1. Our first meeting, and all the meetings for our first year, went easily: when everyone arrived, we sat in a circle. Each person had been invited to bring an instrument, along with any song that they’d been working on. I also made sure I had my own guitar handy in case anyone needed it.

We simply took turns going around the circle. Each person, on their turn, was allowed to play or talk about a song they were working on or an idea that needed development. If we went all the way around the circle and there was still time left, we’d let anyone interested have another turn. We kept all the meetings to about 90 minutes. We let it be known that people were free to come and go as needed, if they couldn’t be there the whole time — however, I encouraged everyone to stay as long as they could in order to be fair to each other. You don’t want to have people who just come to play their song and then leave before helping anyone else, unless they have a job, nursing baby, or something that prevents them from attending the whole session.

2. We let people bring their own songs and ideas. Sometimes I’d assign a topic to write about in between meetings, in case anyone needed ideas. So for instance, one month our theme was “sacrifice.” People who needed ideas had one month to write a song about sacrifice. Then at the monthly meeting, we all took turns sharing those songs.

3. It’s best for the writers involved to lay out the ground rules for co-writing in advance. In our case, we decided that if someone brought a song to the group, the others should freely offer advice without expecting to get a co-writing credit if their ideas were used.

If someone had a lot of ideas for another person, then both parties were free to decide together that they’d work on the song and each receive a co-writing credit. But if, for instance, I just gave someone an idea for a rhyme or a phrase, then that’s just freely offered advice. It remains the original person’s song, and I don’t get a songwriting credit for it.

4. Our worship arts pastor, Mike Cosper, chooses the songs. He confers with our lead teaching pastor, Daniel Montgomery, as well as others on occasion. I’m going to write more about his criteria in the next post in this series, but chief among them would be biblical accuracy and fitness for our corporate liturgy. Secondary (but also important) concerns would be things like originality, “catchiness,” and “singability.”

5. We mainly just play the songs, but anyone is free to talk about articles, books, and things like that. We have also hosted a couple songwriting seminars, and plan to do more in 2009, which get more technical in the amount of instruction provided.

6. Sometimes if I’d find a good article online, I would send a link in email to all the team members.

7. Once a month for the first year. We meet on a less regular basis now, as far as the “official” Sojourn Church workshops go, but this is partly because we were able to develop a tight songwriting community where various people became friends and felt comfortable sharing songs with each other on a regular basis.

8. For awhile we had a private blog (I used Blogger for that, because it was free and easy to set up) but most of our writers prefered meeting in person to sharing in the online forum so we haven’t kept the blog up. But many of us do record demos to mp3 and email them as attachments to each other, with a note saying, “What do you think of this?”

How does a first meeting goes?
What song do you choose to work as a team?
What about at the end who i the author of the song?
Who chooses what song get to be sang in church and under what criteria?
Do you study sonwriting articules in this meeting or just play the songs?
If yes, you read the articles there or send it by mail and just comment about the article?
How often do you met?
Where can we upload the tracks to share them with one another?

Sorry, for so manny questions, I don’t spect an anserw for every single question, but those are some of the thing that are in my head…
Blessings
jv