How to write Christian songs

At Sorted last year, Andrew Cowan from St Helen's, Bishopsgate, gave some great hints on how to write Christian songs. So helpful, in fact, we thought we’d share them on our blog! Andrew writes …

Colossians 3:16-17 tells us that our singing is meant to help the word of Christ dwell in us richly as we sing to each other as well as to God … so how do we write songs to help us do that? Here are four big principles and a few random bonus tips that I am finding helpful at the moment. Songs need to be:

• Biblical: always start with the Bible. Our songs need to teach biblical truth accurately, so that we are actually singing the word of Christ.
• Understandable: the words we sing need to be clear and memorable: not using jargon, confusing language or too many metaphors… but at the same time poetic enough to be interesting and fresh (easy, yeah?). If not the word of Christ will be lost because we won’t understand or remember it!
• Singable: the tune needs to be singable by the average congregation member. This might mean avoiding overly complicated syncopation and keeping the melody somewhere between the A below middle C and the D an octave above.
• Lyrical: the words and tune need to be appropriate for each other... (eg. triumphant words need a triumphant tune), and it should be catchy enough to help us remember the words!

Here are a few more tips in no particular order:

• Don’t try and write the next Christian number one hit. You probably won’t, and anyway you will just be serving yourself. Remember your goal is to serve the church by helping us sing praise to God and encourage one another.
• If you’re struggling for words, try and use what you’ve heard in church recently. Did the sermon have 3 points? See if they can be your 3 verses and write a chorus that sums up the big idea. OR… find an old hymn that no one sings because the tune is awful and come up with a new melody!
• Keep the focus in the words away from us and more about God. Let’s sing more about how awesome God is (because he is) and less about how we feel (because that isn’t the most important thing).
• Don’t try to cram too many ideas into one song. Why not pick one idea, like Jesus as King, or God as Trinity and write about that? A song that expresses one big idea clearly is much more useful to the church than a song that cobbles together lots of ideas badly!
• Let your pastor, youth worker, or Christian friends look at it and give you feedback (and learn how to take constructive criticism well!)
• Hard work pays off. Just give it a go and don’t be afraid to fail.

So let’s get writing, and don’t forget to pray… we need God’s help both to understand his word and express it clearly!