Our worship band practices on Thursday nights. This week, though, we devoted the time to hearing ideas for new songs. I’m of the opinion that we’re in a golden time of songwriting. Lots of great stuff is being written, at least in terms of worship music. When Anchor started in 1998, we were fully into the Maranatha stuff, a carry-over from our previous church. Then we discovered the Passion movement and fell in love with those great new songs, like “We Fall Down,” “Once Again,” “You are My King,” “We Wanna See Jesus Lifted High,” and so many others. We still do many of them. The Passion music fits our style–live, guitar-driven, as opposed to the studio-composed and brass-section-enhanced stuff from Maranatha and elsewhere.

Wonderful new music continues arriving from various directions, including from several members of our own worship team, who have been writing superb stuff for the past couple of years. I’m a professional writer, but I can’t get the hang of writing music. But our two guitarists and worship leader have “it.” Our previous worship leader wrote a song called “Great Faith” which we still do; people have asked us, “Who performs that song? I really like it.”

Our repertoire of songs has grown very large, and my master notebook–the biggest notebook I could find, a black monster–is beyond full. So in preparation for Thursday, I not only brought several new songs to the group. I also compiled a list of 25 songs I thought we should retire. Maybe we just don’t do them much anymore. Maybe they no longer fit our style. Or maybe I just don’t, personally, like them. Anyway, they approved the whole list. Rather enthusiastically, in fact. And now I can remove them from my notebook.

My list included these songs: “Above All,” “Almighty,” ” “Awesome God,” “Beyond Belief,” “The Cross has said it all,” “God is the strength of my heart,” “Happy Song,” ” I will sing of the mercies of the Lord,” ” Lord Reign in Me,” “Prepare the Way,” “There’s a Place,” “”You are the fire,” and various others. Including six songs with a Jewish beat that, only a few years ago, were fun to do, but which no longer fit our style. Songs like “I will celebrate,” “Jehovah Jireh,” and “The God of Israel is Mighty.”

Lots of still-good songs there. But we’d rather move on to new stuff.

It makes me think of all the songs from previous eras of my life that have been “retired,” so to speak. That I no longer hear in ANY context. In junior high, I thought “He’s Everything to Me” was just the coolest song ever. I think we could pull it out and do it, and it would still work well. But we won’t. That song is history. In high school, I had a book–just cord charts–of a whole bunch of Ralph Carmichael songs. I played those all the time. Can’t even remember the titles off-hand, now, but we used to sing many of them in our youth group.

Then there’s “Pass It On,” kind of a legendary song. I wonder if it could be revived? You really need to sing it around a campfire, I guess. That’s the perfect environment for it. “Soon and Very Soon,” “Greater is He that is In Me, “Because He lives”–those are a few others from my earlier eras.

Of course, we pretty much retired our whole hymnal. We still do hymns occasionally, but not very often. We should probably do them more. But frankly, the world has moved on. Yes, they are good songs. But I’m sure those hymns are contemporaries of lots of other great songs that never got put in the hymnal, and therefore faded into oblivion. Just because a song got put in a hymnal doesn’t make it extra spiritual or enduring.

As for new songs: we compiled a list of about 20. Good songs. I contributed two Newsboys titles: “Presence,” and “It is You.” I love the Newsboys. We practiced four new songs that night, just to give them a try. “Presence” and “It is You” were two of them, since I had developed cord charts for them. Then we did “Grace Like Rain” (Todd Agnew?) and one other song whose title escapes me right now. I played it by ear. It was fairly easy, and fun to do. We’ll work those four songs in over the next couple of months, I imagine.

The world moves on. Songs get left behind. Such is life.

Once a month, the elders meet with Pastor Tim at the Liberty Diner. There are only two elders–me, and Russ, who was a year behind me in college. We were both part of the core group that left Emmanuel Community Church in 1998 to restart what is now Anchor Community Church (and was then called Third Street Church). There were about 30 people in that original group. Some went back to Emmanuel (having fulfilled their short-term commitments), and some moved out of the area entirely. Only a few couples are left. Me and Pam, along with Russ and his family, always pretty much intended to stay.

The Liberty Diner is blessed with a waitress named Wendy who has a Master’s Degree in Sassiness. We’ve been meeting at Liberty for about four years now, and she’s been there the whole time. She’s 50-something, been divorced, has kids, and wields a very sharp wit. Lots and lots of fun. She never fails to make me laugh. I think she gets in trouble with the management for talking to us too much.

It’s been kind of fun watching her spiritual journey over that time. We’ve been a good influence on her. She’s told about getting back into church, always with amusing observations of church life. One time, she showed up at Anchor (having been prodded by us to do so for many months), and she enjoyed it. We always pray (of course!) before eating our breakfast. One time Wendy was standing there, and Tim asked her to pray for our meal. I’ll bet you’ve not seen that happen before–the waitress praying for the patrons’ meals. She offered a marvelous prayer.

I don’t know what all is going on in Wendy’s life, but I’m confident that we either awakened or reinforced a relationship with Christ that had gone dead or dry. It’s nice to know that, as the three of us talk about our church, we’re also invading a little piece of the world.