How an Australian Church Is Changing Christian Songwriting

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Sarah Zylstra
Let me tell you what church was like when I was a kid. In the olden days, about three or four decades ago, I grew up attending a small Christian Reformed Church in the cornfields of Iowa. Our worship was formal. I wore a dress and sat with my family on a hard, wooden pew. When it was time to sing, we opened up our hymnals to songs like, How great thou art a mighty fortress. Is our God or come thou? Fount of every blessing? Nearly every song had a thee or a thou in it, and they were, on average, about 150 years old. Today, my church doesn’t have a piano, much less an organ. The worship team uses a keyboard, guitars and drums to accompany our singing. We don’t have song books either. The lyrics pop up onto the wall. We still sing hymns, but the average age of our worship songs is about seven years old. I know I’m not the only one to experience this shift. Surveys tell us that in the 20 years from 1998 to 2018 more congregations have set up projectors, hauled in drum sets and begun to raise their hands in worship. The study authors speculate that one reason might be the growing informality of our culture. After all, we don’t address our neighbors or even our bosses as Mr. Or Mrs. Anymore. We don’t often wear suits or dresses to work or even to church. Moving from hymnals to screens, then might say less about our theology and more about our larger culture. That’s interesting. But here’s what’s even more fascinating, the songwriting process itself has changed. It’s a lot faster both the pace at which songs are written and the pace at which they’re released and grab attention. The language is more casual, and sometimes the theology is not as careful as it could or should be. At least one church noticed these problems and tried a different songwriting process. It was slow and clunky and never should have worked, and yet it did. I can’t wait to share their story and what they’ve learned with you. I’m Sarah Zylstra, and you’re listening to Recorded.

Sarah Zylstra
Video light is relatively new to the Christian music scene. They first hit Spotify with the song Jerusalem in 2015 and grabbed attention with yet not I, but through Christ and me in 2018 with a boost from internet searches and at home worship during the pandemic, city alight has grown to more than 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify in September of 2023 more than 6000 people worshiped with city alight at the gospel coalition’s national conference. I was one of them, and I was thrilled because some of my favorite worship songs are city alights, yet not I this is the day and saved my soul. I was also excited because I knew City of Light was popular, and I loved that they made time for TGC in their busy touring and songwriting schedule on the second day of the conference, I said, as much to Anne westrate, who is our events director. She confirmed that city alight was hard to schedule, but not because they had to fit us in around other performances. They had to ask for time off of work because they had day jobs. They’re just teachers and graphic designers and stuff like that. So they just all go to the same church and play in the worship team. It took me a minute to catch on, the people who wrote and sang only a holy God weren’t professional musicians. The group that has more than a million monthly listeners on Spotify isn’t a real band?

Tiarne Tranter
But we still only have one person on staff who looks after city a lot, and then everyone else still has a day job. Everyone else is a volunteer. So we still struggle to find time to rehearse, because everyone’s life’s so busy, and we’re actually not paid to do this. And so other than the intensity of it, the mission hasn’t changed. The day to day hasn’t changed. We still here. We still meet in the church building. We’re still serving in our Bible studies. We’re still, you know, serving on team on Sunday. Yeah, I think people would be surprised, I think, by the amateur nature of what we’re doing over here. If you could see the day to day stuff, I think that people would be shocked.

Sarah Zylstra
That’s Tiarne Tranter, one of CityAlight’s singers, but most of the time, she’s a high school PE teacher and a mom. You. She plans lessons, does laundry and goes to Bible study. She just happens to be part of a church that takes worship songs really seriously, and that is doing things really differently.

Sarah Zylstra
City. A light story begins nearly 200 years ago, when a church was planted in Castle Hill, Australia, her first building was more ominous than a theater or a school gym. It was originally built as barracks for convicted criminals shipped over from England, and then it spent 15 years as a lunatic asylum before becoming the home for st Simon’s Anglican Church. About 30 years later, st Simons was closed, and its members were directed two miles down the road to the brand new St Paul’s Anglican Church. From the beginning, the congregation loved music.

Tiarne Tranter
They began with a choir, and that choir has been singing together since the beginning, maybe three or four years ago, I remember we had an event where we were celebrating the history of St Paul’s, and they showed a video of the original building. And even in those pictures, you could see the choir singing, and people were leading music. It was just really cool.

Sarah Zylstra
The people of St Paul’s path that love down to their children and their children’s children over time.

Tiarne Tranter
You see it just becomes part of our culture, which is naturally growing young people who see others serving and they just want to do the same. And I think we reaping the fruits of that now, of years and years and years of investment from leadership and from the older people in our church.

Sarah Zylstra
St Paul’s was also influenced by the church down the street, less than five miles away, Brian and Bobby Houston planted Hillsong Church in 1983 Brian encouraged his worship team to write their own music, and 10 years later, Hillsong worship director wrote Shout to the Lord. The song was an instant success, sung over and over at churches youth groups and Christian camps around the globe.

Sarah Zylstra
Hillsong played an outsized role in the rapid growth of the Christian music industry between 1993 and 1997 market share for sales of Christian albums in the United States more than doubled, making it the fastest growing segment of the market. A few other Australian musicians also helped boost Christian music in that era. Anybody remember the first album from the newsboys or Rebecca St James?

Rich Thompson
So I think that kind of created this music culture. And it’s like, hey, let’s rethink the way we sing congregationally and worship. Let’s rethink it. And I think that’s in the water a little bit here.

Sarah Zylstra
That’s Rich Thompson, he loved music so much that he joined yet another Australian band, this one called revive, and spent four years opening for third day. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. We’ll come back to rich later. Back at St Paul’s in the 1990s the worship team was also starting to write and sing its own music. Heath Baker remembers coming on board as a pastoral intern in 1998

Tiarne Tranter
Yeah, they just released an album, the first album, way back when had a big horn section on it was a real mixture of all sorts of songs.

Rich Vessallo
They went fairly well in Sydney, a lot of churches picked up the songs

Sarah Zylstra
That’s Rich Vessallo, an audio engineer who began attending Saint Paul’s around that time, and then in the mid 2000s they did the studio recording, which didn’t do very well for a number of reasons. But in 2011 I was asked to oversee another recording project, but this one was going to take a different shape.

Sarah Zylstra
This time, St Paul’s didn’t rent a studio. Instead, they recorded live, and they asked their congregation to join them.

Rich Vessallo
It was very ad hoc, and the church didn’t have budget to do it, and so we didn’t, so we had to work out how to fund it, and you know, we were running on a shoestring budget. We pulled equipment from everybody’s houses and tried to make it work. It did work. The end outcome was fine. It’s nothing like we do today, but it was a really important project for us because we learned a lot from it. It informed a lot of what we all the work we’ve done with the team culture, preparing for a project, and also just helping us really be very clear on what our end goal is.

Sarah Zylstra
What was the end goal? The church leaders were clear. It wasn’t to sell albums, to go on tour or even to create musical masterpieces. The whole point was to provide new songs to sing at church which are biblical. Sound contemporary and singable, he has brought us

Sarah Zylstra
St Paul’s music director felt so strongly about songwriting that he asked the church to pay somebody to lead it part time. He suggested rich Thompson, who is now back in Australia after 10 years in America with the band revive St Paul’s asked if he’d be willing to write songs for them two days a week. Rich, who was working full time and raising a family, said he could give them one. Meanwhile, St Paul’s had begun offering music lessons for children in the community. They asked member Johnny Robinson to run the program. Johnny was bright, so bright that he was studying for his PhD in philosophy, but he was not gifted at administration. Gamely, he bumbled his way through the logistics of the lessons.

Jonny Robinson
One night, as I was just waiting for some of the other lessons to finish, I was playing around on the piano. I wrote a song. It was a Christian song. It was a charity song. Someone heard it. Someone said to me, Hey, can you play that song that you wrote praise the Savior on Sunday?

Jonny Robinson
The accountant at church said to me while I was in the office one day, hey, you wrote that song. The other day, I didn’t really know that you wrote that kind of music. I think because I was so bad at running the music school, it was all administration, and I had no idea what I was doing. So I think he was shocked that I did something that wasn’t terrible.

Sarah Zylstra
The church accountant was so impressed that he offered Johnny the other song writing day, the one that rich couldn’t do. Rich and Johnny met for the first time when sitting down with the music director.

Jonny Robinson
The music minister said, Listen, I gotta go to another meeting. Do you guys want to keep hanging out? You can, that’s fine. So Rich said, you want to keep hanging out? And I said, yeah, there’s a piano in one of the other rooms if you want to go and chill and hang out and talk. So we sat down, and I talked to him about this idea for a song I’d written a melody for it, kind of A Vogue melody, and we wrote Jerusalem together. [Song plays]

Sarah Zylstra
The song was beautiful, but not everyone at St Paul’s was convinced.

Jonny Robinson
There were people in the church that weren’t convinced it was a good use of money. They thought maybe we shouldn’t be paid for it, and maybe we shouldn’t be doing it.

Sarah Zylstra
It’s easy to sympathize with them. After all, aren’t there hungry people who need to be fed homeless people, who need to be cared for, widows and orphans to be looked after? Is this really the best use of the resources God has given?

Sarah Zylstra
Here’s what the church leadership argued, we have a unique gift a congregation full of people who love and excel at music, using these gifts to produce original songs is a ministry, a way to serve our own congregation, and something we can give to other congregations around us. What St Paul’s didn’t realize is that they were also. Paying for something else rich and Johnny knew the industry standards and loved to ask why things were the way they were together, they would develop a musical philosophy that would spark a counter cultural approach to songwriting. But to understand what they did, you first have to understand how things are when contemporary Christian music took over the radio and CD market in the 1990s it also affected church worship. Between 1998 and 2012 studies show that congregations began dropping choirs, bulletins and organs. Instead, they installed projection equipment and set up guitar amplifiers. The song lyrics change too, reported the authors of the rigorous multi year national congregation study in their words, the lyrics moved away from an emphasis on belief and doctrine and toward an emphasis on experience emotion and the search for a least common denominator kind of worship. Not everybody liked this change, and feelings ran so high for so long in so many churches that the arguments began to be labeled the worship wars. In the end, many churches handled the conflict by offering two services, one traditional and one contemporary. Over the years, the ferocity of that battle has faded. Lots of churches now sing both hymns and worship songs on Sunday mornings. In fact, many services are now likely to play songs you might hear on a Christian radio or a Spotify playlist.

Rich Thompson
So you’ve got Christian music that goes on radio, and then you’ve got Christian music that goes into churches. And in my mind, they’re actually two different categories. Back in the 2000s they were quite distinct those, in fact, if you looking at the charts of both of those, they were really distinct in terms of the most played or most sung songs. But today, you’ve kind of got, you’ve actually got a lot of worship songs being played on radio and a lot of, I guess, radio songs being sung in churches. Why the change? It’s hard to know exactly why this is happening, but I guess one of the reasons, if you if you talk to some of the people in the industry, is because there’s something that happens on a Sunday when when people sing a song in church, and they become familiar with a song. And so for radio stations, I think they’ve realized that actually, to be able to play those songs during the week as well. That’s something that that their listeners are going to enjoy because of what they’ve experienced at church. And so now you have this kind of like, I guess, shift where the worship songs are being produced in a way that are kind of radio friendly. It didn’t used to be like that. They’re being produced like radio songs.

Sarah Zylstra
Now that makes sense. If we sing a song we like at church, it’s nice to hear it on the radio or on a music streaming platform. And if we hear a song we like on the radio, it’s nice to get to sing it at church, in theory, then all is well. But of course, real life is rarely as neat or clean as theory. Here’s one problem, when we only play worship music on the radio, we’re cutting out a lot of other songs that don’t fit into that box. In the 90s, most churches didn’t sing Michael W Smith’s Go West Young man, DC talks Jesus freak or Stephen Curtis Chapman’s great adventure. But those songs were formative for a lot of Christians.

Sarah Zylstra
Those songs, maybe we’ll call them non corporate or private worship songs can be a little more artistic. They can take some risks with both the music and the lyrics. They can be a little more emotionally raw, more personal. They serve a different purpose. When we only play worship music on the radio, we’re missing out on those kinds of songs. On the flip side of that, when we only sing radio music in church, we’re cutting out a lot of options for congregational singing. Church History is full of beautiful songs, from blessed assurance to Great is thy faithfulness. Most of them don’t get played on the radio. Further constricting our choices is, ironically, our global connectivity. Before church music directors would look through a hymnal or a song book and choose songs that best fit their context. One study author said, now it seems like worship leaders draw from the relatively small number of hits made popular online at mega churches or at conferences. If you want your worship song to join that list of hits, it helps to write lyrics that aren’t too theologically. Limiting or demanding. Here’s an example. A few years ago, the mainline Presbyterian Church USA wanted to change a line in Keith Getty and Stuart townans in Christ alone, they objected to the line, and on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied, and wanted to change it to a gentler the love of God was magnified. Getty in town and refused to allow the change. Arguing that the wrath of God was satisfied is critical to the Gospel story. The mainline Presbyterians, in response, voted to drop in Christ alone from their hymnal, in Christ alone until come flesh. Another way you can help your song become a hit is to work for a really large church. A recent study found that 36 of the 38 most popular worship songs, between 2010 and 2020 were introduced by just four sources, Hillsong Bethel, elevation in North Carolina, and passion City Church in Atlanta.

Sarah Zylstra
Those are all mega churches. But that’s not all they have in common. All four are theologically charismatic, predominantly white and Western, and for better or worse, they are shaping worship for nearly everyone else, even though most churches across the globe don’t share their theology, size, location or demographics, but none of those things are Rich’s biggest objection to modern songwriting,

Rich Thompson
yeah, I think the time that it takes to write a song is something that we think about and talk about quite a lot here at City of Light, we talk a lot about why we’re writing. What is our motive here? What are we trying to do? And obviously our primary motive is to give glory to God, and we want to do that by equipping the church with songs that are biblically rich and that are accessible. And what we mean by that is they’re easy to sing and easy to play as well. You know, often you see this when art becomes commercialized, when you know you put an industry around something, there’s a danger of the process or the administration actually trumping the art itself. You know, as you start selling more, all of a sudden, there’s demand, and then all of a sudden you need to start meeting the demand. We’ve seen that happen time and again, and we’ve sort of tried to, at our very core, guard against that from taking place, we want to make sure that the songs are written for the express purpose of equipping the church, not for meeting a quota or for meeting a deadline or for meeting a bottom line that’s right at our heart. So if our songs aren’t finished in time, we simply don’t record in that season, and that’s happened many times before. It can be a little concerning that the writers in bigger organizations don’t share that same luxury.

Sarah Zylstra
It’s not that songwriters aren’t Christians or don’t have good things to say. It’s that the pressure to go fast makes worship songs look more like hotel paintings than like Da Vinci’s.

Rich Thompson
It’s really common that sign songwriters have annual quotas that they have to meet. This is, of course, just part of the industry that they’re given in advance, which is like an investment from the organization that they’re writing for, and the organization needs to make their money back on them. This is really common across all genres. You can see, though, when it comes to writing songs for the church, how that industry standard might cloud some of the other realities that are involved with this. We see it as something that we really need to be on the front foot of protecting. We see it a lot like sermon writing actually, you know, you need to slow down. You need to do your research. You need to read Scripture and commentaries. You need to have time in prayer. You need to be chatting with other people if we allow ourselves to form to the trap of needing to write quickly. You know, if it’s to meet a quota or to pay back in advance or something, then the temptation is there to shortcut what we are the process of trying to produce these songs.

Rich Thompson
So if equipping the church is our primary motivation, if they’re going to be sung in church, then crafting the theology into these songs needs to be done with the utmost care. And in our opinion, that has to take time that can’t be done quickly. You’re talking about the Bride of Christ. It’s both an. Incredible opportunity for building up and beautifying the bride, but it’s also very dangerous. There’s a lot of danger in potentially misleading or teaching potentially slightly wrong things through your songs, and the ramification of that over a long period of time is very significant.

Sarah Zylstra
That’s because songs lend themselves to memorization. You almost can’t help but memorize music and lyrics that you hear over and over again.

Rich Thompson
The impact of those old hymns in our generation has been incredibly profound in that when you take a song like in Christ alone, it’s this kind of robust creed or song, and you know, you carry it with you, no guilt in life, no fear in death. I mean, how many times do we just recall those words that we’ve sung as a reminder for us? That means those songs have to be so deeply, deeply rooted in Scripture if you’re going to be recalling them like that, and if they’re even a little bit off when you recall them and continue to recall them, as you said, the potential to lead people astray or confuse people, or, you know, the stakes, the stakes are very high.

Sarah Zylstra
Johnny compares it to sermons. Words written for the church to hear are important, and pastors take time and care to get them right, but not many people are going to listen to a sermon over and over again until they have it memorized. Therefore, if it takes the pastor a few weeks to write a sermon, rich and Johnny figured it should take them at least a few months, sometimes closer to a year, to write a song. But a song isn’t nearly as many words as a sermon. So what do they do with all that time? The first step is to decide on a topic. Rich keeps a list of them on his phone, ideas that occur to him as he goes about. Is weak. Johnny keeps his ideas in notebooks. Lots of times, their songs have grown out of a sermon series at their church, yet not I came from a series on Philippians Ancient of Days, from one on Daniel the next step is not to write.

Jonny Robinson
If you’re going to write a song about the resurrection, it’s not good enough just to rattle off the first three thoughts that you have about the resurrection, or the latest thing that you’ve heard about the resurrection, you don’t know enough about it. I don’t know enough about it. Nobody knows enough about it. Just to give the top three thoughts off the head and write a song about it so rich, and I actually spend probably the first sometimes, 346, months trying to fill up the will

Sarah Zylstra
rich and Johnny listen to sermons, read books and text each other articles about the topic. A good songwriting session is sometimes the two of them talking for a few hours about different things they’ve read or are thinking about. Their goal is to understand a difficult theological truth so well that they could simply and easily explain it to anyone

Rich Thompson
before you even put pen to paper. You need to fill the well. You need to really work hard at we need to understand what is God trying to say to us through His Word? How does it apply to our church? How do we practically live it out throughout the week? And we want to have all those things. We generally fill a whole whiteboard full of things before we start putting pen to paper.

Sarah Zylstra
This filling up the well is why no city alight songwriter, rich Johnny or the other writers at St Paul’s are on staff.

Rich Thompson
So we have this thing that every songwriter in City Light needs to have some sort of day job. So you’ve got something else going on in your life, your mind is able to turn elsewhere. You know, not all your kind of life baskets are in the church songwriting world. It means you’re able to sort of be in the world, be at work, feel what other people in the congregation are feeling on a day to day basis. And so we’re able to take the theological truths that we’re working on and apply them into direct moments that we’ve felt throughout the week.

Sarah Zylstra
It also takes the economic pressure off. If your employer is expecting you to produce a steady stream of popular songs. You might be tempted to rush something out after a while, rich and Johnny didn’t even like being paid for one day a week of songwriting. They both quit taking money from St Paul’s and kept writing on a volunteer basis, even after City of Light, songwriters fill up their wells, it still takes months to get a song onto paper. The topics they’re tackling are complex. And then there’s Johnny. After a while, Johnny finished his PhD and started teaching philosophy at a university. While he was doing that, he noticed that even a single word, if defined poorly, can knock a whole train of thought off the rails.

Jonny Robinson
We had rules at the beginning. We said things like, if you’re going to have more than one abstract noun, perverse, you have to explain why you think you can sneak another concept in without people getting confused.

Sarah Zylstra
Johnny’s grammar rules were stricter than most doctoral dissertation guidelines. Writers had to show him how the conjunctions were working, words like and but, or since or because, they had to be clear what the subject and object of each line was if they changed pronouns, words like he, she, it or us between lines, they had to be clear which subject the pronoun was referring to, and he didn’t stop there.

Jonny Robinson
The lyrics have got to be clear on the one hand, but the Melody’s got to be very clear on the other.

Sarah Zylstra
Hang on a second. I can understand why lyrics have to be clear, but why the melody, the notes aren’t trying to explain the word of God. What does it matter what they sound like? Here’s what Johnny told me in theater performances, the term the fourth wall refers to the imaginary wall between the actors and the audience when it’s broken, perhaps by the sound system going out, or a performer laughing at something that has accidentally gone wrong, that disruption pushes the audience out of the imaginative space they were in. They’re no longer in the story. Now they’re back in the theater wondering how much longer it is before intermission. The same thing can happen in worship. Johnny said, it’s not that congregations suspend disbelief the way you do in a theater, but singing helps us to focus on God, to enter a different head space as we stop worrying about what’s going on around us, all kinds of things, an unexpected bridge, confusing lyrics, an unreachable note, can break that fourth wall, pushing us out of emotional worship and back into the pew, where we might start wondering about the outfit of the person in front of us, or how much longer till lunch got.

Jonny Robinson
Everybody kind of locked in spiritually. They’re thinking about the lyrics they’re singing to God, and then suddenly the melody takes a turn that Nobody’s expecting, and everybody’s shaken out of their concentration, out of their reverie, and they lose the mood there. [Song plays]

Jonny Robinson
I thought that a way of making clear the melody would be writing something which sounded like something they’d been singing their whole lives. So I said, Let’s try and write basically folk songs. So when people are singing, they can guess where the melody is goin g to go and they’re not tripped up by it.

Sarah Zylstra
The other advantage to musical simplicity is that it can be played just as easily in a small church with a guy in his guitar as it can in a large church with a full band. That is important because half of Australian churches have fewer than 50 weekly attendees. Half of American churches see fewer than 65 a week.

Jonny Robinson
I was pretty passionate about making sure that whatever we wrote would work in that room too. It couldn’t have octave jumps, Octave leaps. It couldn’t be dependent on a certain sense sound. It couldn’t be dependent on a certain drum groove, and it couldn’t be so demanding emotionally that it was impossible to sing it if you weren’t feeling anything remotely like what the song was talking about.

Sarah Zylstra
Initially, that was disappointing for some of St Paul’s members. City of Lights. Tunes seemed too tame, almost boring.

Jonny Robinson
There was some skepticism about the style of songs coming out, and people said, this is very this is really simple. Could you make that a little bit more interesting?

Rich Vessallo
They could. I’m the only a holy God album. We were in the studio writing the instrumentation for the guitarist. We had hired Nigel to come and play guitar for us in the studio. And he he played this incredible guitar solo as part of it. And it was, it sounded unreal. It’s like the kind of thing you’d hear on your favorite album. And we’re at one point going, This is so great, but can you play it simpler? And then it really is that tension of wanting and enjoying the creativity of it and how good it sounds, and then going No. But that could mean that someone listens to the song and decides I’ll never achieve this, or I won’t attempt the song. And so even in our early days, we’ve got a fair bit of criticism for you know how melodies are boring, musicianship is too simplified and and not very creative. But we keep telling us. Girls, you know, that’s a badge of honor. We’re achieving our goals. Because regardless of that creative opinion, people are singing the songs. And we want people to sing the songs

Sarah Zylstra
a few times a year, a six person panel, which includes St Paul’s lead minister, sit down to hear song submissions, they listen for sing ability, check for theological accuracy and ask about pronoun usage. They divide the song candidates into three categories, those that are rejected, those that are green lit with just a little editing, and those that need to go back to the drawing board for more serious work. That panel is why the song only a holy God has four verses. Originally, it had just three, expressing how holy and separate God is from us.

Rich Thompson
Yeah, and the senior minister was like, you know, he was saying, Look, you’re just missing. You’re missing part of the beauty. Yes, He’s holy, but he’s also intimate. And we were, we were a bit annoyed by that. We were thinking, look, we’ve just finished this song. But then once you kind of move, you get over that, you start thinking, and you’re like, actually, you know what? He’s right? And we need to rethink this. And so we sat down and and now that’s the moment, I think, the peak moment in the song, when you you come to this point of saying, Oh, this is my father invites me to call him father. So as frustrating as it can be, I do think it’s a very good thing. [Song plays]

Sarah Zylstra
When City of Light gathers enough songs for a project, they’re ready to record, but they don’t book a studio, and they don’t usually hire any musicians. Instead, they call their church.

Rich Vessallo
All of our recordings have our congregation singing. So the crowd that you hear in our songs is the people that attend our services. It’s the sound of the church. It’s the most beautiful thing. Oh.

Sarah Zylstra
By the time a song is ready to record, the congregation has been singing it on Sundays and is familiar with it. The people come in the evening to a church that is decorated with the theme of the album. The band is set on a low stage that extends out into the room so that the congregation wraps around it. The evening includes prayer, Bible, reading and preaching, except for the recording equipment. It’s like a normal church service with a few extra songs, and

Speaker 1
we just love to get everyone there. And people love to come to those recordings as people think, Hey, that’s my voice on those albums. I’m a recording artists too,

Sarah Zylstra
including a congregation’s voice, is so unusual that when rich Fasal Oh gets the songs from the mixing engineers, he always has to send them back, often multiple times, when

Rich Vessallo
it gets into the mix down stage, the mix engineer will send it back to us, and you get this great sounding track, and we’re like, turn the crowd up. Turn the crowd up. Turn the crowd up, like it would go back and forth. And forth, 456, times, and just, just keep turning it up, turning it up, turning up. And it’s just such an important part of our recording. It’s the voice of the church is key to city of light, sound, kingdom.

Sarah Zylstra
To my since 2015 Hillsong has released more than 100 songs. Bethel has done nearly 200 city a light has 37 they started with the 10 song album, yours alone in 2015 a few people listened especially to Jerusalem and nothing but the blood of Jesus. 18 months later, city, a light dropped another 10 songs on the only a holy God album, a few more people listened, especially to only a holy God, and Christ is mine. Forevermore. Instead of speeding up, city alight slowed down, they began releasing a single or two, or maybe a six song EP each year, in November of 2018 it was. Is yet not I, but through Christ in me. In 2019 it was Jesus, strong and kind. In 2020 it was your will be done. Steadily, the number of listeners rose rich Fasal Oh, started to hear from churches overseas who were translating City of Light songs. T on coffee. Barista thanked her one day because her music was putting his kids to sleep at night. And refugees from Ukraine who landed in Stockholm could recognize and sing Jesus strong and kind with the church in their new country.

Tiarne Tranter
Every time I hear that somebody knows a song, or you step off a plane somewhere and you walk into a random place that you’ve never been before. You don’t know anyone, and then you play the first chord, and everyone knows all the words. Actually, we played at a conference recently, and the screen stopped working for yet, not I, but through Christ and me, which is always nerve wracking, and the congregation sang louder than any other song we’d ever sung without the words on the screen. And so yeah, that does surprise me. I always get surprised by that.

Sarah Zylstra
By 2019 Heath was starting to meet a few people after church services who had come specifically to worship at Saint Paul’s because of City of Light. had a lady

Speaker 2
We had a lady visit us from Shanghai just a few weeks ago, and she was saying, you know, we sing your songs in our underground church. So I just had to come and see the church that made these songs. Oh my goodness, right. So I took her straight up the back to our store. I gave her all the CDs that I could find us to take these, use them however you want. It was crazy, just crazy to think how God’s using these songs. But it’s so great to have her at judge.

Sarah Zylstra
Another man on vacation from work, flew from Singapore to Sydney to worship at St Paul’s. Keith told him to make sure to see the Harbor Bridge while he was in town. He’s not fazed by the visitors. In fact, he’s done the same thing stopping by Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City a few years ago to worship with Tim Keller’s congregation, a lot of people tell City of Light. They hang on to their songs in times of grief or illness, Christ is mine. Forevermore has been played at dozens of funerals, day after day. Jesus reigns has called those struggling through marriage troubles or illness back to worship. My God is all I need helped one listener move past addiction and another to worship in the midst of hurt and loss. But perhaps the most dramatic example of this comes from Jamie Trussell, a teaching pastor at Harvest Church in Germantown, Tennessee. Here he is talking to his congregation in early 2023.

Jamie Trussell
I woke up on Tuesday morning singing the refrain of of a group named City of Light. We sing so we just sing one of their songs. Group out of Australia, they did a rendition of, this is the day the Lord has made. And the first verse of that song says, This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice as we lift his name. Now I can’t tell you, or couldn’t tell you at that point why that song was stuck in my head. And my wife would probably tell you, she’ll be honest, I don’t wake up every morning singing worship songs.

Speaker 3
[Song plays: “This is the day that the Lord has made, we will rejoice as we lift his name. This is the day that the Lord has made come and rejoice.”]

Jamie Trussell
So we wake up. I’m singing this song, and don’t know why, but soon the reality of those lyrics would certainly come home.

Sarah Zylstra
A few hours later, Jamie got the worst phone call of his life, his lead pastor, executive pastor, an elder and two church members had been in a plane crash. Four of the five men were killed on impact. Only his lead pastor had survived and was in critical condition at Harvest Church service five days later, the wife of the deceased elder helped lead the church in singing city alights, yet not I, but through Christ in me.

Speaker 4
[Song plays: “What gift of grace is Jesus? My Redeemer. There is no more for heaven now to give.”]

Rich Thompson
We just keep shaking our heads, right? We’re like, this has to be a God thing. We’re just so so encouraged by how God is using our humble little efforts in this little church in the northwest of Sydney. [Song plays]

Sarah Zylstra
Rich Vessallo is City of Lights only employee, but he’s going to need more help soon, from translations to performance invitations to recording, City of Lights growth is a lot to handle, especially since the band members are regular people writing songs and practicing guitar chords on their lunch breaks or after the kids are in bed at night.

Rich Vessallo
It has been quite overwhelming that all the requests, because, you know, we we have a heart for the small churches and ministries. When we get those requests frequently, please come to our church, encourage our team, and we’d love to be able to be doing that, being in their own space and encouraging them. I mean, that’s where you get the most traction. It’s just impossible to be able to do it for everyone.

Sarah Zylstra
One obvious option is to press in to hire their musicians full time, fill up a touring schedule and lead worship all over the globe. I asked Rich about that

Rich Vessallo
this year, we actually are planning to reduce our international travel to hopefully zero.

Sarah Zylstra
Hmm, that sounds like leaning out, doesn’t it? Well, it depends who you ask.

Jonny Robinson
We see ourselves primarily as a songwriting ministry, a resourcing ministry. What I’d like to concentrate on this year is to make sure that we have our mission and our vision really clear going forward to the future, what would the next five to 10 years look like? We’ve done the first 10? What’s the next 10 gonna look like? We want to make sure that people know why they’re doing the things they’re doing when they’re doing them, to make sure their hearts are in the right place, continually in the right place, to keep doing the devotions and the teaching and the reading and the praying.

Sarah Zylstra
Nearly everybody I talked to said the same thing. We know City of Light is at a tipping point where we need to make decisions about the future, but we don’t see yet exactly where God is leading us. And then every one of them mentioned

Rich Vessallo
Asia. We’ve all felt God sort of pointing us to Asia in terms of, you know, it’s our area of the world.

Jonny Robinson
We are really excited by the prospect of working with Asia.

Rich Thompson
What does it look like for us to be serving potentially Asian churches? More, you know, breaking the mold a little bit on what’s been done in the past.

Sarah Zylstra
The weekend after the gospel coalition conference, city alight, flew to Singapore and did a concert for another 5000 people that night. They recorded yet not I in Mandarin. [Song plays]

Jonny Robinson
It was amazing. People in the pews, in the room were crying. People were on their knees hearing these songs in their mother tongue, in Mandarin. So it was a really special night.

Sarah Zylstra
Yes, it wasn’t city lights first project in Asia earlier last year, they recorded a music video of Jesus strong in kind in the Philippines, with young people who had been rescued from sex trafficking.

Jonny Robinson
We’d like to go back to both those countries, see if we could start working with songwriters there, to encourage them to kind of go back and forth and see if they can start writing some stuff.

Rich Thompson
We would like to see raised up more congregational writers from Asia, from Southeast Asia, particularly because I think we are missing a voice in our global church at the moment. A lot of it is, I guess, West, pushing over to East, and the Eastern churches are singing the songs that are curated and written over there in the West. But wouldn’t it be wonderful to see both happen, that songs written in the east are sung in the West? I think the church would be a much richer place as a result of that.

Sarah Zylstra
City Alight doesn’t know exactly what their next steps look like, but that doesn’t worry them. 10 years ago, they had no idea what was ahead.

Rich Thompson
We knew we needed to walk the path. We didn’t quite know why or where it was going, just that this was a good thing to do since day one, the prayer has been that God would bless and establish the ministry in so far as it gives him glory and equips his church, builds His church, and if it should become anything other than this, anything unhelpful. And our prayer is that he would shut it down quickly, mercifully. [Song plays]

Sarah Zylstra
Thank you for listening to this episode of recorded which is part of the gospel coalition’s Podcast Network. This episode was written by me, Sarah Zylstra and produced by city a lights Rich vasolo. If you liked this podcast, please share it with your friends and leave a rating or comment on your favorite platform to support future episodes of recorded please Consider making a financial gift at tgc.org/donate, thank you.