s community building in the warm-ups, the tuning, the problem-solving. To plug in a choral track when there has been no rehearsal is to skip what makes choir worthwhile. And the congregation, even in an auditorium outfitted with the flashiest lighting rig, isn’t there to observe a performance but to participate in cocreation.
Congregational worship is inherently social. The decline of community singing in the US over the course of the 20th century and the shift to music enjoyment as an individualized, isolated experience have left us with the impression that music is something we consume, not something we make or do together.
Gen Z spends more money on live music events than millennials and Gen Xers do, and more broadly, live music is booming. But those stages are for a special few. My college students see music making as something best left to professionals, and hopelessly cringe when done poorly. Most of them don’t play an instrument and are convinced they’ve missed their chance—if they were going to be “musical” or “creative,” they would know it by now.
My sense is that, in many churches, a similar belief has taken root. In the techno-optimistic sprint toward contemporary worship music, seeker-sensitive churches have come to take production so seriously because they fear that the awkwardness of amateurism might cause the tenuous attendee to go elsewhere.
What if that thinking is wrong? What if it’s out of date? These days, we all carry constant access to stunning music in our pockets. The church could offer something different.
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That’s not to say we should try to make Sunday-morning musical worship messier or more awkward on purpose. But reorienting a church’s musical culture toward grassroots songwriting and local eclecticism could be one sign of our upside-down kingdom. Production value might not be as impressive as radical antipolish.
By the end of the two-day In Every Generation camp, I had been part of four different writing groups. In each session, I watched my new acquaintances let musical and lyrical ideas flow with abandon, starting with the skeleton of a groove, experimenting with progressions and unexpected harmonies, tracing out vocal hooks bit by bit, and straining to find the right word for the end of a phrase. Sometimes an idea fell to the floor; sometimes a collaborator grabbed it and ran to start building a prechorus or bridge.
When I worked up the courage to make a suggestion, I began with apologetic, deferential phrases (“This might be nothing …”). But in those writing rooms, there was a noncompetitive generosity of spirit that, eventually, assuaged my fear of being judged for a bad idea—and I had many. I imagine artists who regularly collaborate like this must develop an aversion to snark and pretension. No one, not even the award-winning songwriters, insisted that their sense of direction was better than mine.
To outsiders like me, songwriting can seem like a forbidding, mystical process that requires a combination of divine inspiration and raw talent possessed by very few. In the church, we sometimes refer to writers of influential worship songs as “anointed.”
That mythology is a barrier that Christians like Joel Payne and Chris Juby of Resound Worship are trying to break down. Every year, the UK-based organization invites participants of all musical backgrounds to join their songwriting community and take on the “12 Song Challenge.”
On Resound’s latest EP, “All Our Voices” provides a model for allowing a congregation to cowrite a song in real time, contributing lines to a simple, repetitive chorus.
“These kinds of songs invite the leader into more of a facilitator role,” said Juby. “You find yourself leading the people, not the song.”
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On the process of songwriting with inexperienced musicians, both leaders say that churches can teach the craft in the same way they teach people to lead a group in prayer. They talk about writing and sharing songs the way some talk about meal trains—as a low-stakes, tangible act of service.
“We can write songs that care for one another,” said Payne. That gave me pause. Can a song “care”?
At the In Every Generation camp, we spent one afternoon writing songs on prompts like “awaiting the birth of a baby,” “celebrating an anniversary,” and “sending students off to college.” We were writing music for particular moments in the life of a church community.
It had never occurred to me that a church could send off its college students with a song by and for that particular community—even if there were a few sideways smirks at the sentimentality of it all.
Not all writing sessions lead to tuneful, soul-stirring results. Songwriting is a skill that can be honed and strengthened; I couldn’t write “What a Beautiful Name.” But before God, I imagine, the differences in our skill levels are negligible. We are all children performing on the fireplace ledge.
Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the worship correspondent for Christianity Today and the author of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families, cowritten with Melissa Burt.
