A great book on the theme of worship written for this year's Spring Harvest festival. All contributors bring a different perspective to the theme of worship with a good mixture of practical and academic. All are passionate about worship and I would fully recommend this book if you are too

I’ve been following Tim Hughes’ music since I bought one of his CDs in a Wesley Owen shop (remember them?) in Leeds in 2003, and when I saw this book start to be mentioned on Twitter, I knew I needed to read it – seeing it on NetGalley just sealed the deal for me.

The book is split into 4 parts:

Who and why we worship
Where and how we worship
What happens when we worship?
The Future


Each section is split into multiple chapters, each written by a different contributor, including Graham Kendrick and Lou Fellingham. I loved this as it means you get a different (and expert) perspective and you see each contributor’s passion for their subject shine from the pages.

I don’t know about other people, but usually when I hear the word worship, I immediately think about singing and music. This book cracks that open and explores how worship means so much more, it’s how we live our lives in pursuit of relationship with God.

“Worship is about the mess and fragility of humanity being caught up in the perfection and love of divinity.”


Similarly, when I think of worship, I often think of positivity, and how worship can feel like a struggle when you’re going through a hard time. When singing praise just doesn’t feel right because of the time you find yourself in. But as the book says:

“When we worship, we can be filled with joy no matter what our circumstances are. We can find reason to hope even when all around us seems bleak.”


This has become more and more apparent over the last year when bleakness has been a dominating emotion, with fear, sadness and isolation taking over.

Even when it doesn’t change our circumstances, praise often changes our perspective.


Filled with biblical references, my particular favourite chapters were the three at the start which discussed separately how we worship the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, so much more in depth than I’ve ever gone before.

This book is apparently the Spring Harvest 2021 theme book, and I’m really glad that it will be read more widely as I think there’s a lot to take from it.

The NetGalley copy I have will disappear in a few days and I’m sad about that because I think this book is the kind that will deliver new insights each time you read it, so I’m definitely going to have to find myself a paper copy to dive back into.