Journal
Written down, in between.
Essays from 2017 onwards — on loneliness, on faith, on what Christmas is actually for, and on where worship music came from. Not about the songs. The songs have their own pages.
It is written
What God says about your negative thoughts
Twenty-two thoughts, and the verse that answers each one. Not an essay. A page to take one screen at a time.
15 September 2026
Advent worship songs and hymns for church
What to sing on the four Sundays of Advent 2026: the traditional hymns and the handful of modern songs genuinely about waiting, mapped to the actual lectionary readings, with the data behind each one and an honest account of where the candle themes came from.
25 min read
12 September 2026
How to write a worship song a congregation can actually sing
Keep the melody between A3 and D5 and treat D5 as a place you visit rather than live. Write in C, G or D, which take 68% of what churches download, not the D flat that takes 16% of what gets recorded and none of what gets played. Shorten your phrases, move by step, repeat your rhythms, and demo it without the runs.
40 min read
10 September 2026
Free and legal Christian music: where to get it, and what you may do with it
Free splits into two questions with different answers. Hymnal.net, Hymnary, the Free Church of Scotland, HymnServe, IMSLP and Life.Church Open are genuinely free and say so in writing. What your church may then do with the music is decided by CCLI, PRS and PPL rather than by the download, and there is no religious-service exception in UK copyright law.
38 min read
8 September 2026
The top 10 Nigerian gospel songs
Way Maker, No Turning Back II, Olorun Agbaye, Excess Love, Too Faithful, B'Ola, Favour, Worthy of My Praise, Jireh and Eze Abata, ranked on TurnTable chart data and Spotify counts rather than taste, with every figure attributed to a named source on a named date.
14 min read
4 September 2026
The difference between gospel and worship music
Gospel is a genre and worship is a function, which is why they cannot be ranked against each other. Gospel is a category of sound with a datable history, an industry definition and a shelf in a shop. Worship is what a person does, and in the Bible the words for it come from prostration and paid labour, not from music at all.
45 min read
4 September 2026
It Is Well With My Soul: the story, the sources, and what the hymn says
Horatio Spafford wrote it after his four daughters drowned when the Ville du Havre sank on 22 November 1873, but three named sources give three different accounts of when, the manuscript is undated, and the telegram everyone quotes has four more words in it. Here is who said what, with dates, and then a reading of the four stanzas and the scriptures under them.
34 min read
1 September 2026
The 10 most powerful worship songs
How Great Is Our God, Amazing Grace, Way Maker, 10,000 Reasons, Goodness of God, What a Beautiful Name, It Is Well With My Soul, How Great Thou Art, Great Are You Lord and Holy Forever, ranked by how long congregations have kept singing them rather than by how they charted.
19 min read
17 November 2024
The evolution of worship music: a history of Christian music, with dates
Christians were singing within a generation of the crucifixion, and the three things that actually changed across nineteen centuries were not instruments. They were who was allowed to write, what could be counted, and where the songs come from: from clergy to the grandchildren of enslaved people, from no record at all to CCLI in 1988, and from Wittenberg to Lagos.
27 min read
24 October 2023
Christmas Bible verses, and what the Christmas story actually says
Fewer than you would think, and the ones people open most in December are mostly not the nativity at all, so here they are grouped by what they are for, with four things the Christmas story does not say, and an Advent calendar of 25 verses for the 25 days of December you can put straight into your phone.
27 min read
30 May 2023
Is music divine? Zephaniah 3:17 and the God who sings
Music reaches a person without asking permission, and Scripture says God sings too. So the question is not really whether music is divine; it is who is singing over you.
3 min read
19 March 2021
Faith, and my favourite verses
Faith comes by hearing; which means it is received rather than manufactured. These are the verses I keep returning to, and what each one has done in my own life.
3 min read
22 February 2021
Songwriter's memo: how Behold The Lamb was written
Behold The Lamb came out of a retreat I nearly didn't go on, a sleep I could not fight off, and the sense that someone else was in the room. The words arrived weeks later, out of Revelation 5.
4 min read
17 November 2017
The real reason for Christmas
I spent years trying to fill Christmas with new clothes, then friends, then food, then films, then a girlfriend. None of it held. The reason is Jesus; everything else is a gift with the giver left out.
8 min read
16 March 2017
Life, and what comes after
A plain account of what Christians believe about sin, the cross and what follows, written without scare tactics, with a prayer at the end for anyone who wants to say it.
9 min read
16 March 2017
Loneliness: a path out
Loneliness is not a shortage of people. It is a shortage of people you feel connected to; which is why it can happen inside a marriage, inside a family, and in the middle of a crowd.
8 min read
16 March 2017
The Blood: the verses behind the song
I wrote The Blood after a teaching on what the blood of Jesus actually accomplishes. These are the verses that convinced me it is not only history; that it is still doing something now.
3 min read