Calling all musicians!

At our recent Council of Communities Meeting one of the topics we discussed was: “Delivering Worship Services that return joy to God and True Parents.” It was strongly felt that improving worship services was an important part of the well-being of our communities and, as you might well imagine, music and songs became a central part of that discussion.

In many of our larger services and programs we use PowerPoint to display songs and this has been very helpful as songs can be added as and when someone decides a song is worth including. We have no real central point when it comes to finding and adding new songs and, indeed, PowerPoint song files are not commonly shared and may not even be known about generally if they haven’t been shared with all communities.

Songbooks are useful and important for our communities to have especially for use in smaller group meetings or Home Services. Once again, the issue of creating and updating songbooks is a problem as no one has had the central responsibility for providing such songbooks. Here in Wales we have produced a number of songbooks and the last one produced towards the end of 2014 has been fine for the Wales community and although some other communities have been using this book, a number of songs might not be known well enough for a community to justify using the book since it was originally for the Wales community use only. That particular songbook does need revising as there are a number of mistakes but also for any songbook to be used by other communities it would be helpful to have songs or to introduce new songs that would be better know by all communities. We could make an accompanying CD with the songs for members to learn.

With this in mind it was decided to make an effort to encourage all musicians around the country to share ideas, music, songs etc. if so willing, which can be shared by all.

I was asked to take responsibility for contacting musicians in the various communities with a view to try and make a register of musicians, singers/songwriters etc. who would like to be part of a national register for communicating ideas, sharing songs etc.. It would be ideal to have more of our own songs sung but this will only work if can put together some kind of body of musicians/songwriters who would be willing to communicate and share musical ideas etc. that would benefit everybody.

Please do let me know if you would be interested in joining this group. I will be happy to hear from you and until we can find an ideal method of gathering and keeping all the info. I am happy to get the ball rolling myself.

I look forward to hearing from you.