Q&A: Graham Kendrick

Who was your favourite person to work with?

You can’t say that! It’s like being a parent ? you want every child to end up believing they are the favourite.

Any memorable moments?

Working with Martin Smith ? in these situations I tend to have a few starting points; you sing your idea, which might just be a couple of lines, and see if the other person gets excited by that, or bored. I’d gone through about six or seven before I got any response at all. Actually, the one he went for was the one I had the strongest feeling about in my soul.

Do you sense God leading his Church in a particular direction at the moment?

I think we could give more attention to letting our worship teach. Of course, this is what liturgy has done from the beginning. A good liturgy takes you back to the core of the gospel and who God is, who we are worshipping, and how we approach him; it ends up sending us out into the world. What our popular songs do very well is express an emotion or a feeling, but they don’t necessarily carry that content.

Do we need fewer songs, more worship?

That’s one way you could put it. It’s not so much fewer songs, but more songs of a particular kind, that carry more content and take us on a journey. There’s so much more we can sing about. Maybe we should dispense with the ‘flow’ of worship sometimes; it doesn’t always have to be about the flow. In the end it’s about word and Spirit ? you need the richness of the word, and the presence of the Spirit.

What advice or encouragement do you have for today’s worship leaders?

‘Keeping it real’ (if I may borrow a bit of street slang). Particularly when people are really busy ? you can feel ‘Am just going through the motions? Is this really me?’