Ignite Guitar (and Worship) is Back

Hello again, old friends.

If you're receiving this email, you signed up at some point for a newsletter during my days in the family band Cliftones, or you took a guitar course, Ignite Guitar, with me as your teacher in a class setting at your church over 20 years ago.

To get to the point: I'm restarting this newsletter with a new purpose, and my plan is to send a monthly email with encouragement around worship, guitar training tips, what I'm working on musically, and updates on ministries I'm partnering with to support worship resourcing around the globe.

If that isn't something you're interested in, no hard feelings at all. Feel free to unsubscribe. If you're curious about what I'm up to and why I'm doing this now, read on.

Those were some wonderful times of sharing music as Cliftones and working through my guitar training curriculum with you.

Then life happened.

Cliftones put the instruments away to pursue marriage, grow our families, and try to carve out a living. For me, those early years of creating music and building the curriculum were both passion projects. The guitar courses, especially, were something I could never quite let go of.

As a result, it has sat on my shelf in a closet for years...then in the attic, in bits and pieces on the floor, and all over the place, really.

For approximately 20 years, to be exact, I've held onto it.

I quietly built a YouTube audience of more than 5,100 subscribers through some of those original guitar tutorials. But I couldn't keep up with my own internal demand to do more, and I eventually convinced myself the payoff wouldn't be worth the effort.

So I took down the website.

It's Time to Restart

But I never stopped believing in the training or the ideas behind it.

I still believe the Ignite Guitar method is the best I've seen for an aspiring guitarist to learn the foundations of beginner, intermediate, and advanced guitar. It's a culmination of everything I learned to grow as a guitarist throughout my 20-year journey of learning and playing, a journey that took me and Cliftones onto stages across the Southeast.

Recently, I (finally) figured out how to make the curriculum website sustainable without having to constantly manage the technical side of it.

And that changes everything for me.

Now I can focus my efforts where I really want them: guitar and worship resourcing.

My goal isn't simply to make the best guitar training lessons available for an affordable price. I want to build a platform that encourages unconventional thinking about worship and helps us think more deeply about the music we're making and why we're making it.

At a minimum, each month I'll share:

A guitar tutorial that teaches more advanced concepts and helps you continue growing as a guitarist.

A worship story that connects the music we sing with the stories and people behind it, and ultimately with a heart of gratitude, thanksgiving, and praise.

We need to remember the beauty of singing and doing everything unto God, especially in an age of constant media consumption that continually asks us to worship what we see on a screen.

So, let's get started.

Here's What You Can Expect

A Worship Story - God Moves In A Mysterious Way

Every hymn has a story behind it, and some of them are hard to believe. This month's story is about William Cowper, a hymn writer whose darkest season became connected to one of the most enduring hymns in church history.

In the winter of 1773, William Cowper was in the grip of a near-suicidal depression so deep that he believed God had abandoned him. Late one night, convinced there was no way forward, he called for a cab and asked the driver to take him to the Thames River.

A thick fog rolled in over London that night. According to the story, the driver sensed that something was wrong and, rather than take Cowper to the river, drove around the city for nearly an hour. Cowper eventually drifted off to sleep. When he awoke, frustrated and disoriented, he told the driver to take him home instead.

When the fog finally lifted, Cowper saw what had happened as an act of mercy, a night when he had been kept from himself.

Not long after, he wrote the hymn that would outlive him by more than two centuries:

"God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform; He plants His footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm."

Cowper's hymn became an expression of praise born out of deep despair, and a reminder that even when we can't see the way forward, God is near to us.

A Guitar Tutorial - Holy Forever

This month's tutorial is Holy Forever, the Chris Tomlin album version.