As mentioned in my other moment from last night, I went to a concert in Tonbridge last night. My wife and I had gone, with a friend, to see Stuart Townend.

“Who?” I can imagine most people answering to that!

It’s interesting, although not surprising, that a man whose songs are sung by millions of Christians the world over, and who regularly tops the list of the most sung Christian songs with his classic “In Christ alone” (co-written with Keith Getty), is completely unknown outside Christian circles. His specialism is writing songs that can be used by congregations in their worship rather than “Christianised” pop or rock, and he is undoubtedly very gifted at what he does.

It’s also rather nice that he always encourages everyone to join in and sing with him, so it’s really more like a worship service than a concert.

His explanations of the song-writing process were very interesting, and during the evening he spoke about some different kinds of songs that can be used in worship, one of which is the story-telling song. He pointed out that while we tend to use this kind of song a lot with children, to teach particular Bible events, rarely does this get carried across to songs used by the whole congregation. So part of what he is trying to do is to redress the balance and write some of these story-telling songs for more general use.

It is undoubtedly true that singing helps with memorising, so as ignorance of the great stories of the Bible grows apace, anything that helps keeps His story alive has to be a good thing!