Aim

This essay is about the relationship between God, music and me. God gives us abilities and he expects us to use them in his service. When we do, he blesses the outcome and often it seems that more is achieved than otherwise might have been expected. I hope that you may feel inspired by that and know the reality of being part of something much bigger than you ever imagined. I will describe episodes in my musical life from which I have learned things: about God, about people and about me. As for the expression ‘singing in tongues’, I owe that to a very special person, as you’ll see.

I believe that the ordinary, the obviously possible in human terms is the very least that we should be seeking to bring before God and to deploy in his service. As I said many years ago in an address to the church of which I was treasurer at the time, if God is truly who we believe him to be then what is the problem?! Author John Ortberg got it right: if you want to walk on water, you’ve got to get out of the boat. You have to trust that God will enable you to achieve the truly exceptional, however impossible that may seem.

Whether or not the lessons that I have learned are applicable to you or to others is not for me to say but they might stimulate discussion. So I invite you to kiss goodbye to the mundane: get out of the boat and walk on water!

The Girl From Okinawa

She was twenty-four back then. Born in Okinawa, she had been living in Prague for eight years, studying piano. She did concert work occasionally and was in the process of recording a concerto by Shostakovich. In addition to her native Japanese she spoke both Czech and English. She was a regular at the church in Prague of which I was then the principal pianist and she filled in for me occasionally. The fact that my unofficial deputy was a trilingual Japanese professional pianist appealed to my sense of the ridiculous.

Since becoming a Christian and before meeting the girl from Okinawa I had never been aware of having any particular ability that I would not otherwise have had. I absorbed languages without conscious effort and the same was true of playing the piano. This young Japanese woman changed my perception of myself. She walked over to me after a Sunday morning service in early 1999 and said, “I have a favour to ask. Could you compose for me something that helps me to play the piano like you do?” I was puzzled. I asked what I could possibly teach a professional pianist. Her response stunned me. “You don’t understand,” she said gently, “I play the notes but you sing in tongues with your hands on the piano.” To this day that is the most beautiful thing that anyone has said to me.

In that moment I realised with absolute clarity why people in churches responded to my piano playing in the way that they did. If anyone other than this young pianist were to have said such a thing, I’m not sure that I would have paid it much attention, but discernment of this nature is a precious commodity in somebody whose abilities and experience command respect in others. The resulting composition was my Toccata for piano.

The Old Man Of Chacewater

At the start of my second year at university God turned me into a Christian. Just one short prayer, one night’s sleep and that was it. I woke up changed and other people could see it. Frankly I felt rather dazed by the suddenness of it but after a week I managed to get my thoughts in order. Concluding that my recently completed Concert Te Deum belonged to my old life, I tore it up, binned it and have never attempted to resurrect it.

Then I realised that I had lost all ability to compose music. I assumed, wrongly, that God was saying, “This is part of your old life”. In fact he was helping me to get my priorities right, but it took the death of a friend’s father-in-law to make me realise that.

In May 1977 an ancient man in the Cornish village of Chacewater died. When he was much younger he’d fallen overboard from a boat in the middle of a large lake in Ireland. This was not good news because he could not swim and had felt himself sinking. The next moment he had found himself alone on a beach, very much alive. During his funeral service we read a paraphrase of Psalm 23. Standing outside the church afterwards, his daughter asked me to set it to music. I explained my situation but promised to try. I prayed about it and completed The Shepherd Psalm in two days.

Clearly God wanted me to compose but I had learned two valuable lessons. First, I should never jump to conclusions about what God is saying. Second, God has given me this ability in order to serve other people.

Let Go And Let God

Before graduating from university I had been offered a job that would require me to move to Reading. My fiancée and I were thinking of joining a church to the west of the town centre. One Friday evening, on learning that I intended to move to Reading, the speaker at our Christian Union meeting asked me if I had a church lined up. I got no further than “I was thinking of …” before he interrupted me with “Come to Wycliffe! We can find you somewhere to live.” He put me in touch with a couple of postgraduate students who had a room available for one month and I started attending Wycliffe Baptist Church in July 1977. One month later I took up lodging with two other people from Wycliffe until my fiancée and I bought our first house.

Once at Wycliffe I had been co-opted into playing a worn-out piano at one prayer meeting. Afterwards somebody said to me, “I know that piano is out of tune and probably beyond repair, but I can tell from the way you played it that you’re a real pianist and it’s good that you’re here.” Shortly after that the church started holding music workshops. I went along with no particular agenda in mind. Within minutes one young woman had me helping her to write a new song. One month later there came a point where everyone just looked at me and said, “Conduct us!” Two years later I was asked to become Wycliffe’s Music Co-ordinator, a post I held until my family moved to Wiltshire at the start of 1988.

I learned a number of things through this. When God wants me to do something or go somewhere he doesn’t beat about the bush. He only ever opens one door at a time because he knows that otherwise I’d go through the wrong door. He expects me to respond to the needs of others and get on with it, without questioning what is being asked of me. Sometimes that takes me in some bizarre directions, such as when I ended up conducting two of my compositions at concerts in the USA in April 2015.

Music Dogsbody

Depending on the time of year, up to 60% of Wycliffe’s congregation could be students. There were two regular organists and a choir, though the choir had given up by the time I became Music Co-ordinator. Reading had eight Baptist churches alone and many other denominations besides, giving the students plenty of choice. So if we wanted them to stay at Wycliffe we were going to have to work at it: and that applied as much to me as Music Co-ordinator as to anyone else. Wycliffe held morning and evening services each Sunday. My responsibilities included the obvious things: selecting the hymns and other songs for services, introducing new songs from time to time, finding instrumentalists and singers to lead the music from week to week and playing the piano myself.

We tried a rota system for the musicians but abandoned it fairly quickly. People didn’t want to be bound by a rigid calendar, so we ended up having to make changes to the rota anyway. In any case, I got the feeling that maintaining consistency of musical standards was important for the students and other younger people. It's easier to invite non-Christian friends to church if the experience matches up to expectations and clearly the standard of the music is a factor in that. So we had a core group of musicians who did most of the music and various others who helped out from time to time. This required more work from the core group and me, but it delivered a better and more consistent standard of music for the congregation. The core group needed also to be able to play without sheet music because one never knew quite what one was going to be asked to play or when.

My work didn’t end there. Everything to do with music at Wycliffe came initially to me. For the church’s centenary the elders agreed that we should include in an evening service the first three movements of Rachmaninov’s Vespers. I translated the Russian text into English and adjusted the result to fit Wycliffe’s doctrinal stance. Then I reduced the number of choral parts from twelve to six and wrote the whole thing out by hand. I pulled an ad hoc choir together for the purpose. It worked surprisingly well. On other occasions we did Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on Christmas Carols and Bach’s cantata BWV 140, Sleepers Wake! Music for weddings was often a particular challenge: for one I performed William Walton’s Crown Imperial on the church organ; for another, two friends and I performed Paul McCartney’s We All Stand Together.

Not infrequently I ended up composing something specific. O Bless The Lord My Soul and Communion In Light were composed for weddings. Advent Antiphon opened the 1978 carol service. Celebration Hymn was a setting of a poem by the church pastor. However my most significant work from that time was the cantata John's Account, which the church asked me to compose to celebrate the opening of a new suite of church halls.

For many of these music projects I co-opted people from the church who couldn’t read music and would never have considered volunteering had I not encouraged them to do so. I became known in Wycliffe as somebody who encouraged people to find musical abilities that they never knew they had. Interestingly, a university friend had once told me that I was to be a Barnabas, an encourager.

Our ability to do all of this had nothing to do with being a large church, because if one excluded the students, we weren't. Rather, it was down to our willingness to step out in faith and put in the necessary time and effort. We didn’t wait for people to come to us and volunteer themselves. We went to them, encouraged them and enabled them, believing that it made no sense for somebody to be in a place where their abilities are not being encouraged, developed and used.

Know Your Place

Occasionally people have asked my why it is, that when I’m playing piano or whatever in church I always remain in place even when the order of service doesn’t require me to play. To me it’s a no-brainer. I do not want an order of service to get in the way of me responding to whatever God may want me to do on the spur of the moment. Besides, I am not sure that other people want to sit there watching me trudge across the church just because I'm not where I need to be for whatever God decides is to happen next!

We were coming to the end of a baptismal service at Wycliffe Baptist Church. There were more than four hundred people in the congregation. As far as any of us musicians knew, we were done with music for the evening, having played everything on the order of service: but we all remained in our places. The pastor stood and faced the congregation. “Let’s all say the grace together!” he declared. So we did. Then he raised his arms above his head and with a slight sideways glance at me said one single word: “Rejoice!” With hardly any delay my hands hit the piano keyboard and the other musicians joined in when it made musical sense to do so. Led by us, the church launched into Graham Kendrick’s Rejoice, Rejoice! None of us had any sheet music, guitar chords or even lyrics in front of us. We played entirely from memory. Few if any of the congregation would have known that this was completely unplanned.

These experiences have taught me three significant things. First, I know from personal experience that God expects me to be ready to play at the drop of the proverbial hat. That means staying in my place. Second, even when I can’t imagine myself coping God does the coping for me. Third, in the interests of responding promptly and flexibly to the mood of the moment, you need a core of musicians who are comfortable operating without sheet music, chord sheets or whatever. My experiences many years later in Prague add weight to this. I remember well the first time I went to the church there in which I settled. With barely one minute to go to the service there was still nobody at the piano. I got up from my seat and approached the pastor. “I see you don’t have a pianist,” I said to him, “does that concern you?” He looked at me and replied, “Should it?” “No” I answered and walked over to the piano and played for that service. I played for most services over the next three years. The pastor’s view was that my place was at the piano and that’s where I should stay.

Inconvenience And Risk

A group of Christian musicians from Devizes and Melksham, including me, came together in late 1989 to form a band. We provided an itinerant music resource for churches and Christian meetings. This was a considerable time commitment for not only did we occasionally have to play at two services (in different places) each Sunday but also we had to carry a substantial load of sound equipment and turn up typically three hours in advance to get properly set up. At one such event the guest speaker came over to me and said out of the blue that God wanted me in music media ministry. The sheer diversity of what we did in those days still amazes me and it was a lesson in being prepared for anything.

The band took risks. We played a medley of Christian songs from a float in the Devizes Carnival one year, including Sovereign Jesus. As we passed one of the town-centre pubs several of the onlookers started to hurl coins at us. These were being thrown with considerable force, without regard for the damage they might inflict. One such missile hit our lead singer in the face with sufficient force to draw blood, only narrowly missing her right eye. A couple of other coin impacts caused superficial damage to my keyboard. A local newspaper gave us a good write-up but described the reactions of those onlookers as shameful.

Two lessons emerge from my time with the band. The first is pretty obvious: if you’re going to get out there and serve Jesus Christ, you have to be prepared for inconvenience, personal risk and even injury. The second is more subtle. Since around the mid-1990s the emphasis for new Christian songs has gradually shifted from congregation-focused to solo-focused. That matters, because the effective vocal range of a congregation is considerably less than that of a solo singer. That is why some of today's songs are too high or too low for everyone in a congregation to sing comfortably. In my own music I try to make a clear distinction between solo songs such as I Heard Your Voice, Step Into The Light, Fear To Faith and Vesi, and congregational songs such as Lord We Await, Beautiful Lord and Song Of The Saviour.

Healing

In 2010 two of my church friends lost their mothers under very different circumstances. The funerals were to be held on the same day, in different places. I wanted to pray for the families but could find no words. So I sat at my keyboard and played. With remarkably little editing the result was my Elegy For Strings. Shortly afterwards I was asked to compose an orchestral work for Christian Solidarity Worldwide, to raise awareness of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. The result was Prayer For Burma, with its gamelan influences.

Gradually I came to realise that God wanted me to use music to heal and to help people. O Love was written in memory of a woman who died aged only twenty-nine in tragic circumstances. During the dark time when Christians were being crucified in Iraq, I sat at the desk in a hotel room in Hanoi and wrote On That Cross. My magnum opus to date has been my 2015 concerto for clarinet, cimbalom and orchestra, entitled A Himalaya Concerto. It was written to raise awareness of the damage inflicted by the earthquakes in Nepal in April 2015. On a more personal level, A Celtic Benediction was my response to the death of my younger sister.

It is a humbling feeling to stand in a church seeing people with tears streaming down their faces as they sing one of my songs or listen to music written for them. Music has such potential to comfort and heal, that I encourage any church to explore this as part of its ministry.

At Home And Abroad

It’s not hard to deliver something in music that encourages and blesses people: you just need the imagination and sometimes the perseverance to see it through. The 2009 Christmas Carol Service at my local church featured two new Christmas carols that exemplify this: Glory, written by a friend of mine and arranged and performed on the night by me using my synthesiser rig; and Light In Darkness, which was wholly my own work. My setting of Jesus Christ Is Risen Today was an off-the-cuff response to something someone said at church.

I have learned also that if one lets God do the driving, he can make things happen even abroad through my music. I was absolutely amazed to discover that one of my choral arrangements of O Love had been sung by a choir in Indonesia at the start of a concert and by a church in Akron, Ohio during a communion service. Then again, there are other ways of serving as long as one regards oneself as being entirely at God’s disposal.

Collaboration

I am a perfectionist, which doesn't make collaborating with others as easy as perhaps it should be. Over the years God has made it easier for me to accommodate other people's ideas, to the point where collaborative projects now make up a significant proportion of my musical work. My most recent such project at the time of writing has been with an American friend, who asked me to set one of his poems to music. The result was Patriotic Confession. It may not be an absolute chart-topper but it gets its message across very effectively and I admit to liking it very much. The friend in question works with me for one of the charities of which I am a trustee. Two spin-offs from that charity's work have been An Omani Dance Suite, with its mix of Arabic and western modalities (and a young Lebanese woman dancing in a hijab!), and Angel Dance, which comes as close to trancy as anything I've ever written.

In 2024 I was contacted a choir in Cyprus, who asked me to provide a set of orchestral backing tracks for an album of well-known songs that they were producing. Working remotely on a project like that required a good deal of patience and commitment from all involved, but the results were encouragingly good. Stuart Townend's Power Of The Cross acquired a particular majesty and my own arrangement of Be Thou My Vision grew out of that project. I translated the latter into a rather lovely Romanian version also, besides adapting an existing poem in Bahasa Malay.

I have a friend living in North Wales who is not only a prolific songwriter but also was one of the musicians who performed my cantata John's Account in 1986. At his invitation, we have collaborated on the Christmas musical Wondrous Birth. Some of the songs work very well as stand-alone numbers, as my local church demonstrated at its 2024 Christmas carol service. Not all of my music is explicitly Christian, of course, though the people with whom I collaborate almost invariably are. My song cycle Idylls, for example, was written for a London-based Christian professional soprano.

Summing Up

I consider myself blessed. As a retired international development consult with experiences and friends all the way from Chile to Mongolia, Vietnam and Australia, it's not only other people who are touched by my life: I am touched by theirs also. When I sit in a street-food restaurant in Hanoi, a street-side grill in Tirana, a church in Câmpulung Moldovenesc or wherever; whether or not I understand what people around me are saying: I remind myself always that these are people, individuals just as I am. Their present reality is their only reality. These are people's sons and daughters. How could I not love them as God does?

Of all the countries in which I have worked Romania is closest to my heart. So let me leave you with this lovely rendition of A Celtic Benediction ... sung in Romanian. I continue to compose, arrange and generally offer myself as a music dogsbody to anyone, anywhere. If The Girl From Okinawa is to be believed and I genuinely do sing in tongues with my hands on the piano, then it’s only by God’s grace; and if using music for the edification and healing of souls is genuinely my contribution to the world, then ultimately it can only be to the glory of the God who inspires it: even when it's just a bit of fun for a choir in the Netherlands!

I could ask for nothing more.

6th July 2025