Music and Worship Resources

This page contains details of organisations, publications and recordings which we have found helpful at Burlington. Visitors might find them interesting and perhaps useful too.

Who we're working with

We've found the following people and groups very helpful in developing our music ministry through personal contact and more formal training and have worked closely with quite a few of them.

Music and Worship Foundation - provides a high standard of training and practical support for Christian musicians across denominations and music styles throughout the UK and beyond. Our Music Director is East Anglian co-ordinator for their Regional Training programme.

Charlie Groves came to Burlington in April 2008 as part of an mwf training day and we really enjoyed him sharing with us for a day.

Andrew Maries (Keynote Trust) - came to Burlington on Advent Sunday 2005 to lead our morning worship and run a creative worship seminar in the afternoon which we thoroughly enjoyed.

Geraldine Latty - a superb worship leader who has led our worship a few times, and most recently joined us for our 2004 church weekend. Check out some of her albums here.

Richard Hubbard (Cantus Firmus Trust) - Richard has worked with our orchestra on a number of occasions, provided lots of useful input and several large and exciting pieces of percussion as well. 

London School of Theology - Home to the Theology, Music and Worship degree course and a range of excellent evening and day courses and summer schools - in conjunction with the music and worship foundation.

London Music Ministry Conference - Tim and Andrew attended their recent conference in London and in general it was an excellent day. There are some useful links to other resources such as those from Emu music and the Sovereign Grace website on their website.

Music resources we're finding helpful

Hymn and Song Books

Our main sources for new songs are the Soul Survivor and Spring Harvest songbooks and the very useful Kingwaysongs.com website.

We've found Resound Worship have some excellent new songs from people like Matt Osgood, Joel Payne and Sam Hargreaves. All the songs are free to download and use (as long as you have the CCLI licence) and there are MP3 demos to give you an idea of how they go: "Strong, biblical lyrics supported by singable, engaging music in contemporary styles."

We have also tried a few songs recently from Bob Kauflin and Sovereign Grace Music. Particularly from the albums Come Weary Saints (O the deep deep love), Valley of Vision and their Christmas CD Saviour (Salvation is Born).

 In addition we've found the following books useful, although they are few years old now.

Sing Glory (1999) - A major book of hymns, songs and psalms, edited by the Jubilate group.  Although it's ten years old now, it's still a great resource for songs and hymns with biblical material arranged in sections which makes it so much easier to choose hymns around a particular theme. The book reflects a refreshing balance of content with lots of useful indexes.

Carol Praise (2006) - A selection of nearly 250 Christmas carols, hymns and songs both old and new, with a Words CD-ROM included. Traditional and contemporary music arrangements. The CD-ROM includes some orchestrations from the amazing All Souls' Orchestra

Songs for the King (2004) - is an excellent songbook of 130 songs. It was put together by a team from Jubilate and the Keswick Convention and is published by Spring Harvest.  Here are songs that celebrate the richness of biblical truth, express our response to that truth and embrace the challenge of biblical living in today's world. You can buy it here.

Music Resources Websites

Worship Matters - Bob Kauflin's Blog is a truly excellent resource. Well worth consulting regularly or subscribing to via RSS or email.

Worship Central - a range of great Saturday workshops in London from Tim Hughes and others with a very useful Podcast

Kingswaysongs.com - Currently over 1200 songs and growing with powerful search facilities (including search all lyrics), free audio sound samples, free complete song words for each song, sheet music and MP3's (for a fee).

Getty Music - Keith Getty is an Irish composer and arranger whose hymns and songs (often written with Stuart Townend) are very well known - In Christ Alone is probably the most famous example. This website has links to all his albums - many of which feature his fantastic orchestral arrangements. You can also purchase sheet music for the songs and the arrangements themselves should you have access to a tame Symphony Orchestra.

Jubilate Group - a useful website which contains search facilities for more than 1500 hymn and song texts and more than 800 tunes, descants and arrangements - all from Jubilate authors such as Michael Perry, Michael Saward, David Peacock, Noel Tredinnick and tens of others. For a small fee you can download words and music in Sibelius format.

If you want a website which is full of resources that exalt Jesus Christ and just inspire you to worship Him in both song, and in the way you live your life you could not spossibly do better than the Desiring God website.  There are many good talks on Worship on the site.  You can find quite a few of them here.  Sample a few at random, or try Ambushing Satan with Song, or Gravity and Gladness on a Sunday morning.  

What we're listening to

Recent albums we've been listening to include anything from Soul Survivor or Phatfish - as well as Stuart Townend, Keith Getty and Geraldine Latty. Also more recently some albums from Sovereign Grace Music which we referred to above.

Some of use enjoyed a concert last year at the Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich from the London Community Gospel Choir. Andrew is trying to work out a way of transforming the worship group to sound more like them... It's work in progress.

Bach Cantata Pilgrimage recordings - probably only Andrew is listening to this! A fantastic set of recordings of Bach Cantatas, recorded live in 2000, as part of a year long series of concerts, when the Monteverdi Choir toured Europe, UK and US singing all 200+ Bach Cantatas at the time of year for which they were written. If you think worship music started with Keith Getty, Stuart Townend and Tim Hughes, (or even Charles Wesley) - listen to these and think again. You could also try the Bach Cantata series from Japanese Christian and Bach specialist, Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan - beautiful and uplifting.

What we're reading

The book How would Jesus lead worship by Sam and Sara Hargreaves is well work a read and you can order it here.

Worship Matters (note the intentional pun) is a great book (and website) from Bob Kauflin who talks a huge amount of sense about music, words and the heart of a musician and worship leader. Bob was a speaker last year at the John Piper Desiring God conference: The Power of Words and the Wonder of God where he spoke eloquently on what happens when we sing.  Well worth viewing/listening to.