Podcast: Songs That Serve the Church with Jim Sayers

In this episode of Affinity Talks Gospel, host Graham Nicholls sits down with Jim Sayers from Praise Trust and Grace Church Didcot to talk about:

• the story of Grace Church Didcot and the blessings of being a smaller church;
• Jim’s life-long love of Christian music;
• the role of Praise Trust and its criteria for including a song in its collection;
• current trends in Christian music;
• what makes a Christian song timeless;
• biblical areas which tend not to feature in Christian music;
• helps for congregational singing.

https://youtu.be/TydkZmZXQbg

Graham Nicholls (0:11)

Welcome to Affinity Talks Gospel Podcast. My name is Graham Nicholls from Affinity and today I’m joined by Jim Sayers who has various roles but they include being one of the trustees and pioneers really of Praise Trust. So welcome Jim.

Jim Sayers (0:28)

Lovely, good to meet you Graham, as ever. After all these years!

Graham Nicholls (0:33)

Yes, thanks for being with us. So tell us about your two main jobs in your Christian ministry life.

Jim Sayers (0:41)

Okay, so first and foremost I’m a pastor. I’m pastor of Grace Church Didcot, one of the elders and we’re a church plant so we are still smallish, about 40 people, meeting in a community centre. Lots of things that you take for granted in an established church with a building and infrastructure and traditions – it’s just not there in a church plant, which can be a great blessing. But at the other end it can be a great anxiety that this whole thing can fall apart. So yeah, we’re still quite young and fragile, rejoicing in what God is doing, seeing a number of people saved which is fantastic, which is amazing and I think that changes the dynamic of everything. You know, when a family has a new baby, the smallest, youngest person changes everything and young Christians shape and define what the rest of the church is like. So that’s my main job.

Graham Nicholls (1:40)

Do you find yourself – we’ll come into your second job in just a sec, but quick question on the church plant – do you find that church plants or small churches tend to try and be small versions of big churches or have you been able to break out from that and say ‘we’re a bunch of Christians who gather together and we can do what we like’?

Jim Sayers (1:57)

Yeah, I know what you mean. We never had this big launch. We never went for this big, all balloons and strobes and laser lights launch show, whatever that is. We went for a sort of quiet incremental launch and I think that meant that we grew organically. We started from 11 of us and we added layers as we were able to and, I mean, even now, there are lots of layers we’d love to add. We’d love to have midweek children’s clubs and a youth group and so on. We’ve just got a junior church, that’s our children’s work. We put on one-off holiday clubs for a day when we can. So we’re doing what we can when we can. And it is very important not to try and pretend to be the big city church. Actually, I think some people are attracted to a smaller church.

Graham Nicholls (2:49)

Yeah, definitely.

Jim Sayers (2:50)

I think they like being friends. They like actually sitting next to someone in church who they know, who they’ve actually spoken to before. You know, the old proverbial story of the 800 member church and somebody turns to speak to the stranger and discovers that they’ve been an elder of the church for 20 years. So, yeah, there are advantages.

Graham Nicholls (3:15)

Tell us about your other job. 

Jim Sayers (3:18)

So, my other job is voluntary. I’m chairman of trustees of Praise Trust and I’ve been doing that since, well, about the same time really. I became chairman of Praise Trust about the time we started Grace Church in 2018. So, we’ve been doing both things through a pandemic and out the other side, which has been interesting.

Graham Nicholls (3:37) 

Yeah, and I remember that you were brought up in a strict Baptist Gospel standard background because we’re going to talk mainly about singing song praise in the gathered church. What was your experience growing up of that?

Jim Sayers (3:57) 

Well, I suppose in the household I grew up in, it was most of the music that we heard was hymns.  We had a pedal harmonium. I was the only one of the family that never played it and I’m one of eight children. So, we gathered around that to sing. We had piles of hymn books to hand out at home. Having a hymn book at home was normal and I think that might be coming back actually – that people are having a hymn book to use devotionally and sing at home. I think that’s a great thing. So, as soon as my voice broke, I was going down to alto and then tenor and eventually bass. So, I learnt four-part harmonies as a teenager. When Christmas comes and we sing carols, I can just swing into any baseline of any carol that you like and I absolutely love the baseline at Christmas.

Graham Nicholls (4:52) 

So, although Gospel Sounded are known for being quite dour – theologically with some things…

Jim Sayers (5:01)

Some issues, yeah.

Graham Nicholls (5:02)

… that were not necessarily helpful, but it sounds as though it was quite a sort of pious, joyful thing with singing hymns at home or was it a very sombre thing?

Jim Sayers (5:14) 

We didn’t sing them in a sombre way. I think we all had a desire to sing joyfully and to sing. We were brought up to sing and I think it’s really important to teach your children to sing. I think it goes on from generation to generation. We’ve just had a family gathering where we all were belting out ‘Tell Out My Soul’. We are quite a mixed range of churchmanships now, as a family, but we’ve kept the tradition of singing four-part harmonies. We were singing ‘O for a thousand tongues to sing’ and this lovely baseline was coming out on line four and it’s great to hear people singing the parts. Something I’ve done from childhood and I love doing.

Graham Nicholls (6:04) 

So, obviously with your role in Praise Trust – which historically was a physical book, but is an online set of hymns and music and resources, background of…

Jim Sayers (6:17) 

Growing all the time!

Graham Nicholls (6:20) 

Yeah, indeed. And a helpful scriptural index and thematic index as well. Praise.org?

Jim Sayers (6:27)

Praise.org.uk. A very powerful search engine.

Graham Nicholls (6:31) 

Yeah, it does. It’s good. So with that in mind, have you got any kind of reflections on what people are singing and how people are singing in the contemporary church, which I know is really difficult to say. So if we narrow it a little bit to the kind of network of churches that Affinity are involved with, which do range, to be fair, from some psalm-only singing, but it’s mostly, even amongst the Presbyterians, hymns plus quite a few contemporary songs, through to the FIEC churches, the Grace Baptist churches. What do you think about what people are singing? What’s your reflections on what and how we’re singing?

Jim Sayers (7:14) 

It’s very hard to know exactly because, of course, for us as Trust, we only get royalties from CCLI for those items of our collection that are being sung, where we own the rights. People may be singing a great deal of our collection we don’t own the rights to. We’re just publishing somebody else’s material. So we have no idea how many of those are being sung. We have got web analytics on our new website and we’re going to study those in some detail in the coming months, just to get a sense of where we’re being used and how it’s all going. It’s hard to assess really because feedback from those that are actually using you is really hard, isn’t it? I think probably our more contemporary catalogue, the material that we’ve published online, long after the book was published, is the bulk of what’s being sung, would be my guess.  But I would say that people still come to us for the great traditional hymns as well. And, you know, the Wesleys and the Wattses and the Newtons are still out there and filling their role and being rediscovered. There’s a little bit of a renaissance of singing old hymns but marrying them up with new tunes. I think that’s great. I think we should be giving them a new life and it’s something we want to go through our catalogue and say, which hymns and songs and psalms are suffering from a bad marriage to a tune that no one will sing? Can we remarry them to a different tune? It’s the only context in which I would probably use the word remarry.

Graham Nicholls (8:58) 

Just to encourage you, after a conversation you and I had a few weeks ago, we did actually sing ‘Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending’ on that weekend, because we’re doing a topic on last things, which is a great hymn. It’s probably got about 300 verses in the original.

Jim Sayers (9:14) 

Yeah, they weren’t squeamish about writing 10 verses, were they?

Graham Nicholls (9:18) 

No, indeed. But yeah, there’s great theology. But to be fair, after a sort of period in the, I don’t know, 70s, 80s, where songs were a bit lighter on theology, there’s not a complete absence of theology in songs from the last 20 years, probably contemporary songs.

Jim Sayers (9:39) 

It’s interesting, there are so many different moods, aren’t there? So when I first met you on a youth hosteling holiday, and we were singing choruses during the washing up, you know, this was an eye opener to me. And then I went off to university and discovered Mission Praise. And you know, that was the backbone of what everybody was singing, wasn’t it really? Now, it has to be said, there’s a lot of triumphalism in that period. You know, ‘into our hands, he will give the ground we claim’ stuff, you know, that sort of March for Jesus era was very, very optimistic. Lots of hymns about mission, going out to conquer the world and so on. 

Jim Sayers (10:18)

And then something changed in the 90s and the 00s. I think we got a little bit more introspective. I would say that there are some great short songs from that era that have got lost. And whatever happened to the one verse chorus? I think they were a great asset and a bit undersold, really. But then, of course, the Townend revolution came along. Where he was writing, effectively – is it a song? Is it a hymn? Loaded with truth. And I think they became much, much richer. I suppose the disappointment for us was we’d already published our book and we’d only got three of his songs into it. And then they all started changing the whole church music scene completely. And then the Gettys came along and started working with him. And Sovereign Grace started getting discovered over here. Now, I think that’s a great enrichment of what we sing. There’s a much clearer understanding of God. There is a much clearer understanding of the the whole person and work of Christ. The songs on the Holy Spirit were no longer controversial in a way that they were in the 1980s, you know. And that’s not to say that we disapprove of Graham Kendrick. We love Graham Kendrick songs. And I think, you follow his development through all the decades that he’s been writing and you can see trends in what’s being sung. 

Jim Sayers (11:47) 

And then along came the pandemic. And I think that changed a lot. It made us think about why we want to sing because we couldn’t. And I think it also made people discover lament. It’s almost like we had been afraid of lament. And had we got letterboxed a bit? We wanted to avoid the high exaltation sort of phase and we wanted to just avoid the darker colours. Whereas I think if you go to the Psalms, the Psalms have got all the full spectrum of emotion, haven’t they? Huge exaltation and deep lament. So I think lament has become a little bit more acceptable. We can be honest about our emotions now. I think that’s certainly true.

Graham Nicholls (12:37) 

Yeah. Take us through this whole process. So if we go from – first of all, just where are we finding our hymns? And then we’ll talk about which ones to choose, because I know you have some thoughts about that, about how you choose. But just in terms of source, obviously, one could use praise.org.uk, but more broadly – because it’s a funny thing in the modern world, where I guess, historically, you sung the hymns that were in the hymn book and you may not know a few, but there was music for them and you could learn them or you might go to another church and hear one, and think, ‘oh, we can sing this’. But nowadays, it’s kind of what you hear on conferences, what you see online and things have – it’s almost like a fashion industry where, for reasonable reasons, City Alight become popular. They get noticed. We sing them, we notice them at conferences, we sing a few more, they write a few more, we sing a few. So it’s a funny process about how you select. Do you have any concerns about that?

Jim Sayers (13:41) 

I mean, there’s a reason why City Alight suddenly became popular. First of all, they’re working hard at their theology and they’re coming out of a church, St Paul’s North Sydney, with a long evangelical tradition, well taught. And so that shines in what they’re writing. That’s a great strength of a lot of City Alight’s material. The other thing is they discovered what Stuart Townend and Keith Getty discovered, which is if you set your tunes to the pentatonic scale – so ‘In Christ Alone’, da-dum-da-da, da-dum-da-da – we know where it’s going. And it’s sticking to a very predictable range of notes. The feet land where you expect them to. And that’s true with City Alight as well. They are therefore very congregational. And I say hooray for that.

Jim Sayers (14:34)

Because the truth is, with a lot of contemporary songs, if you actually took out the drums and the bass and just listened to the melody, it’s pretty much just a blip along a line. They’re singing two or three notes. What Getty and Townend and Sovereign Grace and City Alight and co have done for us is give us melody back, which has been great. And therefore it sticks in the mind. If I go on holiday to a church and they’re singing something I don’t know, the truth is sometimes it will be utterly forgettable. And I think that’s a pity, because the great thing about anything that we sing is that the tune is going to anchor the words in our soul and we’re going to carry on singing it through the week. If I come away from a Sunday service where I couldn’t really pick up the tune because there’s so much noise in the background and there wasn’t much tune to pick up, it’s instantly forgettable. Actually, take all the backing away and it’s a bit like medieval plainsong. And you’re just not really putting up much melody in there. So that’s one of my hobby horses – that we need to combine great words with a great tune for it to stick in our minds.

Graham Nicholls (15:53) 

So in terms of sources, do you think an aggregator like Praise or a hymn book – which is another form of aggregation – is better than just bending with the wind as to what you happen to experience?

Jim Sayers (16:11) 

Yeah, I think it’s very good for every church to think hard about what it sings.

Graham Nicholls (16:16) 

Yes.

Jim Sayers (16:16) 

And to say, right, we’re going to build up a body of what we know. It’s very important. I’m often accused in our church – because quite a lot of people are new, I’m accused of throwing songs into Sunday that nobody knows and we struggle to sing. And I guess we all have Sundays like that where we have one too many that we don’t know. At the same time, you don’t want to do the same song four weeks running and kill it by overfamiliarity. So you’ve got to strike a balance. But I think it’s very important that the gatekeepers – that the worship leaders, the pastors, whoever’s leading worship – thinks very hard about building up what a church knows and learning stuff regularly so that we are growing what we know and that you have some categories for choosing. 

Jim Sayers (17:06) 

So, for example, is it theologically sound? Are the phrases that are used biblical? Now, let’s be honest, you can go back to the 19th century and look at the hymns that were written in the sort of Romantic Victorian era. And frankly, there’s just a whole load of poetic licence going on there. It’s got no biblical basis, you know, “Fair flowers of paradise extend their fragrance ever sweet.” I mean, where does that come from in Scripture? I know it’s heresy to criticise big Victorian favourites, but we need to think hard about – are we singing something that’s biblical or just because it’s got a lot of psychological heft to it and it punches us hard? You’ve got to work out, is this glorifying to God? Is this edifying? Part of the task of singing to one another is that the word of Christ dwells in us richly and we edify one another as we sing [Colossians 3:16]. 

Jim Sayers (18:09) 

You also want to think when you’re choosing for a Sunday service, how does this fit the theme of the service? If I’m preaching on Psalm 42 – here’s a thing that often happens in a church, you go to a church and someone’s preaching on one of the psalms, they never actually sing the psalm they’ve just preached or a version of it. So are you fitting the mood of the preaching or is the worship – the rest of the worship – saying one thing and the ministry, the preaching, saying something else? So you’ve got to make sure that the whole thing fits together.

Jim Sayers (18:49) 

I would also say, because of what you’ve talked about in terms of celebrity culture – the celebratization of songwriting – we have a limited number of very, very well-known songwriters, singer-songwriters and thanks to YouTube and Spotify and so on. Everybody’s listening to them. Nobody will discover the guy from Lancashire who’s sitting at his desk at home and writing a brilliant hymn, but nobody’s discovered it because he never leads worship at Keswick or he never leads worship at one of the big conferences in America. So we’ve got that issue. How do we find quality songs written by people nobody’s heard of? And that’s actually one of the reasons why Praise exists. We want to publish good Christian writing, especially from here in Britain, to give people a platform to be found. Because we think that we’ve looked at their song and we’ve given it thorough scrutiny in terms of the tune and in terms of the words, and we think this deserves a wider audience. So we’re trying to find the best.

Graham Nicholls (20:07) 

Just coming back to the choosing – you could have a song that was theologically accurate in every line, but there was no beauty to it in that it was just a series of propositions. I think even some contemporary songs that are theologically okay, just every now and then you feel like – this is not poetically very beautiful or coherent.

Jim Sayers (20:30) 

Yes, it’s not going to last the test of time, is it? Because you’ve got to have a foot in – you’ve got to have three feet on this tripod: one foot in Scripture, one foot in the culture that people are living in and their normal musical culture, and one foot in the requirements of music and metre and rhyme poetry. So, you know, there are some great Townend lines that I absolutely love: “From life’s first cry to final breath.” That’s a great phrase, isn’t it? You know, “Jesus commands my destiny.” And I’m sure that required a lot of redrafting and a lot of reworking before he landed on it. I might be wrong, but, you know!

Graham Nicholls (21:27) 

Well, yes, it’s better than ‘from the beginning of life to the end of life.’

Jim Sayers (21:30) 

Absolutely.

Graham Nicholls (21:31) 

Because it’s poetry.

Jim Sayers (21:33) 

It’s poetry, and we need to recognise that. And there are great, great lines from Charles Wesley, “Our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man” – wow, love to have written that. So, there are all those sorts of aspects of the process that have got to be considered. So, we do reject some things because they’re just poetically bland. We separate out the words and the music in our editorial process, because we want the musicians to say: can this be played by the average church musician? But we want to look hard at the words, and we have a list of nine tests, don’t ask me to recite all of them off the top of my head. Is it theologically sound? Is it biblical? Or is it contradicting something that’s said in Scripture?Does it move us? Or is it dull? And some things are just dull and some things are very twee – just archaic sayings that people still seem to write in 21st century hymns. So, you’ve got all of those considerations that are part of our editorial process. And I think that’s very important, because when people come to our website, they expect to find quality. If you like, we’ve been a filter to serve churches, and they can know that if we publish something, we believe that it is sound, it is strong enough to be published. They may not know it, because it’s new to them, but that’s why we want it published, and we want people to discover it.

Graham Nicholls (23:15) 

I had a question about the modern – not the modernisation in terms of music, but in terms of words, because obviously Praise took a view on that. You did a few things with ‘And Can It Be’?

Jim Sayers (23:28)

Yes.

Graham Nicholls (23:29) 

Some people like myself might not like, but I also I’m a hypocrite, or at least I’m inconsistent, because I virtually never sing ‘Be Thou My Vision’, I sing ‘Lord Be My Vision’.

Jim Sayers (23:39) 

Well, thank you very much. There you go. Yeah, I think we did a good job on some, and we didn’t do such a good job on others. And I think you just have to take each one on its merits. 

Graham Nicholls (23:48)

Well, indeed.

Jim Sayers (23:49) 

So I think the big four carols – ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, ‘Hark the Herald’, ‘O Little Town’ and ‘Once in Royal’ – it’s very hard to change those without upsetting everybody. And nobody says that you’ve got to use our version.

Graham Nicholls (24:08) 

No, indeed. 

Jim Sayers (24:09) 

You know, you can still go back to an old hymn book and find the old words. Nobody complains about that. We’re giving you the option of singing revised words. Now, it’s something – I mean, the case for it is simple, really: we expect our Bible to be intelligible to the people who read it. And you can have an argument about which Bible version, but our Bibles are in English. And a great deal of energy has been put in in our lifetimes into translating the Bible into contemporary English. More and more important as people from an unchurched background and many different nations come to to read the Bible. Therefore, it’s very important that people understand what they are singing and that they identify with that. I think that’s very important.

Graham Nicholls (24:53) 

The reason I’m a little bit hesitant about ‘Be Thou My Vision’, for example, is I feel like it’s been picked up in sort of contemporary circles. But it feels like there’s a slight disconnect that people are singing it more for its stylistic antique value rather than because we can really enter into the words. Because ‘Be Thou’ as a request is quite unusual language for my 10 year old grandchild to be singing. So they’re only ever going to kind of learn it as a word phrase – not really as something that’s a heart thing, if you know what I mean.

Jim Sayers (25:32) 

There was another issue with that hymn, which was that the original hymn didn’t fit the tune. 

Graham Nicholls (23:37)

No, indeed. 

Jim Sayers (25:38) 

And so our revised version went out of its way to make sure every line had the same number of syllables. And we knew where we were going. So we felt we helped it.

Graham Nicholls (25:49) 

Some people have chosen, at weddings I’ve conducted, ‘Be Thou My Vision’. And you always think this is going to go wrong because the lines don’t scan. Particularly people at a wedding are not going to know where to go.

Jim Sayers (26:02) 

Yeah, yeah. And we actually we had it at my son’s wedding, but they went and looked at the Praise version and added in some words that were missing and did a bit of a hybrid. Which is fine because, I don’t think we’ve copyrighted that.

Graham Nicholls (26:17) 

A question – you mentioned about where you’re choosing from, the criteria that you use, but also that the gatekeepers should be using and then the service leaders or preachers – whoever’s choosing in terms of fitting the scripture you’re preaching from, fitting the pattern of the service and so on. What do you think about the fact that people who are unchurched probably don’t have a view on whether it should be contemporary or traditional, strangely enough? And is traditional or contemporary more attractive to the outsider?

Jim Sayers (26:56) 

It’s a very difficult one to know that, isn’t it? Because the so-called quiet revival, whatever we make of it, is very interesting in that some people, some young men particularly, are looking for that which is traditional and authentic and, you know, that they might just as easily be drawn to Eastern Orthodox worship because it feels spiritual. I’m not sure that’s something that we should pay attention to. You know, the point is that when they have really arrived spiritually, when they are born again, when they are hungry for the word – then I think it’s understanding and clarity and mission that become important to them. And there’s no doubt that, if you are trying to reach working-class people in Britain, you’ve got to work hard at the language that you use in worship. And I think maybe traditional language is a bit of a middle-class affectation.

Jim Sayers (27:59) 

I think if we have a number of people in our church who are from a background of addiction, for whom singing in church is a challenge, they’ve got to learn to sing for the first time in their life. They only sing in the shower sort of thing. And they don’t want anybody else to hear them sing. They’re quite shy. So to put up an extra barrier that they’ve then got to learn all this other language – with Elizabethan suffixes and all the rest of it – is asking an enormous amount of such people. And I think that the really important thing is that when they get it, when they get the gospel, they really get it. And it goes deep into their soul. And they are quite matter-of-fact and down-to-earth. So I do think that for such people, contemporary English is very, very important.

Jim Sayers (28:50) 

Now, it does have to be said, we have this reputation for having revised all these hymns. We’ve got a catalogue of 1400 items. Less than 400 of them are revised hymns. Which surprises a lot of people.  And I do wonder how many of those are still being sung. So maybe we shouldn’t overblow it.

Graham Nicholls (29:11) 

I think the style as well as wording – this might be a terrible thing to say, but we’ve probably taken out a Radio 2 approach, which would be that we’re not trying to be leading edge. We’re not trying to get you to really notice, you know, the guitar solos or the fact that we’ve introduced rap or something. So we’re not trying to be that kind of innovative, but we’re also not trying to make you feel like you’re going back in time. So now that can be good. It can be a little bit bland because Radio 2 has the benefit that it appeals to a much wider age range, but it also can be a little bit bland. So there’s a danger in that. Does that make any sense to you? It’s not a very spiritual criteria!

Jim Sayers (29:58) 

Well, let’s try and express it differently. We want to be singing things that people of all age groups will identify with. We want to be singing a mix of genres. We want to be enriched by the great classics of the past. We want to sing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty’ and Psalm 23 – the traditional version – and so on. But we also want to be singing the newest things that are coming out of Boswell and Papa and co in America. And we want to be singing what Joyful Noise is singing and producing and publishing here in Britain and so on. So we want to be doing all those things. But I do think it’s important that churches have some sort of middle ground that everybody’s happy on.

Graham Nicholls (30:50)

Yes.

Jim Sayers (30:51)

Because if you’re all the time leaning in one direction, or all the time leaning in the other, you’ve got difficulties. And so you have to think about that every week. I write a Word document of what we sing every week. So I’ve got the whole year to look at and I can go back and see when we sang something before. I’m not particularly a spreadsheet person. And so I’m always looking back to see what we sang and to see how we got the mix right. And I don’t think we always get it right. And I think certain trends appear and certain things get forgotten that were great songs.

Graham Nicholls (31:27)

Yeah, we have the same issue. We have a big spreadsheet and realise you haven’t sung what was a new song you introduced that was good, that you then forgot.

Jim Sayers (31:37)

We sung one recently, ‘Two Sins Have We Committed’, because I was dealing with idolatry in Isaiah. And it’s a brilliant song for that setting. Or it might have been dealing with idolatry in 1 Corinthians and ideal for that setting. But we hadn’t sung it for a year and a half. And yet that’s a great, I would say, contemporary song. My daughter says it has six sins that we’ve committed because you repeat the same thing in all three verses! But I think it’s a great song and I love it. It really relates to people who are turning from a very broken background to come and find Christ for the first time.

Graham Nicholls (32:22)

I think the two sins – aren’t they turning away from God and turning to idols?

Jim Sayers (32:26)

They are, yes. By the time you reach verse three, it sounds like the fifth and sixth sins, you know!

Graham Nicholls (32:31)

I can see that. Good. Well, we’re almost out of time because we’ve tried to run these for about half an hour. So it’s nearly at the end, I promise. Any other general observations that you’re seeing – things that concern you or encourage you when you visit? I know you don’t visit other churches that much, but what you hear.

Jim Sayers (32:52)

Not as much as I did. So I think one of the things we’re very interested to see – the Gettys have just published the Sing! Hymnal. We’re interested to see what the take up for that is, because we’d reached the conclusion that the days of hymnals are over. And so we’re a bit surprised to see that, when it came out over here, it sold out. But is there a demand for that? It’s very much more American. Is there the need for something new here in Britain? That’s something we’re going to be testing the market to see what people say.

Jim Sayers (33:25)

We are always wanting to find new writers – both of music and words. And you don’t have to write the two together. You could be just a wordsmith who we find a tune for. But they need to be writers who are prepared to take criticism. So if you start to write, you know that you’re going to have to write 30 songs or hymns before you really are into form, as it were, and you’ve learned through the process. So we want to develop that because we really need to find the next generation of hymn- and songwriters here in Britain. And there are lots of young adults coming out of university with a classical music training. We’re finding some of those and we want to find more. So do get in touch if that’s you.

Jim Sayers (34:13)

I think we want to be focusing on congregational rather than performative singing, because I think that’s a danger. Our songs are getting longer and longer, aren’t they? And it’s almost like they’re an aircraft that’s stacking up over Windsor trying to come into Heathrow. It goes around and it goes around and it never quite comes into land. The other thing is, are we writing again in another narrow band where we have a lot of songs that focus on the love of Christ for us, shown in his death and his resurrection? But they’re all very Easterish songs.

Jim Sayers (34:51)

Who writes a song about Jesus feeding the 5,000? Who writes a song about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead? Who writes a song that is a lament in times of war? Because we certainly need that at the moment, don’t we? Who writes a song that is really an intercessory song like Graham Kendrick’s ‘O Lord, the clouds are gathering’? Are we writing songs like that now? And who writes a song about the church? I think that’s a very neglected theme. And what about some of the big salvation events like the Exodus? Chris Idle has written an excellent hymn, which we published, called ‘Let My People Go’, which I recommend to anyone who’s going to preach through Exodus. I think it’s got a great tune and it’s got some sensational words. But I guess most people have never discovered it.

Jim Sayers (35:41)

What about the exile? What about King David and that period? What about Elijah? Does anybody write a hymn that you might use if you preached on one of those passages? Or in Acts? Whoever based a hymn on Paul at the Aereopagus, for instance? But it’s a crucial passage.

Graham Nicholls (36:03)

Yeah – and while we’re on the subject, more about last things would be good.

Jim Sayers (36:09)

Yes, you raised that earlier.

Graham Nicholls (36:10)

But also about the Christian life – what you’re putting to death, what you’re putting on, what you’re off. Family life, work life. There are some hymns that thought about how you then reflect that out in family life or work life.

Jim Sayers (36:30)

Wesley wrote ‘Forth In Thy Name, O Lord, I go, My Daily Labour To Pursue’, which is a great hymn, but a real rarity in that category. I think there are some interesting hymns by Martin Lekebush that have covered some of these themes. He’s a very thoughtful writer and you’ll find a lot of his in our collection. But I also wonder, what’s the contemporary equivalent of Wesley’s – I think it’s Wesley – ‘O hidden source of calm repose’. Intimate, devotional hymns. Are we afraid of being that open and heartfelt in what we’re seeing. I just wonder whether there’s a missing emphasis there.

Graham Nicholls (37:14)

Whether they get revived, or whether they just need rewriting. But Isaac Watts was very good at making psalms christological. And there’s not that many. Chris Idle did that a bit.

Jim Sayers (37:31)

David Preston a bit. One or two of us. Some of the versions that I wrote – I wrote a version of Psalm 2 that was explicitly related to Christ’s resurrection and eternal generation and so on, so trying to make that christological. And setting it to Jerusalem because I was so fed up with singing William Blake. But there you go! The other thing is, I think we have to teach a new generation to sing. We are so used to listening because music is manufactured now. Who is actually used to live singing? And if you go to church and the band is really loud, can you hear yourself sing? That’s an issue. I think it was probably Mark Dever that started the trend. You go to a big conference, FIEC, for example, and Cornerstone will be leading worship and we get to sing the final verse and the musicians cut out and we all sing unaccompanied. And that is glorious to hear. We should do a bit more of that.

Graham Nicholls (38:41)

We did something which you probably can’t do in – well, you might be able to where you meet – but we meet in a school and we ended up turning from portrait to landscape–

Jim Sayers (38:51)

What, in the hall?

Graham Nicholls (38:54)

Yeah, which meant we’re basically sideways on, so it’s shorter distance, but also people are facing each other more in series of arcs rather than in rows or facing down on end. It’s massive a massive difference to the singing because, funnily enough, when people can hear each other singing more, they tend to sing back at each other. Whereas if they feel like they’re singing into a void – which, particularly if you’re not in a very acoustically friendly building, you tend to sing lower and lower because you hear yourself. If you can hear other people singing, you go up to their level.

Jim Sayers (39:26)

And also a bit of reverb helps. We are in a hall with an acoustic tile ceiling. And it was only when we went away for our church away day into this old Methodist hall that really that we – wow, the singing was amazing. The same number of people made three times the sound, so that’s important. And that encourages people to sing because the whole thing is louder and they can hide away in the sound of it, which I think is very important.

Graham Nicholls (39:57)

Brilliant! Well, really good to have you on. And a final reminder: praise.org.uk to find out more about the catalogue that you have there, which is always growing and being added to.

Jim Sayers (40:12)

This is going out in March, but if you happen to be discovering it in September, do look out for our Christmas praise collection. We published a separate book of Christmas music, 71 items, and that is actually a spiral-bound music book. And most of that collection is now available. We can’t get the rights to all of it, but most of it’s online. So yeah, come to us for Christmas resources when that comes around, as it will all too quickly.

Graham Nicholls (40:40)

Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks for being on.

Jim Sayers (40:43)

Thank you, Graham.