Beyond Sunday Worship

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Collaborate: 5 Co-Songwriting Ideas That Work

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As I mentioned last week, songwriting retreats are the cat’s pyjamas. More specifically, collaborative songwriting is the best way for worship teams to identify with their particular community and produce the best songs they can.

Are you doing it?

Songwriting with other people is awesome

I think collaborative songwriting is important for a few reasons:

  • It empowers new writers – helps those who struggle on their own
  • It generates better ideas – combines the strengths of different writers
  • It creates a team mentality – it’s not about personalities or stars, but unity
  • It focuses your team on a mission – a mission to serve the church together

As part of our recent retreat, we had many different songwriting sessions, all with a unique focus. In bringing your team together, it’s important that you have a plan in place or nothing may get done. Having pre-planned, thought-out sessions will give your team a creative kickstart.

Here are 5 co-songwriting sessions that work really well:

1. Random Writing

This is where you break out and have people share random ideas. No specific focus, no specific plan. Usually certain writers have song ideas that have been stirring in their head for a while and they’ll share them here. It’s a good way to break the ice and allow anything to go.

2. Prophetic Writing

Pull out a whiteboard and ask your team, “What is God speaking to our church? What do our people need to declare? What is on the heart of God for us?” It’s amazing what responses surface as your team prayerfully engages with your church’s mission. It teaches them to serve, be pastoral, and love people through their songwriting.

3. Sermon Series Writing

Once again, pull out the whiteboard and brainstorm. Lay out upcoming sermon series’ and have your team spit out ideas related to those themes. Then break out and give each group a specific sermon series theme. Set a time to end for idea sharing with the rest of the team. This is great because creativity can often soar further when there’s limits.

4. Spontaneous Worship Writing

This is where you challenge your songwriting groups to just worship together. Start with a familiar song and gradually start to sing out spontaneous expressions of worship. Record the whole thing. Some of our best songs resulted from this. Want to know why? Because the best worship songs are born out of actual worship. Profound, right? But it’s typical for our teams to get lost in strategy rather than lost in His presence. If we want to capture the heart of God in our songwriting, we need to train our writers to write out of a place of intimacy with Jesus.

5. Scripture Writing

Pull out a passage of Scripture and begin to sing it. The Psalms are particularly good for this, but don’t limit yourself to just that. The goal is not necessarily to write word for word from the Bible, but to get your ideas from the Bible. It’s a great way to co-write because you avoid the awkwardness of sharing your own idea. You can blame the Scripture 🙂

The goal of a songwriting retreat is not to edit, arrange, or finish songs. It’s to generate ideas. Set the expectation that anything goes. Just get it out and record it somehow. The editing will come later.

Have a blast and let me know how it goes!

Question: What other co-writing ideas have you tried? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

Comments

  1. Arny says

    I tend to stick to number 5 more often then not…

    Number 4 would be awesome to do! Never done it…but I love those “Enter the Worship Circle” stuff…

    As far as songwriting Ideas….hmmmm…I’v always wanted to write an album…worship…in chronological order from the history of God’s people from adam to revelation…That would be sweet! lol….

    “You opened my heart like you opened the ocean / And Your grace ran through me …..

    (maybe you can finish this line…i got nothing! lol)…

      • Arny says

        Lmbo…When you didn’t “finish” that line…i saw it so clearly…. the line was already finished…I saw something else in my head but then i saw that it was a good line…ha!

        You opended my heart like you opened the ocean
        And your Grace ran through me
        You lit up my life like you lit up the night
        And your Love came to me

        that could work…

  2. patrick says

    the lord’s been leading me to begin writing again after a ten-year downtime. problem is now…i’m overwhelmed by the prospect and love these tips. always down for some collab.

    • Brandon says

      Same here… I have already written a song for my church, but I still have to put music to it. Got some stuff together yesterday, but if God wants it to be written at this point in time, it will happen. I do know for a fact that he wants it to be a completed song one day…just not sure if it is now…

  3. Brandon says

    Great post! And I like your idea of writing a song here…maybe I can help a little?

    I will bless the LORD at all times;
    His praise shall continually be in my mouth.
    My soul shall make its boast in the LORD;
    The humble shall hear of it and be glad.
    Oh, magnify the LORD with me,
    And let us exalt His name together.

    *It comes from Psalm 34

  5. Jimmy Fabrizio says

    I like this idea, especially how it encourages an openness and humility amongst worshipers.

  6. Ryan Egan says

    This lyric has been sitting with me for awhile and I’m not doing anything with it – perhaps you could give me the push I need:

    Take my hands and tie them down
    Capture my will beneath your crown
    Let me run from trials taunting
    Flee when all my past is haunting

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