People often try to sort churches into "traditional" and "contemporary" styles of worship and ask us, "Which are you?" The answer, intentionally, is "neither." That requires a few words of explanation about our priorities.

First, we believe that worship should be deeply theological in the sense that it is focused on and about God. The music and liturgy of the church does not exist mainly to entertain us or even to inspire us - it exists as a service we provide for the Lord, proclaiming true things about Him with full hearts. Worship is an in-breaking of the heavenly throne room onto earth. As such, we want to make sure our music is lyrically rich and God-focused. 

In addition, the worship of the church should always be both rooted in the past and living in the present. We are a part of a community of faith that stretches back to the time of Jesus, and should be drawing on all of those resources in our worship. It is foolish to think that the songwriting of the past two decades could equal in quality the two thousand years before them. However, it is equally foolish to lose sight of the fact that our worship should be grounded in the present rather than preserving some past moment as the ideal. As such, in terms of both instrumentation and song selection, we try to combine the best of both. At Kish we sing songs from across the ages using all kinds of instruments. We use historic liturgical forms but invest them with contemporary language and creativity. All of this is done to (hopefully) transcend the divisions many impose on the church.

Thanks to these priorities, we sometimes sing unfamiliar songs. Below is a playlist of some of the less-well-known music we use. Hopefully it will be helpful to your personal worship as well!