Sir Lew Grade, a major British film producer, said in a newspaper interview, “I have the blessing of average taste. If I like it, the common man will like it.” And the common man did, all over the world, as box office sales of his films attested.

Remember, when you’re writing congregational choruses, you’re writing for the common man—songs to be sung together by average people, very few of whom have musical sophistication or training.

You, on the other hand, as a serious musician/songwriter, have certain cultivated musical tastes, and it may be difficult for you to lay some of them aside to create songs simple enough for untrained people to sing.

Look at CCLI’s list of the most used worship choruses and you’ll see that most of these successful “people songs” are very simple in harmony.

Although we’ve discussed modern harmony in earlier posts, we must point out that a worship chorus with complex harmony will probably not get established, for one reason, because worship publishers aren’t interested in publishing songs with many altered and extended chords the average young church worship band can’t play.

You may have a new diploma from the Modern Jazz Institute and a complete command of modern harmony and improvisation. Good! Enjoy it! It will help you to know how to create beautiful and moving but simple colors— unexpected chord changes, pretty inversions, color tones in the melody, alternate bass tones, and colorful tones and lines in the accompaniment —while saving the more complex harmony for other occasions. Harmony doesn’t have to be complex to be beautiful.

A worship chorus must be learnable quickly and easily, or the worship service becomes an exercise not of worship but of learning. If we are asked to try and remember a lot of complicated and unpredictable changes of direction, our minds are working hard on the exercise, but our spirits are not freed up to soar into heavenly places.

So a worship chorus must be not only original and inspiring, but simple, repetitive and predictable.
When we hear the first two lines, we can predict almost with certainty where the next line of melody will go, and the next.

A bridge or chorus may start us in a new direction, but we can feel almost immediately where it’s going because one line leads us logically to the next.
By the second time through, our spirits begin to soar.

We call this sequential writing, and it is simply the most successful way of writing for choruses.

A good worship chorus is like a greeting card to the Lord from all of us. It speaks not just to us, but for us, providing a way for us to express ourselves to the Lord together.

So a worship chorus, more than almost any other type of song, needs to express a universal sentiment, something we can all agree upon as our own expression of love to Him.

Here’s a technique you might want to try in your praise chorus writing: it’s called lining. It’s very effective in situations where the congregation doesn’t have access to the words and music. It has been used in many cultures, from ancient times to today, in Bible times, in the early American colonies where they had no hymn books, in tribal cultures with no written language. It’s still used some in black gospel music but very little outside of that idiom.

The leader sings a line at a time and the singers sing it after him or her. Sounds boring? Wait till you hear it done with a good solid groove. It can be as exciting as “We Will, We Will Rock You!”

If you haven’t heard it done in church, think of that chant the Marines use in their marching drills, where the drill instructor shout-sings “I don’t know but I’ve been told . . .” and the troops sing each line after him.

Jamie Owens-Collins used a similar device, called Call and Response, in the verses of “The Battle Belongs to the Lord.” But it isn’t a new device; it’s at least 3,000 years old. You’ll find it in Psalm 136, in which the leader sings different words to each line but is answered each time by the congregation with the same words, “His love endures forever.”

Try it. You’ll like it.

Written by : Jimmy & Carol Owens

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