WorshipTraining

Course Description

Welcome to essentials in worship songwriting. In this online course, you are about to join other worship leaders, artists, worshippers and spiritual influencers, across streams of the Church and across the world, in exploring foundational ideas in the craft of songwriting – particularly related to worship.

Songwriting for worship is the art of musically and lyrically creating pieces that enable and enhance the corporate expression of worship. This Essentials course is designed to support and strengthen your own journey in writing songs for worship by:

1. Teaching you the fundamental elements that make a song come to life, come to fruition, and come to usefulness in a community or communities,
2. Encouraging you with examples of favorite worship songs (especially from contemporary history) and the stories behind the crafting of those songs, and…
3. Equipping you with the tools to advance your own songwriting for personal or corporate applications in worship.

Teaching, encouraging and equipping will all play a role in your journey through these few weeks. It is our desire to simply provide a foundation for your growth, and then to bring some “light-handed” guidance to the process of that growth.

Essentials in Songwriting is ideally meant to be taken after a participant has taken our Essentials Core Courses in worship theology, history and values. While these are not a prerequisite to taking the Songwriting course, we strongly recommend that you you don’t take this one without, at some point, taking the others. Each provides a vision, context and content for our songwriting that we have found changes the way creative people approach the songs they write.

This course is designed to be about 6 hours of work for you each week for 4 weeks, leaving plenty of space to keep life going as you learn rather than putting everything on hold. In this way, your daily life and activity can form and inform your songwriting process and reflection. In the best of songwriting experiences, opportunity to “linger over an idea” is indeed essential.

What ideas in Songwriting will we be exploring? You’ll dive into the world of “song vision,” and the art of arriving at one, central theme that will form the foundation and center of your song. We’ll also be exploring lyricism, song structures, and the elements that mark some of the best worship songs we know and love today.

Especially exciting, and central to our course, is the fact that you will be writing a song throughout these four weeks. In other words, you will be applying everything we are learning as we move through the course together..

Peer review of one another’s ideas and songs is essential to this course working, so we ask you to participate highly in offering reflections on other’s songs in the process of this course. All that we do in giving song feedback is done with encouragement, support and an effort to make each participant a better songwriter along the way.

By the time we’re finished, we trust you will have a strong song for either further use, or further rewriting.

Over a four-week period, you’ll post weekly drafts of your “song in process,” as well as some brief reflections on the readings and content. At the conclusion of the course, you will post your final mp3 song and chord chart, for use by others in our Learning Community.

Your class will be guided along and facilitated by Will Bernard, M.Min., your Course Moderator. I (Dan) will lead the content of the course, participate in the opening and final week conference calls, participate in the ongoing conversations, and contribute the primary media teaching for each week. Your course moderator will lead you weekly through the course content.

Through this course you’ll gain fresh insights into the craft of worship songwriting and become an integral part of our internationally growing family of “lifelong learners”.

Again, welcome to essentials in worship songwriting. It is our privilege to have you join us for this encouraging and creative experience.

With friendship,

Dan Wilt, M.Min
Learning Director
WorshipTraining.com

Course Objectives

As a result of taking this course the student should be able to:

1. Define terms such as song vision, song structure, melody, harmony and revision.

2. Identify the basic elements that make a song accessible, singable, theologically strong and musically consistent.

3. Demonstrate an ability to effectively and aggressively rewrite a song without losing perspective on its spiritual import and purpose,

4. Compare the different songwriting genres that may arise throughout the course, and

5. Appreciate the challenges of negotiating the theological, devotional, teaching and spiritual impact of a song on an individual or a community.

The journey of songwriting is a lifelong process, like most learning.

We encourage you to be teachable, encouraging to others, willing to grow yourself, and to give yourself to the process of crafting your song to completion!