One of our worship leaders, Matt Papa, often says that songs are sermons people remember. I still remember the first time I heard him say that: it didn’t give me warm fuzzies. (After all, I’m the guy preaching the sermons.) But once I got over my pride, I was able to see where he was coming from. There’s something about music that can accomplish in four minutes what a preacher can’t in 40. Music gets lodged in your mind. It bounces around your head when you aren’t even thinking about it. In short, it sticks. And that’s a large part of why, last year, we officially launched The Summit Church Music, our very own record label.
Not every church has a record label, of course. And not every church should. But it struck us a few years back that God had given us some incredibly talented singers, songwriters, and musicians. Every week, they would lead our church in worship…singing other people’s songs. So we asked ourselves, “What might it look like if we gave these guys a chance to write songs for us?”
The result was better than we could have imagined. These songwriters produced songs that were real-time accounts of what God was doing in our church. They reflected what we were learning and how we were growing deeper in the gospel. And they were catchy.
We explored what it might mean to get more of this music into the hands (ears?) of our people. Because one of our Summit plumblines is that the week is more important than the weekend, we wanted to equip people to use this music in discipleship the other six days of the week. After all, we make our sermons available to people throughout the week. Why not the songs?
The Summit Church Music (TSCM) has only been off the ground for a matter of months, but already the songs have played a huge role in getting the message of the gospel into the hearts of our people. As I said when the first album was released, TSCM brings you back to the cross and the glory of God again and again. And it does so with top-notch instrumentation, vocal mixes, and production quality. My own kids, for instance, won’t stop singing the songs TSCM has recorded for Summit Kids. When they released “We Are” last summer, my four-year-old gave the sincerest praise imaginable: he sang it every hour of every day for a period of two weeks.
I’m thankful for what The Summit Church Music has to offer our church, and I pray that their “4-minute sermons” will help us all drive our roots deeper into the gospel, every day of the week.
TSCM has released an exclusive 3-song digital album as a free—yes, really free—download. The album was written to go along with our current sermon series, “Broken Saviors,” to remind us that there is only true God and Savior and King—Jesus. Pick up your copy here today.
