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How an Australian Church Is Changing Christian Songwriting
Let me tell you what church was like when I was a kid in the olden days—about three or four decades ago.
I grew up attending a small Christian Reformed Church in the cornfields of Iowa. Our worship was formal: I wore a dress and sat with my family on a hard wooden pew. When it was time to sing, we opened our hymnals to songs like “How Great Thou Art,” “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Nearly every song had a “thee” or “thou” in it and the hymns in our repertoire were, on average, about 150 years old.
Today, my church doesn’t have a piano, much less an organ. The worship team uses a keyboard, guitars, and drums to accompany our singing. We don’t have songbooks either—the lyrics pop up onto the wall. We still sing hymns, but the average age of our worship songs is about seven years old.
I know I’m not the only one to experience this shift. Surveys tell us that in the 20 years from 1998 to 2018, more congregations have set up projectors, hauled in drum sets, and begun to raise their hands in worship.
The study authors speculate one reason might be our culture’s growing informality. We don’t address our neighbors or even our bosses as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” anymore. We don’t often wear suits or dresses to work, or even to church. Moving from hymnals to screens, then, might say less about our theology and more about our larger culture.
That’s interesting. But here’s what’s even more fascinating: the songwriting process has changed. It’s a lot faster—both the pace at which songs are written and the pace at which they are released and grab attention. The language is more casual. And sometimes the theology isn’t as careful as it could or should be.
At least one church noticed these problems and tried a different songwriting process. It was slow and clunky and never should have worked—and yet it did.
I can’t wait to share their story, and what they learned, with you.
Not a Real Band
CityAlight is relatively new to the Christian music scene—they first hit Spotify with the song “Jerusalem” in 2015 and grabbed attention with “Yet Not I but Through Christ in Me” in 2018. With a boost from internet searches and at-home worship during the pandemic, CityAlight has grown to more than 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
In September 2023, more than 6,000 people worshiped with CityAlight at The Gospel Coalition’s national conference. I was one of them, and I was thrilled because some of my favorite worship songs are CityAlight’s—“Yet Not I but Through Christ in Me,” “This Is the Day,” and “Saved My Soul.”
I was also excited because I knew CityAlight was popular, and I loved that they made time for TGC in their busy touring and songwriting schedule.
On the conference’s second day, I said as much to Ann Westrate, our events director. She confirmed CityAlight was hard to schedule, but not because they had to fit us in around other performances.
CityAlight leading worship at TGC’s national conference in 2023 / Courtesy of TGC
“They had to ask for time off of work because they have day jobs,” she said. “They’re teachers and graphic designers and stuff like that. They just all go to the same church and play in the worship team.”
It took me a minute to catch on. The people who wrote and sang “Only a Holy God” weren’t professional musicians? The group with more than a million monthly listeners on Spotify isn’t a real band?
“We only have one person on staff who looks after CityAlight,” said singer Tiarne Tranter. “Everyone else still has a day job. Everyone else is a volunteer. So we struggle to find time to rehearse because everyone’s life is so busy, and we’re actually not paid to do this. And so other than the intensity of it, the mission hasn’t changed. The day-to-day hasn’t changed. We still meet in the church building. We’re still serving in our Bible studies. We’re still serving on teams on Sunday. I think people would be surprised by the amateur nature of what we’re doing over here—if you could see the day-to-day stuff, I think that people would be shocked.”
Most of the time, Tiarne is a high school PE teacher and a mom. She plans lessons, does laundry, and goes to Bible study. She just happens to be part of a church that takes worship songs really seriously and is doing things really differently.
Church Plant in Criminal Barracks
CityAlight’s story begins nearly 200 years ago, when a church was planted in Castle Hill, Australia. The church’s first building was more ominous than a theater or a school gym—it was originally built as barracks for convicted criminals shipped over from England, then spent 15 years as a institution for the mentally ill before becoming the home for St. Simon’s Anglican Church. About 30 years later, St. Simon’s was closed and its members directed two miles down the road to the brand-new St. Paul’s Anglican Church. From the beginning, the congregation loved music.
St. Paul’s Castle Hill celebrating 40 years in their current building in May / Courtesy of St. Paul’s Castle Hill Facebook page
“They began with a choir, and that choir has been singing together since the beginning,” Tiarne said. “Maybe three or four years ago we had an event celebrating the history of St. Paul’s and they showed a video of the original building. And even in those pictures, you could see the choir singing and people were leading music and it was just really cool.”
The people of St. Paul’s passed that love down to their children and their children’s children.
“Over time, it just becomes part of our culture, which is naturally growing young people who see others serving and want to do the same,” Tiarne said. “We’re reaping the fruits of that now—of years and years and years of investment from leadership and from the older people in our church.”
Australian CCM
St. Paul’s was also influenced by the church down the street. Less than five miles away, Brian and Bobbie Houston planted Hillsong Church in 1983. Brian encouraged his worship team to write their own music, and 10 years later, Hillsong’s worship director wrote “Shout to the Lord.” The song was an instant success, sung over and over at churches, youth groups, and Christian camps around the globe.
Hillsong played an outsize role in the Christian music industry’s rapid growth. Between 1993 and 1997, the market share for sales of Christian albums in the United States more than doubled, making it the market’s fastest-growing segment. A few other Australian musicians helped boost Christian music in that era—anybody remember the first album from the Newsboys? Or Rebecca St. James?
“That created this music culture and it was like, ‘Hey, let’s rethink the way we sing congregationally and worship,’” said CityAlight songwriter Rich Thompson. “And I think that’s in the water a little bit here.”
Thompson loved music so much he joined yet another Australian band—this one called Revive—and spent four years opening for Third Day. But I’m getting ahead of myself—we’ll come back to Rich later.
Back at St. Paul’s in the ’90s, the worship team was also starting to write and sing its own music. Keith Baker remembers coming on board as a pastoral intern in 1998.
“They had just released an album—the first album—way back when,” Keith said. “It had a big horn section on it. It was a real mixture of all sorts of songs.”
“That went fairly well in Sydney,” said Rich Vassallo, an audio engineer who began attending St. Paul’s around that time. “A lot of churches picked up the songs. And then in the mid-2000s, they did a studio recording, which didn’t do very well for a number of reasons. But in 2011, I was asked to oversee another recording project, but this one was going to take a different shape.”
This time, St. Paul’s didn’t rent a studio. Instead, they recorded live, and they asked their congregation to join them.
“It was very ad hoc,” Rich said. “The church didn’t have the budget to do it, so we had to work out how to fund it. We pulled equipment from everybody’s houses and tried to make it work.”
It did work.
“The end outcome was fine,” he said. “It’s nothing like what we do today, but it was a really important project for us, because we learned a lot from it. It informed a lot of the work we’ve done with team culture, preparing for a project, and helping us really be very clear on what our end goal is.”
What was the end goal? The church leaders were clear—it wasn’t to sell albums, to go on tour, or even to create musical masterpieces. The whole point was to provide “new songs to sing at church which are biblically sound, contemporary, and singable.”
Because St. Paul’s wanted to be a “city on a hill,” drawing others to “the light of the world,” they called the album City Alight.
Starting to Write Songs
St. Paul’s music director felt so strongly about songwriting that he asked the church to pay somebody to lead it part-time. He suggested Rich Thompson, who was back in Australia after 10 years in America with Revive.
St. Paul’s asked if he’d write songs for them two days a week. Rich, who was working full-time and raising a family, said he could give them one.
Meanwhile, St. Paul’s had begun offering music lessons for children in the community. They asked member Jonny Robinson to run the program. Jonny was bright—so bright he was studying for his PhD in philosophy. But he wasn’t gifted at administration. Gamely, he bumbled his way through the logistics of the lessons.
“One night, as I was waiting for some of the other lessons to finish, I was playing around on the piano,” Jonny said. “And I wrote a Christian song—it was a church song. Someone heard it and said to me, ‘Hey, can you play that song that you wrote—‘Praise the Savior’—on Sunday?’”
He did.
“The accountant at church said to me while I was in the office one day, ‘Hey, you wrote that song the other day. I didn’t really know you wrote that kind of music,’” Jonny said. “I think because I was so bad at running the music school—it was all administration and I had no idea what I was doing—I think he was he was shocked that I did something that wasn’t terrible.”
The church accountant was so impressed he offered Jonny the other songwriting day—the one Rich couldn’t do. Rich and Jonny met for the first time when sitting down with the music director.
“The music minister said, ‘Listen, I gotta go to another meeting. Do you guys want to keep hanging out? You can. That’s fine,’” Jonny said. “So Rich said, ‘Do you want to keep hanging out?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, there’s a piano in one of the other rooms if you want to go chill and hang out and talk.’ And so we sat down, and I talked to him about this idea for a song. I had written a melody for it, kind of a folk melody. And we wrote ‘Jerusalem’ together.”
The song was beautiful. But not everyone at St. Paul’s was convinced.
What Are We Paying For?
“There were people in church that weren’t convinced it was a good use of money,” Jonny said. “They thought maybe we shouldn’t be paid for it, and maybe we shouldn’t be doing it.”
It’s easy to sympathize with them. After all, aren’t there hungry people who need to be fed? Homeless who need to be cared for? Widows and orphans to be looked after? Is this really the best use of the resources God has given?
In 2014, CityAlight’s Adrian Lee plays guitar while Jonny Robinson watches / Courtesy of CityAlight
Here’s what the church leadership argued: We have a unique gift—a congregation full of people who love and excel at music. Using these gifts to produce original songs is a ministry, a way to serve our congregation and something we can give to other congregations around us.
What St. Paul’s didn’t realize is they were also paying for something else. Rich and Jonny knew the industry standards and loved to ask why things were the way they were. Together, they’d develop a musical philosophy that would spark a countercultural approach to songwriting.
But to understand what they did, you first have to understand how things are.
How Things Are
When contemporary Christian music took over the radio and CD market in the 1990s, it also affected church worship. Between 1998 and 2012, studies show that congregations began dropping choirs, bulletins, and organs. Instead, they installed projection equipment and set up guitar amplifiers. The song lyrics changed too, reported the authors of the rigorous, multiyear National Congregations Study. Worship moved “away from an emphasis on belief and doctrine and toward an emphasis on experience, emotion, and the search for a least-common-denominator kind of worship.”
Not everybody liked the change, and feelings ran so high for so long in so many churches that the arguments began to be labeled the “worship wars.” In the end, many churches handled the conflict by offering two services—one traditional and one contemporary.
Over the years, that battle’s ferocity has faded. Lots of churches now sing both hymns and worship songs on Sunday mornings. Many services are now likely to play songs you might hear on Christian radio or a Spotify playlist.
“So you’ve got Christian music that goes on radio, and then you’ve got Christian music that goes into churches, and in my mind, they’re two different categories,” Rich Thompson said. “Back in the 2000s, they were quite distinct. In fact, if you were looking at the charts of both of those, they were really distinct in terms of the most played or most sung songs. Today, you’ve got a lot of worship songs being played on radio and a lot of radio songs being sung in churches.”
Rich Thompson in 2022 / Courtesy of CityAlight’s Facebook page
Why the change?
“It’s hard to know exactly why this is happening,” he said. “One of the reasons, if you talk to some of the people in the industry, is because there’s something that happens on a Sunday when people sing a song in church and they become familiar with a song.”
Radio station staff have realized that “to be able to play those songs during the week is something that their listeners are going to enjoy because of what they’ve experienced at church,” Rich said. “And so now you have a shift, where the worship songs are being produced in a way that are radio friendly. It didn’t used to be like that.”
That makes sense. If we sing a song we like at church, it’s nice to hear it on the radio or a music streaming platform. And if we hear a song we like on the radio, it’s nice to get to sing it in church.
In theory, then, all is well. But of course, real life is rarely as neat and clean as theory.
Here’s one problem: when we only play worship music on the radio, we’re cutting out a lot of other songs that don’t fit into that box. In the ’90s, most churches didn’t sing Michael W. Smith’s “Go West Young Man,” DC Talk’s “Jesus Freak,” or Steven Curtis Chapman’s “Great Adventure.” But those songs were formative for a lot of Christians.
Those songs—maybe we’ll call them noncorporate songs, or private worship songs—can be more artistic. They can take some risks, with both the music and the lyrics. They can be a little more emotionally raw, more personal. They serve a different purpose. When we only play worship music on the radio, we miss out on these songs.
On the flip side, when we only sing radio music in church, we cut out a lot of options for congregational singing. Church history is full of beautiful songs, from “Blessed Assurance” to “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” Most of them don’t get played on the radio.
Tiarne Tranter at the Sing! conference in 2023 / Courtesy of CityAlight’s Facebook page
Further constricting our choices is, ironically, our global connectivity. Church music directors used to look through a hymnal or songbook and choose songs that best fit their context, one study author said. Now, it seems worship leaders draw from the relatively small number of hits made popular online, at megachurches, or at conferences.
If you want your worship song to join that list of hits, it helps to write lyrics that aren’t too theologically limiting or demanding.
Here’s an example: A few years ago, the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA) wanted to change a line in Keith Getty and Stuart Townend’s “In Christ Alone.” They objected to the line “And on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied” and wanted to change it to a gentler “the love of God was magnified.” Getty and Townend refused to allow the change, arguing the atonement is critical to the gospel story. In response, the mainline Presbyterians voted to drop “In Christ Alone” from their hymnal.
Another way to help your song become a hit is to work for a really large church. A recent study found that 36 of the 38 of the most popular worship songs between 2010 and 2020 were introduced by just four sources—Hillsong in Sydney, Bethel in Redding, Elevation in Charlotte, and Passion City Church in Atlanta.
Those are all megachurches. But that’s not all they have in common. All four are theologically charismatic, predominately white, and Western. And for better or worse, they’re shaping worship for nearly everyone else, even though most churches across the globe don’t share their theology, size, location, or demographics.
But none of those things is Rich’s biggest objection to modern songwriting.
Too Fast
“The time it takes to write a song is something that we think about and talk about quite a lot,” Rich Thompson said. “We talk a lot about why we’re writing—what is our motive here, what are we trying to do? And obviously our primary motive is to give glory to God, and we want to do that by equipping the church with songs that are biblically rich and that are easy to sing and play.”
It’s critical to remember that in a music industry that has grown large and profitable.
“Often you see when art becomes commercialized, there’s a danger of the process or the administration actually trumping the art itself,” Rich said. “As you start selling more, there’s demand, and then you need to start meeting the demand. We’ve seen that happen time and again, and we’ve tried to guard against that. We want to make sure the songs are written for the express purpose of equipping the church, not for meeting a quota or for meeting a deadline or for meeting a bottom line. So if our songs aren’t finished in time, we simply don’t record in that season, and that’s happened many times before. It can be a little concerning that the writers in bigger organizations don’t share that same luxury.”
It’s not that those songwriters aren’t Christians or don’t have good things to say. It’s that the pressure to go fast makes worship songs look more like hotel paintings than like da Vincis.
“It’s really common that songwriters have annual quotas that they have to meet,” Rich Thompson said. “This is just part of the industry. They’re given an advance, which is like an investment from the organization that they’re writing for. And the organization needs to make their money back on them. This is really common across all genres.”
The trouble is, writing quickly under pressure lends itself to the temptation of writing without enough thought or care.
“If equipping the church is our primary motivation, if [the songs are] going to be sung in church, then crafting the theology into these songs needs to be done with the utmost care,” Rich said. “And, in our opinion, that has to take time. You’re talking about the Bride of Christ. It’s both an incredible opportunity for building up and beautifying the Bride, but it’s also very dangerous. There is a lot of danger in potentially misleading or teaching potentially slightly wrong things through your songs. And the ramification of that over a long period of time is very significant.”
That’s because songs lend themselves to memorization. You almost can’t help but memorize the music and lyrics you hear over and over again.
“The impact of those old hymns in our generation has been incredibly profound,” Rich Thompson said. “Take a song like ‘In Christ Alone’—it’s this robust creedal song you carry with you. ‘No guilt in life, no fear in death.’ How many times do we recall those words? That means those songs have to be so deeply, deeply rooted in Scripture, if you’re going to be recalling them like that. And if they’re even a little bit off, when you recall them, and continue to recall them, it has the potential to lead people astray or confuse people. The stakes are very high.”
Jonny compares it to sermons. Words written for the church to hear are important, and pastors take time and care to get them right. But not many people are going to listen to a sermon over and over until they have it memorized. Therefore, if it takes a pastor a few weeks to write a sermon, Rich and Jonny figured it should take them at least a few months—sometimes closer to a year—to write a song.
But a song isn’t nearly as many words as a sermon. So what do they do with all that time?
How to Write Lyrics Differently
The first step is to decide on a topic. Rich keeps a list of them on his phone—ideas that occur to him as he goes about his week. Jonny keeps his ideas in notebooks. Many times, their songs have grown out of sermon series at their church—“Yet Not I but Through Christ in Me” came from a series on Philippians, “Ancient of Days” from one on Daniel.
The next step is not to write.
“If you’re going to write a song about the resurrection, it’s not good enough just to rattle off the first three thoughts that you have about the resurrection or the latest thing that you’ve heard about the resurrection,” Jonny said. “You don’t know enough about it. I don’t know enough about it. Nobody knows enough about it, just to give the top three thoughts off their head and write a song about it. So Rich and I actually spend probably the first sometimes three, four, six months, trying to fill up the well.”
Rich and Jonny listen to sermons, read books, and text each other articles about the topic. A good songwriting session is sometimes the two of them talking for a few hours about different things they’ve read or are thinking about. Their goal is to understand a difficult theological truth so well that they could simply and easily explain it to anyone.
“We need to understand: What is God trying to say to us through his Word?” Rich said. “How does it apply to our church? How do we practically live it out throughout the week? We generally fill a whole whiteboard full of things before we start putting pen to paper.”
This “filling up the well” is why no CityAlight songwriter—Rich, Jonny, or the other writers at St. Paul’s—is on staff.
“Every songwriter in CityAlight needs to have some sort of day job, so that you’ve got something else going on in your life,” Rich said. “It means you’re able to be in the world, be at work, feel what other people in the congregation are feeling on a day-to-day basis. So we’re able to take the theological truths that we’re working on and apply them into moments that we’ve felt throughout the week.”
Rich Thompson meeting with CityAlight songwriters in 2018 / Courtesy of CityAlight’s Facebook page
It also takes the economic pressure off. If your employer is expecting you to produce a steady stream of popular songs, you might be tempted to rush something out.
After a while, Rich and Jonny didn’t even like being paid for one day a week of songwriting. They both quit taking money from St. Paul’s and kept writing on a volunteer basis.
Even after CityAlight songwriters fill up their wells, it still takes months to get a song onto paper. The topics they’re tackling are complex. And then there’s Jonny.
After a while, Jonny finished his PhD and started teaching philosophy at a university. While he was doing that, he noticed that even a single word, if defined poorly, can knock a whole train of thought off the rails.
“We had rules at the beginning,” Jonny said. “We said things like, ‘If you’re going to have more than one abstract noun per verse, you have to explain why you think you can sneak another concept in without people getting confused.’”
Jonny’s grammar rules were stricter than most doctoral dissertation guidelines. Writers had to show him how the conjunctions were working—words like “and,” “but,” “or,” “since,” or “because.” They had to be clear on the subject and object of each line. If they changed pronouns—words like “he,” “she,” “it,” and “us”—between lines, they had to be clear about which subject the pronoun was referring to.
And he didn’t stop there.
How to Write Melodies Differently
“The lyrics have got to be clear on the one hand, but the melody has to be clear on the other,” Jonny said.
Hang on a second.
I can understand why lyrics have to be clear. But why the melody? The notes aren’t trying to explain God’s Word. Why does it matter what they sound like?
Here’s what Jonny told me: In theater performances, the term “fourth wall” refers to the imaginary wall between the actors and the audience. When broken—perhaps by the sound system going out or a performer laughing at something that has accidentally gone wrong—that disruption pushes the audience out of the imaginative space they were in. They’re no longer in the story; they’re back in the theater, wondering how much longer before intermission.
The same thing can happen during worship, Jonny said. It’s not that congregations suspend disbelief the way you do in a theater. But singing helps us to focus on God, to enter a different headspace as we stop worrying about what’s going on around us.
Worship at St. Paul’s Castle Hill / Courtesy of CityAlight’s Facebook page
All kinds of issues—an unexpected bridge, confusing lyrics, an unreachable note—can break that “fourth wall,” pushing us out of emotional worship and back into the pew, where we might start wondering about the outfit of the person in front of us or how much longer ’til lunch.
“You’ve got everybody kind of locked in spiritually—they’re thinking about the lyrics; they’re singing to God,” Jonny said. “And then suddenly the melody takes a turn that nobody’s expecting, and everybody is shaken out of their concentration, out of their reverie. And they lose the mood there.”
Jonny figured he could make the melody clear by writing music that sounded familiar.
“So I said, ‘Let’s try and write basically folk songs,’” he said. “So when people are singing, they can guess where the melody’s going to go and they’re not tripped up by it.”
The other advantage to musical simplicity is that the song can be played just as easily in a small church with a guy and his guitar as in a large church with a full band. This is important because half of Australian churches have fewer than 50 weekly attendees. Half of American churches see fewer than 65 a week.
“I was pretty passionate about making sure that whatever we wrote would work in that room too,” Jonny said. “It couldn’t have octave leaps. It couldn’t be dependent on a certain synth sound. It couldn’t be dependent on a certain drum groove. It couldn’t be so demanding emotionally that it was impossible to sing it if you weren’t feeling anything remotely like what the song was talking about.”
Initially, that disappointed some St. Paul’s members. CityAlight’s tunes seemed too tame, almost boring.
“There was some skepticism about the style of songs coming out,” Jonny said. “And people said, ‘This is really simple. Could you make that a little bit more interesting?’”
Hillsong’s Nigel Hendroff (standing) working with CityAlight in 2019 / Courtesy of CityAlight’s Facebook page
They could.
“On the Only a Holy God album, we were in the studio writing the instrumentation for the guitarist—we had hired Nigel [Hendroff] to come and play guitar for us in the studio,” Rich Vassallo said. “And he played this incredible guitar solo as part of it, and it sounded unreal, like the kind of thing you’d hear on your favorite album. And we’re at one point going, ‘This is so great. But can you play it simpler?’
“It really is that tension of wanting and enjoying the creativity of it, and how good it sounds, and then going, ‘No, but that could mean that someone listens to the song and decides, ‘I’ll never achieve this’ or ‘I won’t attempt the song.’ And so even in our early days, we got a fair bit of criticism for melodies that were too boring or musicianship that was too simplified or not very creative. But we keep telling ourselves that’s a badge of honor. . . . Because regardless of that creative opinion, people are singing the songs—and we want people to sing the songs.”
Perfecting the Songs
A few times a year, a six-person panel—which includes the lead minister at St. Paul’s—sits down to hear song submissions. They listen for singability, check for theological accuracy, and ask about pronoun usage. They divide the song candidates into three categories: those that are rejected, those that are greenlit with just a little editing, and those that need to go back to the drawing board for more serious work.
That panel is why “Only a Holy God” has four verses. Originally, it had just three, expressing how holy and separate God is from us.
“The senior minister was saying, ‘You’re just missing—you’re missing part of the beauty. Yes, he’s holy, but he’s also intimate,’” Rich Thompson said. “We were a bit annoyed by that. We were thinking, Look, we’ve just finished this song. But then once you get over that, you start thinking, Actually, you know what, he’s right, and we need to rethink this.’”
So Rich, Jonny, Michael Farren, and Dustin Smith added another verse.
“Now I think that’s the peak moment in the song, when you’ve come to this point of saying, ‘Oh, this is my father,’” Rich said. “So as frustrating as it can be, I do think it’s a very good thing.”
Sound of the Church
When CityAlight gathers enough songs for a project, they’re ready to record. But they don’t book a studio. And they don’t usually hire musicians.
Instead, they call their church.
“All of our recordings have our congregation singing on them,” Rich Vassallo said. “The crowd that you hear in our songs is the people that attend our services. It’s the sound of the church. It’s the most beautiful sound.”
By the time a song is ready to record, the congregation has been singing it on Sundays and is familiar with it. The people come in the evening to a church decorated with the album’s theme. The band is set on a low stage that extends out into the room so the congregation wraps around it.
The evening includes prayer, Bible reading, and preaching. Except for the recording equipment, it’s like a normal church service with a few extra songs.
“We just love to get everyone there,” Keith said. “And people love to come to those recordings, because people think, Hey, that’s my voice on those albums, I’m a recording artist too.”
CityAlight recording with their congregation / Courtesy of CityAlight’s Facebook page
Including a congregation’s voice is so unusual that when Rich Vassallo gets the songs from the mixing engineers, he always has to send them back, often multiple times.
“When it gets into the mix-down stage, the mix engineer will send it back to us, and you get this great-sounding track,” Rich said. “And we’re like, ‘Turn the crowd up. Turn the crowd up. Turn the crowd up.’ We go back and forth four, five, six times. . . . It is such an important part our recording. The voice of the church is key to CityAlight’s sound.”
Cooling Down and Heating Up
Since 2015, Hillsong has released more than 100 songs. Bethel has done nearly 200. CityAlight has 37.
They started with the 10-song album Yours Alone in 2015. A few people listened, especially to “Jerusalem” and “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus.” Eighteen months later, CityAlight dropped another 10 songs on the Only a Holy God album. A few more people listened, especially to “Only a Holy God” and “Christ Is Mine Forevermore.”
Instead of speeding up, CityAlight slowed down. They began releasing a single or two—or maybe a six-song EP—each year.
In November 2018, it was “Yet Not I but Through Christ in Me.” In 2019, it was “Jesus, Strong and Kind.” In 2020, it was “Your Will Be Done.”
Steadily, the number of listeners began to rise. Rich Vassallo started to hear from churches overseas who were translating CityAlight songs. Tiarne’s coffee barista thanked her one day because her music was putting his kids to sleep at night. And refugees from Ukraine who landed in Stockholm could recognize and sing “Jesus, Strong and Kind” with the church in their new country.
“Every time I hear that somebody knows a song, or you step off a plane somewhere and you walk into a random place that you’ve never been before—you don’t know anyone—and then you play the first chord, and everyone knows all the words,” Tiarne said. “We played at a conference recently, and the screen stopped working for ‘Yet Not I but Through Christ in Me,’ which is always nerve-racking. And the congregation sang louder than any other song we’d ever sung, without the words on the screen. And so that does surprise me. I always get surprised by that.”
Keith Baker / Courtesy of CityAlight’s Facebook page
By 2019, Keith was starting to meet a few people after church services who had come specifically to worship at St. Paul’s because of CityAlight.
“We had a lady visit us from Shanghai just a few weeks ago,” he said. “She was saying, ‘You know, we sing your songs in our underground church so I just had to come and see the church that made these songs.’ Oh, my goodness, right? So I took her straight up the back to our store. I gave her all the CDs that I could find. I said, ‘Take these, use them however you want.’ It was crazy. It’s crazy to think how God’s using these songs. But it was so great to have her at church.”
Another man, on vacation from work, flew from Singapore to Sydney to worship at St. Paul’s. Keith told him to make sure to see the Harbour Bridge while he was in town. He’s not fazed by the visitors—in fact, he’s done the same thing, stopping by Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City a few years ago to worship with Tim Keller’s congregation.
Influence
A lot of people tell CityAlight they hang on to their songs in times of grief or illness. “Christ Is Mine Forevermore” has been played at dozens of funerals. “Day After Day, Jesus Reigns” has called those struggling through marriage troubles or illness back to worship. “My God Is All I Need” helped one listener move past addiction and another worship in the middle of hurt and loss.
But perhaps the most dramatic example of this comes from Jamie Trussell, a former teaching pastor at Harvest Church in Germantown, Tennessee. Here he is, talking to the congregation in early 2023:
I woke up on Tuesday morning singing the refrain of a group named CityAlight. They did a rendition of “This Is the Day the Lord Has Made.” The first verse of that song says, “This is the day that the Lord has made / We will rejoice as we lift his name.” Now I couldn’t tell you at that point why that song was stuck in my head. My wife would probably tell you, if she were being honest, I don’t wake up every morning singing worship songs. So we wake up, and I’m singing this song and don’t know why. But soon the reality of those lyrics would certainly come home.
Jamie Trussell the Sunday after the plane crash / Courtesy of Harvest Church’s live stream
A few hours later, Jamie got the worst phone call of his life: his lead pastor, his executive pastor, an elder, and two church members had been in a plane crash. Four of the five men were killed on impact. Only his lead pastor had survived and was in critical condition.
At Harvest’s church service five days later, the wife of the deceased elder helped lead the church in singing CityAlight’s “Yet Not I but Through Christ in Me.”
“We just keep shaking our heads,” Keith said. “We’re like, ‘This has to be a God thing.’ We’re just so, so encouraged by how God is using our humble little efforts in this little church in the northwest of Sydney.”
What’s Next
Rich Vassallo is CityAlight’s only employee, but he’s going to need more help soon. From translations to performance invitations to recording, CityAlight’s growth is a lot to handle. Especially since the band members are regular people, writing songs and practicing guitar chords on their lunch breaks or after the kids are in bed at night.
“It has been quite overwhelming—all the requests,” Rich Vassallo said. “Because we have a heart for small churches and ministries, and we get those requests frequently: ‘Please come to our church, encourage our team.’ And we’d love to be able to be doing that, being in their own space, encouraging them—that’s where you get the most traction. It’s just impossible to be able to do it for everyone.”
One obvious option is to press in—to hire their musicians full-time, fill up a touring schedule, and lead worship all over the globe. I asked Rich about it.
Rich Vassallo / Courtesy of CityAlight’s Facebook page
“This year, we’re planning to reduce our international travel to hopefully zero,” he told me.
Hmm. That sounds like leaning out, doesn’t it?
It depends on whom you ask.
“We see ourselves primarily as a songwriting and resourcing ministry,” Jonny said. “What I’d like to concentrate on this year, is to make sure that we have our mission and our vision really clear. . . . We want to make sure that people know why they’re doing the things they’re doing, to make sure their hearts are in the right place, to keep doing the devotions and the teaching and the reading and the praying.”
Nearly everybody I talked to said the same thing: “We know CityAlight is at a tipping point, where we need to make decisions about the future. But we don’t see yet exactly where God is leading us.”
And then every one of them mentioned Asia.
“We’ve all felt God sort of pointing us to Asia—you know, it’s our area of the world,” said Rich Vassallo.
“We are really excited by the prospect of working with Asia,” Jonny said.
“What does it look like for us to be serving Asian churches more?” Rich Thompson said. “You know, breaking the mold a little bit on what’s been done in the past?”
The weekend after The Gospel Coalition’s conference, CityAlight flew to Singapore and did a concert for another 5,000 people. That night, they recorded “Yet Not I but Through Christ in Me” in Mandarin.
CityAlight in Singapore / Courtesy of CityAlight’s Facebook page
“It was amazing,” Jonny said. “People in the room were crying. People were on their knees, hearing these songs in their mother tongue, in Mandarin. So it was a really special night.”
It wasn’t CityAlight’s first project in Asia—earlier last year, they recorded a music video of “Jesus, Strong and Kind” in the Philippines with young people who’d been rescued from sex trafficking.
“We’d like to go back to both those countries and see if we can start working with songwriters there, to encourage them,” Jonny said.
“We would like to see raised up more congregational writers from Asia, from Southeast Asia particularly,” Rich Thompson said. “Because I think we are missing a voice in our global church. A lot of it is West pushing over to East, and the Eastern churches are singing the songs that are curated and written over there in the West. But wouldn’t it be wonderful to see both happen—that songs written in the East would be sung in the West? I think the church would be a much richer place as a result of that.”
CityAlight doesn’t know exactly what their next steps look like. But that doesn’t worry them. Ten years ago, they had no idea what was ahead.
“We knew we needed to walk the path, but we didn’t quite know why or where it was going—just that this was a good thing to do,” Rich Thompson said. “Since day one, the prayer has been that God would bless and establish the ministry, insofar as it gives him glory and equips his church. And if it should become anything other than this, anything unhelpful, then our prayer is that he would shut it down quickly—mercifully and quickly.”
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