Why you should check out Ross King's worship music

Ross King is a worship pastor/recording artist/sonwriter in the Bryan/College Station area. He has been releasing singer-sonwriter type records for years, but in the past few years he has come out with a couple of outstanding records of music written for use in corporate worship. Specifically, I'm talking about To Make God Famous, vol. 1, To Make God Famous, vol. 2 and Soulspeak. On each of these three records you'll find several songs that will be immediately useful for worship leaders in corporate worship settings for at least the following reasons:

• Ross writes from a profound understanding of the centrality of the gospel. In other words, the gospel is explicitly the theme of many of the songs, and we can never have too much of that. Indeed, there is an ironic and tragic shortage of such songs in contemporary corporate worship music.
  
• The songs remind us that sin is basically idolatry--that is, the worship of other things in place of the God to Whom all worship is due.
• Ross's writing demonstrates an excellent practical understanding of the doctrines of grace. I say "practical" because it's not necessarily expressed in the theological language we're used to using when we discuss Calvinism--but it's there nonetheless. This actually leads me to my next point...
• Ross is good at taking familiar truths and stating them in new ways to make us see them from new angles. He actually wrote an article pertaining to this on his website a few years back that is brilliant and sure to offend (in a good way). The way he has his site set up I can't figure out how to link to it directly, but I strongly recommend that anyone interested in writing songs for corporate worship give it a read. If more worship songwriters would take him seriously the Church in the English-speaking world would benefit tremendously. Go to Ross's website, click on "Writings", and then find the article called "On worship songwriting".
• The music is solid, but not necessarily anything groundbreaking (which Ross readily admits in the liner notes), but I say this works to your advantage, because that way you'll feel less tied to the album arrangement and more motivated to come up with something creative with your own group.
• My friend, supporter, and object of my man-crush, Nathan Kawaller, plays bass on Soulspeak.

If you're only gonna get one of these, get To Make God famous, vol. 2--almost every track is great. If you can only get a few songs (the link above takes you to the eb+flo website, where you buy individual tracks), get 2, 4, 6, 9, or 10 from that same album.