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.
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to the large church down the road (I know, we're 8 km's from Hillsong). God gives us what we need and then we need to be thankful and nurture that team