Newsongs For The Church 2019
Every year, for as long as I can remember, Spring Harvest has been responsible for an influx in new worship songs across UK churches. With the rise of a number of new festivals and the advent of music distributed through the internet this role has been somewhat diminished, but it is still something that Essential Christian and Spring Harvest take seriously. Every year there is still a songbook produced for Spring Harvest which contains all the worship songs used at Spring Harvest, and every year, before the festival, they produce a New Songs for the Church, which highlights some of the tracks that are new and will be featured at the festival. For those of us who never seem to make it to the event, this is a handy glimpse to see what the people at Spring Harvest believe will be gaining traction in churches this year! This album contains 11 tracks, and many of them you may have already heard. The first is "Praise Him Forever" co-written by Chris Tomlin, Jonathan Smith and Phil Wickham and was featured on Chris Tomlin's Holy Roar album. This is followed by Ben Fielding and Reuben Morgan's (Hillsong) "Who You Say I Am" and this track is about re-writing what we tell ourselves and instead we sing over ourselves our inheritance and acceptance that God spells out for us through His word. After the tour-de-force of the previous song, everything gets stripped back to open "Hallelujah (Lives In Me)" by Iron Bell Music. Then we are into our declaration that there is hope for the world. That "Hope Has A Name", His name is Jesus! This track is from River Valley Worship, although as with all these tracks they are recorded by other artists for this release. Next up is the UK's own Lou Fellingham's "Wonder of the Cross" which features on her latest album "Made For You (Live)". "Wonder of the Cross" and the next track "Breathe" both have the problem that there are a load of songs with the same, or similar, titles. The "Breathe" that is featured on there is from Influence Music from their 2018 album "Touching Heaven". "Love All Along" brings Sam Bailey's co-write with Matt Redman from HTB Worship. This is a new song which was released as a single at the end of 2018 and it's very much about the constant love of God for all His creation at all moments culminating in the Love shown on the cross and the restoration and redemption available for us. It's always good to see a name that is familiar to you, but that may not be known in wider circles, and this is the case with "Companion" which is co-written by Scotland's Allan McKinlay. This is a song that reminds us that we have a constant companion and roughly follows the themes of Psalm 23. "See Jesus Stripped Of Majesty (Amazing Love)" is a track from hymn-writers and Keswick Convention regulars Colin Webster and Phil Moore (along with Tim Chester). The album rounds out with Beck Frith's "You Are Worthy" which is a glorious track and then another track from River Valley Church in "Calvery's Shadow" which is a fabulous new song to help lead us into and through communion. As normal all these tracks are presented by talented singers and worship leaders including Cathy Burton, Sarah Bird, Quinton Delport, Nathan Jess and Neil Wilson. They receive solid backing throughout from the musicians who regularly record sessions for Essential Christian like Dan Wheeler, Matt Weeks and Paul Evans. I haven't gone into much depth about each track on here or the content, but there is a good selection of tracks. I think that they have done a good job of selecting music from different sources and not just the expected places and this means that there is a lot of difference in styles and gives a good flavour of the established church worship scene at the moment. 7.3/10
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