Over 30 people gathered for the Wesleyan Songwriters Summit at College Church of the Nazarene in Bourbonnais, Illinois, held 1-3 August.

The participants — predominantly Nazarene worship leaders and ministers — engaged in songwriting sessions and workshops over the three days to help promote more Wesleyan Holiness-based worship songs not only being sung by churches but also written and shared beyond.

While a keynote speaker addressed the group, much of the time together was spent in workshops simply writing worship music. Some groups joined together, while other participants went through the songwriting process as individuals.
Together, the group wrote over 10 worship songs during the event and debuted their songwriting work after the event.

The event theme was "Cultivating Creative Community." According to Danny Quanstrom, lead pastor of Hastings Church of the Nazarene in Michigan, the goal was to help promote more worship songwriting with a Wesleyan-Holiness theological base.

"We recognize that many of the songs we sing in [Wesleyan] churches, and the Wesleyan tradition, are not songs written by Wesleyan artists," Quanstrom said.

And while he doesn't think it's necessarily inappropriate, he recognized the lack of Wesleyan songwriting, especially in contemporary worship music. Quanstrom noted that part of what it means to be Wesleyan is to sing together.

"The Methodist movement would not have been what it was if not for the hymns of Charles and John Wesley," Quanstrom said. "Functionally, we seem to have forgotten that part of what it means to be Wesleyan is to write songs and to sing together the theology of the Church."

Organizers of the summit sought to accomplish its theme of "Cultivating Creative Community" by turning the weekend into more of a collaborative workshop than a conference.

"We wanted to give people an experience of what it feels like to collaborate on songwriting for the church so that they can go back into their local churches and find the two or three people who might become their collaborators back home and keep it going," said Brannon Hancock, associate pastor, and worship leader at Marion First Church of the Nazarene in Indiana.

Hancock, who also teaches worship at Indiana Wesleyan University, led a workshop and three songwriting groups and was encouraged by the songs the groups created.

"Even in my fairly random decisions about splitting my group into the smaller pods of songwriters, [I] just trusted the Holy Spirit would put the right people together and that it would be fruitful," Hancock said. "Then to see what they came up with was really encouraging."

Both Hancock and Quanstrom stressed the importance of examining the theology of worship music.

"When we're making decisions about the songs that we sing, we are choosing the theology that we're placing in the mouths of our people," Hancock said. "Those decisions we're making about the songs we sing are so important because we're making decisions about the theological and spiritual formation of our congregations."