The influence the song has had beyond that still amazes me.¶Ī few thoughts though: write the Bible into your lyrics, write memorable melodies, have someone in leadership in your church screen and challenge your lyrics, be open to feedback! “Mighty to Save” was written for our local church. It can be a distraction trying to write a ‘global’ song when really we have an immediate responsibility and commitment to serve our own local church, to write for and into our own communities. I think on a practical level for songwriters we always need to have our local church in mind. So it can feel trivial to try and break down what gives a song influence in the Church. What necessary elements make a worship song widely accepted?īF: God uses obvious and obscure things and both obvious and obscure people. WL: “Mighty to Save” has been incorporated into services around the globe. God is able to take a song from a living room in the suburbs of Sydney to places we could have never imagined. It is deeply encouraging and humbling at the same time to realize that it is all by God’s grace. It still blows me away to read and hear stories of “Mighty to Save” connecting with people at defining moments in their life, as it has in my own life. That particular song spoke to a period of time we were at in our own church life. It’s the kind of moment you live for as a songwriter. I’ll still never forget the first night I heard our local church singing that song. We showed “Mighty to Save” to a few of our key team and it made its way on to the setlist for a Sunday night service at our Hills Campus. Our writers are almost always writing, and almost always showing each other ideas and collaborating. I like to think Hillsong Church has a great culture around songwriting. WL: When did you first share this song with others and what happened to it from there?īF: I love being a part of a songwriting community. It helps a lot to be on the same page at the outset. We have learned to set clear direction for our co-writing.
Effective collaboration doesn’t hold back the best ideas, but it gives them away, believing that they will be replaced by even greater ideas. Over the course of several months we wrote and rewrote verses and bridges with literally hundreds of ideas that never made it through. It meant finishing “Mighty to Save” was a lengthy process. I’ve learned to push harder and to aim higher. I’ve learned a lot from other writers through co-writing, none more than Reuben, who I believe is undisputedly one of the greatest and most prolific songwriters for the Church on the planet today. He will rework an idea, a melody, a lyric over and over until the options are exhausted and the best option rises to the surface. Reuben is brilliant at the craft of songwriting and more specifically rewriting. “Mighty to Save” was the first song we ever finished together.Ĭo-writing seems to magnify inspiration, the craft and the hard work. Reuben and I have been friends since I was 15 years old and that helps a lot when co-writing, to feel comfortable to present ideas and to be honest throughout the process. “Mighty to Save” certainly had its share of each. I don’t know of any song I have written or co-written (that I like) where these three elements haven’t coexisted. WL: Tell us a bit more about your process of co-writing this song?īF: Songwriting is part inspiration, part craft and part really hard work. We definitely didn’t realize at the time the significance of that decision, as we began to sing the words “mighty to save.” We had sort of reached a dead end and decided to move on to a new idea. On the day we began working on “Mighty to Save,” Reuben and I were sitting in his living room working on another song. “Mighty to Save” comes straight from Zephaniah 3:17, God is with us, he delights in us, his heart is towards us. There’s nothing better than sitting down to write and having a thought from God’s word bubbling up and spilling out onto the page. It’s almost as if Jesus was talking directly to songwriters.
Jesus said “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45). God is all about restoring people to himself. We see it every week in our church, Hillsong. Our God who is all powerful, chooses not to turn his power against us, but towards us, drawing us to himself, writing us into a new story-his salvation story. WL: Tell us about the circumstances surrounding the writing of “Mighty to Save”?īen Fielding: “Mighty to Save” is a song that came not from one situation or circumstance in our lives, but as the sum of many. (Originally published in Worship Leader March/April 2012.) Written by Reuben Morgan and Ben Fielding
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