Louder Than The Music

Our final Artist Of The Month in 2010 is the wonderful Rend Collective Experiment and we are honored to bring you an LTTM guest blog from band member Chris. Read about his thoughts and views on the band's year.

What an unbelievable year it has been for our wee family (spiritually speaking!) band from Northern Ireland! This time last year we were nervously anticipating the release of our debut album, "The Organic Family Hymnal", completely unsure of how people would respond to our odd brand of alternative worship (we sometimes jokingly refer to our genre as electronic,ambient,acoustic,folk,pop rock!). Fortunately the response was overwhelmingly positive, with Louder Than The Music giving us a particularly sympathetic review as I recall, and this year has been a surreal and wonderful journey for us! We met our heroes like Martin Smith, Tim Hughes and David Crowder, played great gigs and got invited on a major North American tour with Chris Tomlin.

But much more than that, this year has been a steep learning curve for us, as we have navigated some of the pitfalls, with varying degrees of success, of the Christian music industry and tried to hone and refine our art and ministry within that context. What I guess I would like to do in this blog is share with you some of the things I/we believe are important. Before I get to that I offer up this disclaimer- I am not a qualified theologian or even a particularly wise and Godly lay person! The 'experiment' in our band name refers to the fact that we don't have all the answers and are still working things out, so I offer these words in that spirit of experimentation.The key elements of Rend are all contained in the album title so I'll take it a word at a time:

Organic
We think that the only songs worth writing are born out of authentic,natural connection with God. Songs should be grown in the soil of relationship with God, without the influence of nasty pesticides like the pressures of the industry and finance and even our own egos. One of the things we have struggled with is the shift in dynamic since we signed to a record label and became "professional". We used to know that our motives were pure in songwriting because there was no incentive to write anything inauthentic, whereas now we know that we have to write songs to make a living. We are constantly checking now to see if our songs truly meet the 'organic standard'. My dream in this life is to be authentic and live what I sing.

Family
We want to operate much more like a family than a corporate, industry band. In God's eyes, the quality of our relationships is way more important than the quality of our music and we want to keep that at the front of our minds. We share life together-eating meals, helping each other out financially, sharing our homes, talking each other through girl trouble(!) etc. - and that is what is really important. Music is in the background and loving community is at centre stage.

Our band set up(collective ethos), allows our family to be a large one! We love to invite friends to get involved in our music and that is why sometimes we have up to 15 people on stage with us-we want as many people as possible to be a part of the collective.

Worship bands would do well to look to the model of the God-centred family rather than the celebrity singer/songwriter model for inspiration. We don't believe in celebrity culture, which is why we have multiple lead singers and our front man is our drummer!

Hymnal
Our music is intentionally designed with the local congregation in mind. We want to serve the local church in what we do, rather than simply write self indulgent artsy-fartsy songs. Our songs are meant for inclusion in the 21st century church hymnal. The key qualification for a worship leader is to be a person in love with the church, who really wants to sacrificially serve her. I think it's easy as a worship leader to be quite self-serving in approach- viewing the church as guinea pigs for your latest project or worse, as a target market. We want to put the needs of the bride of Christ first in our ministry, writing the songs she needs, rather than the ones that scratch our particular creative itch!

So there you have it, a little glimpse into the heart of our little worship project. I hope you have extracted something of use from these roughly crafted sentences! Thanks again to LTTM for allowing me to blog on their site-you guys are brave!

Love and Peace

Chris (RCE)