By Haley Scott Parker
Samford’s Center for Worship and the Arts (CWA) is inviting students and faculty alike to participate in the songwriting workshop series, Worship Exchange.
Funded by a grant from Belmont University’s Creative Arts Collective for Christian Life & Faith, the series will consist of four workshops from March to September. In these workshops, participants will be grouped into teams of three to five to collaborate and create more than just a song.
Daniel Lee, program manager for the CWA, is eager to see what could come of this project.
“Hopefully, with three to five people working together on songs, their co-labor in kind of an iron sharpens iron way produces the song but also produces character in the songwriters themselves that we hope would come from a practice like this,” said Lee.
The goal of these workshops is for songwriters to gain resources and produce “realistic community music,” said Lee. Groups will write roughly three to four songs that are meant to be taken into their personal church communities.
These groups will receive professional coaching from songwriters and worship leaders throughout their sessions. During the first session, Rachel Wilhelm, a Nashville-based songwriter and worship leader, will be providing guidance through her experience in the music industry.
For students like Cate Curtis, a sophomore worship leadership major, these workshops are providing an opportunity to build the foundation of a music career and fill the gaps in her songwriting journey.
“I want to gain experience. I want to learn how to do what I want to do. I can listen to music all I want and try to recreate it, but it’s not the same thing as actually knowing the underlying aspects that you don’t get without the actual training of it,” said Curtis about what she hopes to gain from the Worship Exchange experience.
The first session of the Worship Exchange series will take place on March 5 at 11:30 a.m. in Divinity North 101. For more information, contact Daniel Lee at dlee11@samford.edu.
