My Own Little World

In my last post, I covered all the reasons why I did not like Hillsong for the longest time. Those of you that are Hillsong fans may be wanting to ask me a lot of questions, but I am confident that many of them will be answered in the following words. Leading worship over the past few years has shown me one of the coolest things about Hillsong: it is an incredible resource for churches around the world. No other worship band that I know of could write at least ten new songs each year and not have them all be awful. If a church were to use Hillsong exclusively as their song catalog for worship, they would have an extremely robust selection of songs to sing. My perception of United has begun to change over the past couple years. Specifically, their 2013 studio album Zion is what changed my view of Hillsong in general. On Zion was a collection of songs that were God-focused and wildly original in their music. It was almost unrecognizable as a Hillsong album due to their house...

As my few regular readers will note, I have started to preface my music reviews with a little background on my thoughts going into my listening of an album. In preparation for my review of Hillsong Worship's (formerly Hillsong Live) upcoming album No Other Name , I felt that I needed to elaborate on my thoughts surrounding the Hillsong brand due to some past comments I have made about their music. This is the first part of a two-part series on this topic. Hillsong is probably one of the most famous names in Christian music, but most casual listeners will not realize that Hillsong is actually the name of a megachurch in Sydney, Australia, that identifies with the Pentecostal tradition. Within the church, there are several different bands that all serve different purposes. For this first writing, I will limit them to Live (the main worship team) and United (the youth band). There are and were many more, but these are the only two that have stood the test of time and stayed releva...