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People often say to me things like …‘there are so many new songs out there we can never hope to learn them all! Do we really need more new worship songs?’ Or sometimes they’ll say ‘you often play a lot of your own songs when you lead worship, why is that?’ Or ‘Don’t you ever run out of ideas? Surely there’s only so much you can write about one basic theme!’

The spiritual answer might well be that God is still speaking, God is still acting and the Holy Spirit is still inspiring his songwriters, as his contemporary ‘scribes’ if you like, to write about what’s going on and to help God’s people express it back to God in worship. The gospel is of course the greatest love story ever told, the deepest mystery and God himself the most glorious subject for any songwriter.

There’s actually a whole number of issues behind these very similar sounding questions but here’s a couple of quotes I have personally often found encouraging and inspiring and maybe they will help you to understand something of what makes a writer tick. Certainly I do think they helped me to understand why I do what I do.

Bob Dylan once said “I just wanted a song to sing… people do want songs they can sing and there came a point where I had to write what I wanted to sing because nobody else was writing what I wanted to sing.
I couldn’t find it anywhere. If I could I probably would never have started writing.” (1984)…on ‘why write?’

J R R Tolkein and C S Lewis
“There was a conversation that took place between Tolkein and C S Lewis (the creator of ‘the Chronicles of Narnia’) in which they were talking about the fact that they felt such a frustration that they couldn’t pick up and read the kind of books and stories that they liked or wanted to read. And they both came to this conclusion that in the end maybe they would have to write the books they wanted to read ...”
Brian Sibley, author of “The Lord of the Rings; The Making of the Movie Trilogy”

In answer to the question ‘why do I often use a lot of my own songs?’ aside from the above comments I have found you can only realistically lead someone to a place where you have been yourself. My songs have mostly come out of my own experience of God, whether in the place of worship and wonder, or in life itself, through various situations and circumstances. But having met God in that place I guess I have confidence that I can lead others to meet him there too. The process of writing a song will often draw me in deeper into God. If he speaks to me in that place then it will often reflect in the lyric and again, maybe he’ll speak to others in that way too, either through the lyric itself or maybe the song will draw them into the presence of God, where they’ll have their own encounter with their Saviour.

That’s one of the beautiful things about worshipping together, each one can have an intimate encounter with God and be impacted in a way that’s unique to that individual.