Tomorrow is Sunday 1st October and Arun Community Church is having a thanksgiving service. It just so happens that I’m on the rota to lead worship for the meeting and have spent much of the day with a guitar in hand, trying to choose a set of songs that reflect what I believe God wants to do tomorrow!

As I’ve said before, I absolutely LOVE to worship. It’s one of those things that just captivates and inspires me so I take the responsibility quite seriously. What I’ve found today is that it can be very hard to find songs that fit in with a particular theme. After a bit of trawling across Google, I’ve found a few websites that allow you to search for a particular theme or subject in a song, yet often I (or the church congregation) aren’t familar with the song results they return. The other option is software packages. The church have tried a few different worship programmes over the years yet none are that satisfactory or available to me on my home computer!

So that just leaves me with pages of song books and print-outs. It’s quite time consuming but I actually appreciate looking at each song individually and deciding if it will fit into the mix. The list I’ve prepared for tomorrow is:

• Beautiful One – Tim Hughes
• Happy Day – Tim Hughes
• I Will Dance (Undignified) – Matt Redman
• Oh Praise Him – David Crowder Band
• Holy Is The Lord – Chris Tomlin
• Everything/Consuming Fire – Tim Hughes
• My Jesus, My Saviour – Darlene Zschech
• See his Love – Tom Lockley
• Praise Him You Heavens – Russell Fragar

My concern with this list is that although they are mostly around praising God, they are not specifically about thanksgiving – the theme of the morning. It’s not a major problem as I guarantee we won’t get a chance to play all of these and I usually end up swapping things around as God does His thing. Maybe I’ll post the actual playlist tomorrow afternoon to see how it differed!