Graham Kendrick is a veteran of the worship scene in the UK, penning such classics as ‘Shine Jesus Shine’, ‘The Servant King’ and ‘Knowing You (All I Once Held Dear)’. He talks here about what it means to lead others in worshipping God and his desire to see people become 24/7 worshippers.

CT: How did you get into worship leading?

GK: I trained as a school teacher and in my teens I took an interest in writing songs but I was never was really trained in music. I and some others started using songs in Christian coffee bars to share our faith but when I went to college the band broke up. I continued to write songs with the acoustic guitar, songs that I would sing in a folk club and many of the songs told a story, like a little scene out of the gospels, Simon Peter the fisherman and the moment Jesus called him, for example. And I would play these songs in folk clubs, in schools, in concerts and try and open up the story and get people thinking about the story.

After college I joined a team that travelled around serving churches, doing missions with churches two or three weeks, going to local schools, doing lessons singing a few songs and answering questions, doing that for many years for Christ. And God touched my own life in opening up to what it meant to worship God and to use songs to express that and to write those kind of songs and those songs began to take off alongside new events like Spring Harvest. It was a new event at that time then and I was involved in it, working close to one of the founders for many years. There was a whole new generation that wanted to worship in a fresh way with more freedom and with more songs from that generation as well as the great old hymns of the past and that really launched this whole ministry in writing songs, in teaching, and I have continued to do that to the present day.

CT: How exciting was it travelling and playing songs?

GK: You get to know its hard graft, especially touring in and out of vans, setting up equipment, packing it down and again, getting tired, not sleeping very well. Then you go back and do it again! But it is what God is doing in you and stirring in you and he wants you to bear fruit and to play your part so it’s certainly exciting when you are going out and there are new opportunities. There are seasons where you plug in faithfully and times when things are disappointing and you have to re-evaluate why you do things. I think in many ways God seeks to purify our motives so that we are not just driven by the adventure of it all. That’s when it becomes truly an offering to God. It’s because we love him and want to be his servant.

CT: How do you keep writing original songs?

GK: Well I wouldn’t claim that I have done that, I think part of it is writing a lot of songs and of course for every song that ends up being published, there are half a dozen that never made it so you are picking the best. There is whole lot of work that goes in that is not seen. I remember talking to a jeweller once who I think who was trying to justify the cost of a pair of diamond stud ear rings which my wife was interested in and he said do you know that for every carrot of diamond you have to shift 25 metric tonnes of rock and dirt and I thought we are in the same business. I sometimes feel that to mine a gem of a song you just have to dig a lot of dirt.

But I’ve also worked very, very hard on particular lyrics. I edit and I rewrite and I test until I feel that I have done the best that I can.

Perhaps the other thing is because I started out as a performer with my own particular folky sound style that’s very, very different to praise and worship, so when it came to praise and worship I really took the role as a songwriter and I’ve always been happy to tackle all kinds of styles and if I just saw myself as an artist I only use songs that really worked for me my voice and my pitch of voice and all those artist type things you know.

But if you are writing for the church and you want to write a song in a calypso style or write in a rock style or a traditional hymn style, I am happy to have a go at any of those and that itself brings forth a variety of styles and songs.

CT: What was your deepest experience with God?

GK: I cannot really pick one out, I am not a man of extremes, I am a very kind of steady person and I think my spiritual experience is similar to that in a way that, you know some people are people of extremes. There are extreme highs and extreme lows and I am one of those steady guys that keeps on plugging on year after year. I think that’s a good thing too because for every experience you may have you, then have got weeks or months to live the life.

You can’t live off experience. Experiences can take you to a higher place in God and I think this is perhaps one of the problems we sometimes have and even the way we do church, we can try to produce experiences for people in our meetings because that’s what people want and often very graciously God blesses, but if we are not careful we can make people dependant, we can make the meeting or the preacher or the worship leader dependant. If we are doing our job, if the prophets, apostles, teachers, evangelists are doing their job well, the job is described in the book of Ephesians as to equip the saints for the work of service, so the best thing I can do in my role as leading worship is to help people become worshippers 24-7, not to get up there and do it for them.

So as a worship leader I am trying to help them give their worship to God, not to perform worship that they can watch. Because we live in a culture of entertainment and the celebrity, so it’s very easy to slip into that thing of having the big man or woman of God who is supposed to deliver the experience that changes our lives and I don’t believe in so many wonderful men or women of God who have so much to give us. As ministers the best thing we can give the people is to equip them for that daily faithfulness in work, at home, in the ups and downs, in everyday life, to find God for themselves there, and to be faithful, to be worshippers in the midst of the joys and sorrows of everyday life.

CT: Was there a low point of your life when you found things really hard?

GK: I can remember when shortly after we had our first child we had been married for a couple of years and I was very, very busy, too busy, and my wife and I have never realised what they now call postnatal depression. She wasn’t sleeping well, she was anxious, and we had some very dark times and, like I said, we were busy, a little isolated in some ways, but God helped us through. I think I learnt lessons or two about needing to give attention, not being so focused on the ministry that I neglect to recognise the needs of my wife and the new baby as well. God was gracious to us and helped us through that.

CT: As for the young people who are doing worship, what advice would you give them?

GK: Well I think the first and foremost thing is to be a worshipper, don’t expect to get up and lead people somewhere you don’t go to yourself very often. Also, become a consistent worshipper. That the thing I struggle most with and in one sense the struggle never goes away but being a consistent worshipper, not just up and down. If you are just going to stand up there and lead other people in worship there’s got to be an integrity and that integrity comes from seeking to live the life.

None of us are perfect, we make mistakes but God is gracious to us, we pick ourselves up or rather we get on our knees first and confess our sin, and then we carry on but there’s got to be to that commitment to being a worshipper.

Secondly be a servant, the church is not there as a platform for our performances. It’s not there to give us what we need to satisfy our desires, to play an instrument or to perform something, it’s there as a place for God’s presence to dwell and we need to come under the fear of God and humble ourselves and have a servant attitude.
So maybe you turn up with your instrument and you find that someone has messed up the rota and someone else got there first on their instrument, what do you do? You get upset and say stop wasting my time? No, you are there to worship with or without your instruments. So you say ‘oh, ok, you know I will put my instrument in the cupboard and I will join the congregation and just worship with my whole heart because I am here to worship’. It’s those kinds of attitudes where we recognise to serve.

Thirdly I would say be real, be yourself and I don’t mean your sinful self. Be real, don’t put on a false front, a false face when you stand before people, people can see and will respond better when they know that the people up there are being genuine and the people there are there to worship.

CT: What’s your hope for worship in the church?

GK: There should be a renewal. Things have maybe in some cases got jaded or worn out or tired and then church music, there are people who so faithfully lead the worship but they just get so tired and burnt out.

There are a lot of people who get tired and burnt out and find their motives getting mixed. So it’s so good to gather people together with people who can understand what it’s all about and listen to good teaching and meet other people, be lifted up in the worship, catch the fresh breath in the Spirit of God and those kinds of things.
One place which we should see the miracle of unity is in the church where people who would not normally be in the same room together or even know each other are actually side by side, with one purpose, one vision, worshipping the Father, one Father of us all, together, and I think we need to do that a whole lot more.

The spirit of this world is tribalism and division, setting up walls around our particular group but the Kingdom of God as we see in the Scripture here is says no Greek, no Jew, no slave or free, barbarian, male or female. But Christ is all in all.

There is a beautiful description in the New Testament of a church where there is a wonderful different mixture of people. Sure it’s hard work and I am sure it’s hard work to meet people across cultural backgrounds, language backgrounds, but I believe the blessing of God is in there when we make the effort, when we come together to worship, the desire to be each other’s blessing even more than we desire to be blessed ourselves. When the world sees that spirit of the church they are going to shut their mouths because it isn’t there elsewhere and people are going to say ‘wow, God is with you ‘cos nothing else can do that’.