I’ve recently been put in charge of music at our morning church. This can be a very demanding ministry. I’ve written plenty about church music over the years, and given a lot of consideration to the various challenges it presents. Here are some of my thoughts.

Finding songs is one of the biggest hurdles a music director faces. Fortunately, we are better off in this area than we have been for years. We now have access to a large collection of quality material from local artists such as Emu, Garage Hymnal, Mike Morrow, Castle Hill Anglican and others - I recommend them all highly. But the really exciting development has been the emergence of Sovereign Grace music in the US. They have a huge catalog of songs, and produce several new albums every year. The quality of their material is generally very high - good music and excellent lyrics. Anyone who still says they can’t find any songs simply isn’t looking hard enough.

Another major challenge, for my church at least, has been managing the sheet music. It is continually going missing, or winding up in the wrong folder, and we spend precious minutes at rehearsal trying to track it down. To resolve this, I’ve decided to send soft copies of the upcoming songs to all of our musicians. This enables them to print and bring their own music, and also lets them rehearse at home. Emu, Sovereign Grace, Garage Hymnal etc allow you to freely download their music scores, which is a great help.

A third difficulty relates to the very limited rehearsal times we have. We usually have less than an hour to learn four songs and rehearse them to a reasonable performance standard. This is actually quite a feat, and our musos do it week in, week out. To make life a little easier, I’m using a “rolling” song roster - each week I take the previous weeks song list, remove the song at the top and add a new song to the bottom. The overlapping of songs will make things much easier for the band - and for the congregation as well. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how this will go down, but I want to give it a go.

Amidst all the hassles and challenges of planning and rosters and organisation, I’m reminded of what a great privilege it is to be a church musician. We stand in a proud tradition that stretches back 2,000 years, and includes some of the greatest musicians in history. May God be glorified by our ministry.