Songwriting - Personal Opinion

I spent slightly more than a month on night-time gig. It was an interesting one, an eye-opener for me in many aspects. We would regularly do a particular song as an instrumental, featuring a performer on the soprano saxophone. And after our set one of the singers would get on stage and sing the same song, but poorly (it seemed like he was making up all the lyrics as he went along, and in very weak English).

Our drummer would comment, "There are how many billion songs on this planet, why must he choose that one?"

That quite sums up my attitude towards songwriting for worship and for church use. We have a crazy number of songs available for church use these days, why would we need to write more?

Of course, I know that is my personal opinion, and there are people in the body of Christ gifted and tasked to write more songs for church use. Barring any major changes, I won't do that myself, because:

1) There is no assurance what I write is worth using in church;

2) Even if it is worth using in church, it will still need lots of time and exposure to make it something usable, with the potential of becoming what I call a Fallback Worship Song. Given that there are many great songs already available and in use, should my time and effort be put there?

3) I am not in the worship music business, with a quota of albums to create, produce and market. If you are, that's great for you. Be faithful to what God has put in your hand, OK? I am not, and so I see no need to come up with more songs to add to the millions already out in the church music scene.

That said, I wrote a few songs more than 10 years ago. I might get around to recording them and putting them up somewhere. But don't hold your breath, I am no Chris Tomlin, in either quantity or quality of songwriting. I do better in taking someone else's song and making it better! :)