Sing a New Song
Original Songwriting at Urbana 06by Betsy Ezell
What do you get when you put twelve tired artists in a room and tell them to write a song? And not just any song, you’re asking them to write the song that will open Urbana 06, which will draw people into the heart of what Urbana is all about, will glorify God and be, generally, off the chain? If your answer is that you get a lot of ideas, some chaos and no song, you’re absolutely right.
In February 2006, at the end of a long day of rehearsing, the Urbana Worship Team, convinced we could find nothing better for the opening of Urbana, tried our hand at writing this very song. Daryl Black took the myriad ideas, images, phrases, and melodies we came up with that night. He did some editing and arranging and amazingly turned that chaos into Jesus, We Come to Worship You.
Charged with leading worship at Urbana, the Urbana 06 Worship Team spent a year figuring out the best possible songs for the convention, learning along that way that some of those songs were not yet written. At our first team rehearsal in November 2005, Daryl Black, Urbana 06 Worship Director, explained some of his goals for the group—that we would grow as worshippers, worship leaders, increase our understanding and experience with multicultural worship and that we would be songwriters. He promised that at some point in our journey together he would lock us in a room and not let us out until we had written a song. Scary.
My first thought: “I’m not a songwriter; I’ve tried and I stink. I’ll leave the songwriting to people who know what they’re doing.” After all, there were songwriters on the team—they had business cards, archives of original music on their laptops, master’s degrees, they were on tour with famous Christian bands. I was skeptical, to say the least, that I would find any place in this elite group.
At our next rehearsal, Vince Henthorn shows up with this recording. It was him singing this song he had written, I Have a Calling, accompanied by a worship group he led. He took Daryl’s challenge to heart, reflected on Urbana’s theme and proceeded to write a song that would also be sung at the opening session of Urbana 06. Vince doesn’t even play an instrument!
If Vince could write a great song and not even know how to play an instrument, surely my lame excuses were exactly that—lame. Besides, every time I talked to Daryl on the phone or saw him at a rehearsal, he would say—“Did you write that song yet? I know you have one in there somewhere.” Did I mention that Daryl is generally right?
I began toying around with Unify Us in January 2006. The previous summer, I did a manuscript study of the entire book of Ephesians with a number of InterVarsity staff. I walked away deeply impressed with the idea that through the church the manifold wisdom of God will be made known and that this wisdom results in reconciliation and unity between individuals, people groups and social systems that should naturally be estranged.
I had a few ideas on paper when I met with Daryl in March of 06. I showed him what I had and we worked together to come up with a chorus. Over the next couple months, I wrote the song, changed the melody, changed the verses, added a bridge. But in the end, I had a song that I believed would speak to the hearts of Urbana attendees and bring glory to God as people cried out for unity.
Get to know Daryl and know that he talks big and thinks big, and in return, big things happen. Daryl essentially locked seven worship team members in a room in December 2005. We wrote I Believe, a song you didn’t hear at Urbana and that you will only find on the Urbana 06 Worship CD (due out in April).
A number of team members came to the team with previously written songs that fit into the vision for the Urbana repertoire. Josh Koh wrote Satisfied during his experience with InterVarsity’s Chicago Urban Project in the summer of 2004. Con Mis Manos is a new arrangement of “an old school jam for Latinos,” as Melissa Vallejo puts it. The song is a Spanish hymn that Melissa sang as a kid, to which she added a modern flair in 1997. Edwin Santiago wrote the melody of Siempre while substitute teaching in 2005, and added the lyrics later, based on Psalm 34:1. Daryl contributed You Alone Are God and Santo, Santo, Santo, doing something new and writing a song in Spanish (with Melissa’s help with the translation).
I believe that God gave the Urbana 06 Worship Team an incredible gift as he inspired us to write new songs for Urbana, and that he had all of Urbana in mind when he did so. And in St. Louis, as God uniquely spoke through the speakers, the testimonies, the seminars, and the rest of the Urbana experience, you and I could uniquely speak back to him praise and thanks and prayers that reflected what we were experiencing as a community. My vision is that as God gave the Worship Team these new songs to lead you all into responding to him through worship that he also gives these songs to you to use on your campuses and at your churches, not only to bring a little bit of Urbana 06 home, but to lead others to “Sing to the Lord a new song.”
Check http://www.urbana.org/u2006.worshiparts.cfm for chord sheets of some songs written for and sung at Urbana 06.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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