songserve

Firstly thanks for taking time to look at the site. The vision of this site is very simply to bring glory to God. The first line of the Lord's prayer says:

"Our Father in heaven hallowed be thy name."

Too often I have skipped quickly through this to get to whatever I was really praying about. However recently I have become convinced that the desire to see God glorified is the starting point of every other good thing. He is glorified through establishing his kingdom, through provision, protection and deliverance. The evangelist David Nasmith sent missionaries out in the 19th Century with the following instructions:

"Let the glory of God and the salvation of souls be your chief, your only end."

Multitudes were saved and the poor were so well cared for that Great Britain avoided a revolution similar to the one seen in France. For this site to work the desire to praise has to enter into the hearts of people.

• Please join with other users of this site in praying for an infectious and unstoppable tide of worship to rise up around the globe.
• Ask God to raise up worshippers who will worship him in spirit and truth.
• Pray for new songs, rhythms and sounds.
• Pray for people to have intimate times of personal devotion.
• Pray teams of musicians and singers will find each other and new bands to form.
• Pray for worship to flow out into the public places: parks, streets, hillsides and sports stadiums.
• Pray more and more believers would pick up instruments or be able to lift their voice in praise.
• Pray that every spiritual and physical obstacle that hinders worship would be removed.
• Pray for unity of heart in the place of worship.

My hope is that through this site and others like it some anointed songs and times of worship can be captured and spread. I would love to be able visit this site and be able to hear fresh sounds of praise from around the world. Please pray for a great community of worshippers and that songs would leap quickly across national boundaries. Please pray this site would be discovered by more and more people each day.

The second thing that is needed is people with a passion for computers, programming, art and graphics. There are some truly amazing things which are possible with emerging web technologies. Please pray God would supply all the talented technical and artistic people needed. Pray for groups that really work well together.

Give us the tools and we will finish the job

Please pray for the continued freedom of the Internet. There are many challenges to freedom of speech and we need to pray this door remains open. Pray specially for ISPs at the moment as there is pressure being placed on them by governments to censor the Internet.

Please pray the song sharing software would be world class and respected and used secular musicians. As Christians we are called to bless and serve everybody and one way to do this would be to give everybody a great pieces of free software.

"In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven."

Copyright

To date most worship songs are released under a traditional copyright this makes it very hard to share these songs legally. Things like CCLI licences make this a bit easier at the church level. I would be very keen to see Song Server deployed at the church level so that each church can have it on a password protected members directory on their web site. Members of the church could then have access to all the songs the church uses at any time and in any location. The server could then track song usage in home groups, personal devotion and church services. This would lead to very accurate reporting of song usage and so artists can receive the royalties they are due through the CCLI. Most churches have a CCLI licence so this would mean that Christians attending a church would have great freedom to copy music and lyrics within the church. Music would be free at the point of use and the CCLI licence paid for by the church out of offerings. This means people on low incomes can still worship from a large collection of songs as the cost is distributed across the church and artists still get royalties in proportion to the amount their song is used. CCLI licences seem to me to be good value but the language is geared towards worship service use only and not home groups or personal devotion. So I would very much value your prayers as I begin to talk to all the parties involved about copyright.

• Please pray that all the legal an bureaucratic barriers to worship would be removed and that worshippers would be free to worship God with any song at any time.
• Please pray for favour with CCLI and Christian publishing companies and established musicians and songwriters.
• Please pray for provision songwriters, musicians and publishers. Pray that anointed songs could reach the widest number of people.
• Please pray for more artists to use licences such as the Creative Commons one which enable free distribution.