Hillsong music is the primary, and profitable, way Hillsong culture imports itself to churches the world over. It’s estimated that 30 million churches still sing “Shout to the Lord” today. Give a gift of $30 or more to The Roys Report this month, and you will receive a copy of “Wounded Workers: Recovering from Heartache in the Workplace and the Church” by Kirk Farnsworth. The worship band, Hillsong, became so popular that the church changed its name to match it. Two years later, Zschech became the worship leader at Hills Christian Life Center, a Pentecostal congregation in New South Wales, Australia. I didn’t know that “Shout to the Lord” was written by Australian singer-songwriter Darlene Zschech in 1993. What mattered was how the music made us felt it made me feel hopeful, and joyful, and closer to the Lord. Smith), and “The Heart of Worship” (Matt Redman) - a song ostensibly about how worship is about God and not us, even though a lot of the lines start with the word I - were added to the mix.ĬCM worship music was the soundtrack to my evangelical upbringing. Of course, I didn’t know anything about how the music ended up in our church on Sundays, or that our worship leader had presumably paid to license the music through CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International), the leading purveyor of song-use licenses to North American churches. So contemporary songs like “Shout to the Lord,” “Better Is One Day” (Matt Redman), “Open the Eyes of My Heart” (Michael W. We were a Methodist megachurch-hopeful that was seeker-sensitive, and boring hymns were perceived to turn seekers off. (You know the one…) I had theretofore not seen many people throw their hands up at our church, but it seemed authentic and powerful and like something you would want to have happen to you. I remember it vividly because there was this one woman who would raise her hands when we got to the big key change. Sometime in the late 1990s, my church started singing “Shout to the Lord.”
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