GRAHAM KENDRICK has been called the greatest living composer of hymns and worship songs. Tony Cummings quizzed the man.

I guess we hit a sound, I guess we got the right sound. John Pantry produced that and I think he broadened the folkey sound and made it more interesting. Synthesizers had just appeared and we had this synthesizer, a Moog, and so there were some fresh, interesting sounds on there. We had some good songs on there. I guess an enduring album is often because there are a few memorable songs. One of the songs, in fact the title 'Paid On The Nail1 came from it, was called "How Much Do You Think You Are Worth?" which I actually still occasionally sing. Though I don't do concerts anymore. So maybe that was what it was, we had a sound that had cohesiveness to it, we had some good songs, the moment was right, that's all I can suggest as to why it's been regarded as a classic album. I don't mind listening to it now actually, which is saying something.

Over a few years Britain's pop gospel scene grew from being very Mickey Mouse to something where Buzz or Youth For Christ could organise a concert and fill the Albert Hall. Were you flattered to be playing 'big time' gigs like the Albert Hall?

Oh yes. I'm sure I was. It's hard not to be impressed with doing something at the Albert Hall you know. I think it genuinely reflected that there was a new movement which was desperately trying to relate to contemporary culture because you see the church just got totally left behind in the 60s, or most of it. The church always tends to take a decade to catch up with contemporary culture, things move so quickly. A whole youth culture developed in the 60s with the Beatles and everything, we started having terms like "teenagers' and so on, and it was absolutely vital that the church began to find ways of communicating to this new subculture, in fact it was almost every young person in the country. So the fact that it was growing to a stage that you could fill the Albert Hall was a good thing. Now I'm sure if we were able to jump into Dr Who's Tardis and travel back there and sit in the back row we'd probably cringe a lot of the time, we took ourselves so seriously most of the time.

How did the transition from performance-oriented pop gospel to praise and worship take place?

'I think it was a gradual process - the first step was personally discovering worship on a level I hadn't previously experienced, worship in the Spirit, then deciding that I would attempt writing songs that expressed that. In fact one of the things I struggled with in those early days was that so many of the new songs that were appearing on the scene I found rather lightweight and even banal in some cases but I couldn't deny there was something special, that something happened when we sang them. There was a new dimension of worship which somehow these choruses, with all their weaknesses were allowing to happen. So I thought the only possible reaction because I was a songwriter to this criticism was to say, 'OK let's try and write better ones' so I began just occasionally to attempt to write worship songs. A song called 'Jesus Stand Among Us At The Meeting Of Our Lives' was the first song of mine to become popular to some degree. At that time I remember with the team I was working with we had a whole week where we went away and stayed in someone's house with the simple aim of producing some worship songs. We had many, many hours of worship and praying and out of that quite a number of ideas emerged. If you like we created a stimulating environment. I was the one who was writing the stuff mostly but the other members of the team were creating the stimulating environment. A number of songs came out of that. Another landmark on the way was I was at that time recording songs, I guess now we're talking 1977. 78 and Geoff Shean who was running Kingsway Music at that time discovered that I had this stockpile of worship songs that nothing had been done with. He already had a vision for worship songs, the whole Songs Of Fellowship he was involved in that in those days, and he persuaded me to actually record an album of these worship songs. I think it came out in 78.

Was there a major difference between recording worship material & recording praise and worship songs?

Obviously the process is very similar but with a worship album you're trying to capture an atmosphere that people can relate to with worship and with the 'Fighter', which I recorded the same year as the 'Jesus Stand Among Us' we were trying to challenge, wake people up, get people to listen. It's much more of a performance. Both things were perfectly valid in the context of what I was doing at the time and the interesting thing is that they seemed to coexist side by side very happily. Spring Harvest started around about that sort of time and immediately there was a need for new songs, there was a sense of the leadership saying we need songs that are uniquely suited to this event and we need songs that express where this whole movement is going. So that was a new demand and a new platform. Of course Spring Harvest started fairly small, just a couple of thousand people, but as it grew and as my role within it as worship leader developed, so it became a matter of course for me to present to the selection committee several songs for inclusion in the programme. And that kind of accelerated the whole process so I reached a crisis point I guess about six or seven years ago now where it became obvious that I couldn't do justice to both the concert performance side of my work and the demands of the worship side. I'd just written a book on worship and that brought a new dimension in because people were beginning to recognise that I had a gift in leading worship but whether I had anything to say, a brain as well, was another question. So writing the book on worship did me a lot of good because I don't think I had a very clear theology of worship up to that point and it helped me gain a whole understanding of the subject from a Biblical point of view. But of course it created demand for me to go and speak on worship and so on. So I had been working with Geoffrey Stevenson who many people will know is an excellent mime artist and we'd been touring universities, colleges, churches and so on with a music and mime presentation. So we had to choose really and I felt the future lay for me personally - though both were very good things - the direction I should go towards was giving my time to the whole area of praise and worship, on various levels: teaching. writing, leading worship, writing worship songs, recording worship albums. So that was a very significant decision about six or seven years ago and I've hardly done a concert since.

Spring Harvest was the key platform in seeing your career as a major praise and worship songwriter wasn't it?

I think it must be the major platform for my songs. But it's hard to pin down. There have been other elements as you say, the publishing side and the tapes that have got around. But obviously it has given me face to face contact with a large number of people, it's not just the songs it's I think people have felt they've got to know me and I've got to know them in that kind of context. I think that's very important actually, one of the things that people look for in a worship leader is someone that they feel comfortable and reasonably safe with, not too safe because that would be boring but safe enough so that we're not going to ask them to do something totally embarrassing. Now you can't please everybody but I do try and make everybody feel at ease because when people are at ease they start to open up and you can't worship God from the depths of your heart.

Don't you think some people have said that you've used Spring Harvest as a platform to promote your own career?

Probably. No one has said it to my face but there's bound to be those kind of questions raised. I think everyone knows that the Christian publishing world to some degree revolves around an event like Spring Harvest because they're an excellent platform for presenting new products. There's obviously a danger in that. There is also a great opportunity in that. I think it just comes down to people in a position to initiate things being responsible and making sure that what they're offering is useful for the people who are going and is not just going to be away of shifting stock that's actually not going to do anybody any good. So that's always the danger to make sure that the integrity is there.

So how would you define worship?

I often start by giving a definition of worship in terms of where the word comes from which is "worth-ship" in the Old English, expressing the worth or value of something. I also believe that every human being has the inbuilt capacity to worship: we will always end up worshipping something, we're created that way. The problem is we worship the wrong things. We all have the capacity for worship, to express love, to express appreciation and praise to our Creator so it's very clearly a creator/ creature relationship. It has not only a physical dimension of making verbal expressions and physical expressions but it has a spiritual dimension, in fact probably Jesus' most comprehensive statement upon worship is in his conversation with the Samaritan woman where he defines true worshippers as those who worship the Father in spirit and in truth. So everybody's a worshipper of something but to be a true worshipper requires a relationship with God as Father. It requires that your spirit is made alive so that you can relate to God in a supernatural dimension and requires that your worship is done according to truth as it is revealed through Christ and set out in the Scriptures. So that if you like is a definition of genuine Christian worship as opposed to any other kind of worship, worship the Father in Spirit and in truth.

But worship doesn't necessarily need the vehicle of singing.