Songwriting captures the voice of a congregation

With debates about traditional, contemporary or blended worship in most churches’ rearview mirrors, a growing trend among worship pastors is the creation of original music for their churches. 

Two worship pastors from SBTC churches—David Gentiles and Matt Boswell, both songwriters and sons of Southern Baptist ministers—weighed in on the place of songwriting in the church during an interview with the TEXAN.

For Boswell, in his sixth year as worship pastor of Providence Church in Frisco, writing songs came early. 

Boswell, now 36, started leading worship services at age 15 in the church where he grew up. As a young teen, he wrote songs for his local church and continued writing modern worship choruses until he started dating the young woman who later became his wife. 

“When we first started dating, she came to our church and mentioned that we didn’t do any hymns,” Boswell said, recalling his reply: “Nobody sings those anymore.” 

“I had forgotten really where I came come from musically,” Boswell added.

Six months later, Boswell introduced the classic hymn “Just As I Am” to his congregation, only to be surprised when a church member asked if he had written it. This amusing incident led to what Boswell called “a plunge into recovering hymnody” in his own compositions. 

“I have never looked back. It has changed how I now write music and has changed even the music that we do now at Providence.”

Boswell credits long-term friendships with Northern Ireland’s Keith Getty and the UK’s Stuart Townsend with shaping his thinking in the writing of modern hymns that reflect both God’s kingdom and a songwriter’s national homeland.

“I wanted to see what new American hymns would sound like. Even more so, what Texan hymns would sound like,“ Boswell mused. “I saw a space American songwriters were not addressing: modern hymns written in the vein of older, historic hymns. I set my course in that direction, and I haven’t looked back.”

Boswell noted his hymn “Christ the Sure and Steady Anchor” as an example.

That hymn, written for Providence Church, also illustrates how songwriting personalizes corporate worship, allowing the worship leader/composer to address needs within a local body. 

“I wrote that hymn with specific people in mind in our congregation who were fighting doubt, fighting depression, fighting sickness, fighting sin,” Boswell explained. “I specifically wanted to give voice in our church as to what it looks like in the midst of those battles to still point our attention and affection to Christ.”

Boswell is also careful to base his compositions upon sound theology, explaining that in planning corporate worship, he reads Scripture and commentaries on the text to be preached. “I allow the contours of that text to shape the songs that we sing.” Thus, teaching pastor and worship leader “have the same kind of kindling in the fireplace.”

In both songwriting and leading music in worship, Boswell and Providence focus on the gospel narrative, with Boswell organizing services along a gospel liturgy. 

“Four movements: God, Man, Christ, Response inform what we sing and what I write,” Boswell said. Songs address the character of God, the nature of Man and his need for God’s grace, the nature of Christ and His atoning work, or the nature of humankind’s response to that truth. “If I am writing, I will write in one of these four categories.”

Both Boswell and Gentiles believe they have been called to be worship pastors.

In addition to leading worship for Sagemont’s Sunday night contemporary service, Gentiles also produces the church’s recording projects: to date, two EP (extended play) records available as digital downloads, the first based on the book of Philippians; the second, “Save Us,” released Easter weekend.

“I produce our records and hope to write new songs for our body. My heart and my vision are to create musical content for our people that originates from our voice and experiences in life.” 

Worship leaders are “shepherds,” noted Gentiles. “We are first ministers of the gospel. God has graciously given us music as a vehicle by which we share this gospel and shepherd our people in following Jesus.”

While not integral to guiding the congregation in worship, Gentiles said, songwriting can be “an incredible tool for the local church body,” explaining that crafting songs for a particular group is a method by which the worship leader expresses the “heart language” of his flock.

“Songwriting provides the opportunity for a church to discover who they are,” Gentiles said.

As an example, Gentiles discussed serving as a worship leader at First Baptist in Euless. The church had launched the Miracle Campaign to retire a multimillion dollar debt in a short time. “I wrote a song called ‘We Need a Miracle.’ It would become our anthem for two years. For that moment in time, it was what we needed to sing as a people.”

Sometimes songs written for a particular group end up with widespread appeal, Gentiles noted. The song “Good Good Father,” popularized by Chris Tomlin, originated from a small home church. 

“The message of that song, written for the needs of a local group of people, [was] something the global church needed,” Gentiles said. “It has crossed over and had a national platform. That is what God does with songs.”

Thus what begins as a ministry on a local level expands in God’s economy.

“The Holy Spirit is really the distribution department of the church,” Gentiles explained. “I write for where I am in life and my church’s life and let the song go. … If that message resonates with a larger subset of the church, the church will sing it.”

While writing music for the church is valuable, Gentiles also acknowledged that the trend can sometimes put undue pressure on those who lead music in the church but do not write songs. 

“There is pressure in the church culture that if your church is not producing records or if you are a worship leader and you don’t write songs, you are less than others. That is just not true,” said Gentiles, an exclusive songwriter for LifeWay Music.

Gentiles, whose father is a Southern Baptist minister of music, noted that in his father’s generation, many music ministers neither wrote music nor played instruments, instead focusing on choral music and voice.

Songwriting may not be necessary, but both Boswell and Gentiles affirm that songwriting enhances corporate worship.

Gentiles concluded, “Songwriting provides an important opportunity to tell our story to one another, to affirm to one another what God is doing in our church and what God is doing in the world. To be able to sing songs that are in our own heart language, that’s pretty special.”