Hi Mandy,
Great stuff … ya know, I”ve been a subscriber to Worship Leader Magazine for as long as I can remember. I’ve been a SongDISCovery subscriber since it was launched. I’ve been privileged to have one song I published “picked” for a SD issue, and I “bought” a spot on another issue – a $2500 mistake. (I guess that song, “You Are Faithful”, by Jason Wallis, didn’t connect, at least, based on CCLI usage).

I know Julie and the team are reaching out. They have great hearts of worship. Phil does a great job, and my participation in one of their recent “SongDISCovery” panels as a writer was educational, and well .. humbling at the same time.

I think it’s awesome they are reaching out .. I’ve not blogged about it, but maybe I’ll throw my voice in there, too … since so many of our readers are the same.

I launched TheWorshipCommunity.Com about 1 month prior to WL launching SongDISCovery community. The two sites don’t have the same objective, and I think are complimentary, but I’ve had no success in really trying to connect the two. It’s a struggle, because you feel that the “dialog and community” between worship leaders that is happening our our blogs and TheWorshipCommunity.Com would be an AWESOME asset to those worship leaders, yet you don’t want to come across as competing or trying to “steal” members or traffic at the same time .. but then again, that doesn’t make sense, as the SD community is more of a “myspace” type community where you post bulletins, upload songs, etc.

Even then, you’ve got mega names like Paul Baloche and Mark Roach, etc., who will always dominate those charts, etc.

Bottom line … I think it’s awesome they are reaching out. I don’t find a whole lot of content these days in the mag that hits home for me, or songs on SD .. but my favorites in the mag are the articles about how songs were written – the story behind the songs, etc.

They used to do this “local edition” thing, I was the South East USA worship leader for a year, but I only got “interviewed” once the whole year (I guess I should say we ALL only got one interview) … it was interesting, ’cause I liked hearing from every day worship leaders, what they were doing, etc., .. .kinda like our “video worship confessionals”, etc.

That’s my $.02 …

BTW – I am attending their National Worship Leader Conference in Austin, TX … couldn’t make it last year, but wonder if anyone else is going?

For the Kingdom,
Fred

Phil Sillas is a songwriter and worship leader and has helped to develop a process which really is geared towards helping church leaders get better access to the CD than we’ve ever had before.

Thank you so much for engaging me….please feel free to email me directly at: editor@wlmag.com

Julie

“My 2¢, I’ve been a subscriber for a long time, and I’ve always enjoyed reading and hearing what’s new this month. I can mainly think of what I would like to see LESS of, therefore providing more room for the other stuff already being produced.

I would like to see fewer “big name” artists on the CD. Like Leeland was on the CD last time around. These guys are going to get the big advertising push necessary to make us all aware of them anyway. Feature more of the “small time” signed artists, and independent artist.

Same thing with the magazine. Let CCM cover the “big time” worship leaders that everybody already knows about. If you want to interview them fine, but don’t forget that we’re interested in what else is going on in the churches around the country. I miss the worship leader interviews, which is part of the reason I started doing them on my blog. I want the coverage of the next big thing alongside that little small thing over there that no one but God has noticed yet.”