Song Categories Part 3 - Holy Spirit Songs

The idea behind having a Holy Spirit song in the worship set every week was simple: I wanted to remind everyone that the Holy Spirit dwells in every believer. It’s easy to slip into doing it on our own strength and forget about the Holy Spirit and the Spirit’s active role in a believer’s walk of faith. Before this approach to choosing and organizing songs, the Holy Spirit showed up infrequently at best in the worship songs we sang week in, week out!

Most Holy Spirit songs are prayer songs which we place after the sermon as part of the response set of songs. We have found that Holy Spirit songs are not very common. There are also varying doctrinal views on the Holy Spirit which I won’t get into here except to say that we look for songs that are consistent with the church doctrinal statement (which should be true of all songs a worship leader is choosing!).

The depth isn't there for some of the more simple Holy Spirit songs. I have also used songs that aren’t necessarily a Holy Spirit song but reference the Holy Spirit in a way that is important, “Amazing Love (You Are My King)” is an example. I feel it is better to use these less than ideal songs than to have no songs on the Holy Spirit at all. We started with the songs we already knew and are slowly expanding this category.

Worship is formative and we want our songs collectively to present a comprehensively Biblical view of God which would be difficult to do in any meaningful way without including songs on the Holy Spirit regularly.

Holy Spirit songs we are using include:

Let the Weight of Your Glory Fall
2790475 Steve Merkel ©1999 Integrity's Hosanna! Music
Walking In The Spirit
19399 David W. Morris ©1988 Integrity's Hosanna! Music
Rain, Rain, Rain
S.Dial/K.Lawson ©2002 Cedarstone Music BMI
I Say Yes
David Stanley ©2002 100% Wool Records
Open My Eyes, That I May See (Classic Hymn)
Public Domain Clara H. Scott, 1895

We have resorted to new tunes to old hymn texts and the pastor wrote us a song text too.

We are trying to improve the quality of songs in this category, so I’m always looks for great Holy Spirit songs. Have any to share?

In Part 4 I will look at Response songs. (Part 2 was on GITS songs)

0 comments:

Post a Comment