At last some fresh musical resources for the Christmas season, courtesy of the fantastic Resound Worship website. While there are plenty of traditional carols in our hymn books that we all like to dust off for December, finding worship music for the Christmas period that has a more contemporary flavour has in my experience been rather limited in recent years.
Most churches seem to end up reverting to the Kendrick music of the eighties from The Gift (1988), such as Oh What a Mystery I See, The Servant King or Immanual O Immanuel. Great though these songs were (are?), they are over twenty years old and hardly contemporary.
The worship books we use don’t help much either. The latest Songs of Fellowship 4, in its seasonal index only covers Easter! Christmas apparently doesn’t exist amongst its 500 or so songs. The same was true in book 3. OK, so we’ll make songs like Light of the World fit our candle lit carol service but I crave better!
So I’m dancing for joy at the discovery of Resound Worship, an incredible resource stuffed full of new worship material. The site provides words, sheet music and backing tracks for songs written by a group of gifted individuals. Not only are these of high quality, but they are provided completely free.
For Christmas 2010 there are a whole bundle of great contemporary worship songs that include sheet music, lead sheets and even some with orchestral/choir arrangements. We have been putting some of these through their paces with our worship group and the two we like the best so far are What Kind of Throne by Joel Payne and On Christmas Day by Matt Osgood.
Resound Worship is a wonderful resource and I am grateful to them for making this much needed resource available. Take a look for yourself and I can guarantee you’ll be singing some new Christmas songs this year.