This week Kristen and I are in Austin, Texas for the first Austin Stone Worship Conference. I’m speaking on collaborative culture and on mixing hymns and contemporary praise songs together in worship services.
We hope to see some of you at this conference, but we didn’t want the week to go by without sharing an update with the rest of you. As Kristen wrote a few weeks ago, we’ve begun the process toward a new, full-length Kristen Gilles worship record. This record includes ten original songs written by Kristen and me. Jonatan Barahona wrote a couple of these with us as well. And like Kristen mentioned in our first album update, Jonatan is the arranger and band leader for this record.
The photo above comes from Alumni Chapel at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where we recently recorded piano-and-vocal demos. Jonatan has shared these demos with our recording band, who will begin practicing together this week. We’ll enter the studio the first week of November, aiming for CD release in Spring 2014.
We thank you for your prayers throughout the recording process. God gave us these songs following the birth of our son Parker, who was stillborn just over one year ago, October 21, 2012. We believe these songs will comfort and challenge God’s people, and help us all to praise God through all seasons of life. We also hope these songs will remind us that God is neither silent nor callous or powerless when His people are hurting. He is an ever-present help in time of trouble, and He will keep His promise to raise us up and make all things new.
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Good luck with your presentations, Bobby. Mixing hymns and contemporary songs in worship is a challenge we are dealing with often at my church. I would love to hear what you have to say on the subject – but since I won’t be making it down to Austin is there any way you can share your presentation post conference? Downloadable PDF? PPT? MP3?
I second Bruce’s request for posting your presentation! I’m always looking for more resources on incorporating a variety of hymns/praise songs in our worship services, and would love to see a much more collaborative culture among Christian artists in general, but especially in our own community. Any chance this will be available?
Looking forward to the new album as well!
Thanks John and Bruce!
Unfortunately I don’t have any presentation materials for the hymns/praise songs talk. That one was a lunch time Q&A/moderated discussion at a restaurant. It wasn’t recorded, and I didn’t come into it with any prepared notes.