I am currently in the United Kingdom, working and holidaying whilst taking a short hiatus from Sydney life.

In my short time in the UK I have come to a few short conclusions.
The weather is terrible.
The people rarely smile. (Probably to do with the weather)
A ridiculous amount of people smoke
The lifestyle is generally fairly unhealthy; A chocolate bar is stupidly cheap, (80c AUD. Whereas a pink lady apple is about $2 AUD).

And whilst there are many things I don’t seem to like about this place, there are many fantastic things too.
It’s close to everywhere cool,
There’s some amazingly cool music shops.
There’s a thriving music scene
And perhaps the thing I have learnt to appreciate most is the amount of Huge old Churches.

At first I didn’t think much of this. I went to York Minster Cathedral and felt as distant from god as possible: It was cold and stale, an Architectural marvel sure, but it was just big and cold and empty. A building isn’t a church: the people of god meeting together are.

I started attending a church in the middle of the London Business District: surrounded by HSBC head quarters, Lloyds Headquarters and an oddly shaped Gherkin Building lies St Helens of Bishopsgate.
There is nothing too special about this place, it’s an old church where people meet every week to learn about and worship our Lord and Saviour, the same thing that happens everywhere around the world.
However at this church I have learnt to love singing and the simplicity of it.
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We are called Garage Hymnal because we love hymns! For us they set the standard for how great words and great music working together can move people to respond to God.

And as much as we love bashing them out to the classic tunes with the rich sound of a pipe organ in full flight, we also love adapting them to new music. We do this because we want to take their timeless words of Christian wisdom out of hymnals and into the ipods of a new generation.

We published new versions of Take My Life, Whiter Than Snow, and It Is Well With My Soul, and we have a new version of This Is My Father’s World on the way. But there are so many more great hymns words out there! What’s your favourite hymn?

Myself (Andy) and Greg are just back from TWIST music ministry conference - it was a great three days of making, listening to, talking about and thinking about music.

The theme this year was “Naked Church” - like Jamie Oliver’s cooking show, the idea this year was to strip back the lights and massive band and enjoy the great raw ingredients of church life together: great God, great people, great songs to sing together. It was good to catch up with pals like Jodie McNeill, Simone Richardson, Nicky Chiswell, Rob Smith, Philip Percival, Mark Peterson, etc etc etc.

The speaker was Dominic Steele who some of you may remember from Christians in the Media in Annandale. He talked about spiritual gifts from 1 Corinthians: apparently he’s a “Charismatic in the Biblical, not the church politics, sense”. Interesting to hear his take on many of the issues in church music: for his money, the most important question is not “how loud?” or “how many guitars?” or “which songs?”, but instead “what is the heart of the band?”, “are they serving the people in the crowd?”, “are we loving each other in our public gatherings or are we committing the corporate sin of selfishness?”.

Challenging questions. Of course working out the heart of the band is much harder than having some hard and fast rules (no guitar solos, no hand raising, no …). Lazy people love rules for that reason.

Every time I run a church workshop I start with the same opening question: “why do we bring our instruments to church?” The answers are often very illuminating. Sometimes people say it’s “to exercise the gift that God’s given me”. And that’s not a bad answer - but of course it’s only half the biblical answer. We are given gifts to build up the church, and if we’re not doing that we should go home!