Thousand Tongues (formerly Reformed Praise) is excited to share a new album project and ask for your help in accomplishing it. In case you haven’t heard about our name change, you can read about it here.

Background

It has been 2.5 years since our last album, Merciful to Me, and this fall we’ve sensed the Lord’s promptings to begin another album. This album will be a bit different than the last one. Merciful to Me was a huge project, and was intended as a kind of introduction to our songs in general. We included 4 modern songwriters, used 5 studios in 4 cities, included dozens of musicians, and used extremely varied styles of music. The end result was really neat, but it was a very exhausting and involved project.

If we were to embark on another recording project anytime soon, I knew it would have to be one much simpler in scope. Over the past year, a vision for an album of mostly original songs, using just a few key musicians, crystallized. This project aims to present some of my own more recent original worship songs that have ministered both to the people of Redeemer Bible Church and around the world. Though these songs are still congregationally friendly, they are a bit further musically (and sometimes lyrically) from traditional hymns and would be better fit into the modern worship song or singer-songwriter/Americana genres. For the first 10 years or so of my worship songwriting, I wrote almost exclusively “updated hymns.” But for the past few years, I have been writing more and more original lyrics. Maybe the thousands of hymns I have been studying for all these years are finally starting to soak into my lyric writing soul! 2012 has been a particularly fertile time of writing for me.

Once I settled on choosing songs that were more singer-songwriter oriented, the first person that came to mind to help arrange and produce the album was Jake Armerding. One of the ways God has shown me guidance and confirmation in this project has been not only Jake’s agreement to get on board, but in hearing how God has been prompting him to get more involved in worship as a songwriter and leader, even before I contacted him. Jake is a fine musician with a variety of instrumental and stylistic skills, and is also becoming a good friend. He arranged and performed “Begone, Unbelief” and “Glory Is Certain” on “Merciful to Me,” so you may be acquainted with his voice and instrumental skills. If you want to check out more of his original music, visit http://www.jakearmerding.com/

Tentative Song List (Our song list isn’t final, but will likely include):

For the Sake of His Name
You Are My Righteousness
I’ll Never Forsake You
You Make Me Beautiful
I Have a Dad
When Sorrow Comes
My Precious Savior Gave His All
He Alone Is God
Wave Upon Wave
Do Not Fear
Come Down
Uncondemned (by Jake)
Unfinished song (by Jake)
[ Complete in Thee - Informal ]
Why We Need Help

We need your financial help to make this project. Thousand Tongues (Reformed Praise) is still a relatively small, independent “publisher,” and we can’t reasonably expect enough album sales to offset our costs. What’s more, while we will “sell” this music through retailers like Amazon and iTunes, we always make it available by suggested donation (our policy for everything and end up giving a ton of product away for free as well, both for evangelistic and “marketing” purposes. The sales we had for Merciful to Me went into covering the manufacturing costs and in funding our ministry in general over the past 2.5 years. Right now, particularly because of our organizational transition, we have almost no money.

What Are the Needs?
I am estimating that the project will cost about $10.5k. It’s amazing how quickly things can add up, even for a project with a simpler scope than Merciful to Me. If you’d like a breakdown of our estimated budget, just contact me and I’ll be happy to send it to you.

If you’d like to donate towards this project, click here:

Your donation is tax-deductible

How God Has Been at Work Already

Before we created this public Kickstarter project page, we approached various friends and supporters of Thousand Tongues, including those who have helped in the past. Over the past 40 days, we have managed to raise almost $7k privately, even though one of our key large givers for the last project isn’t contributing this time. What a picture of God’s grace and hand in this project!

Donations vs. Sales

We were blown away 2.5 years ago to see how God met the almost $12k need for Merciful to Me. Though it was step of faith, we were convinced that it was something God wanted us to do and were so blessed to see how He worked to make the project happen. The process of asking for donations rather than transactional sales has always given us a more personal connection to those who support what we are doing, and we look forward to how God will use this project to help us connect with and minister to people.

Since we’re a non-profit organization (our status is in process, but our lawyer says it’s fine to offer tax-deduction receipts since the status is retroactive) donations to the project can be deduced from your taxes.

Time Table

Jake and David have been working on arrangements in December 2012 and early January 2013. They will record at Redeemer Bible Church the week of January 28th, and will head to another studio February 4th-6th. By late February we should have some rough mixes coming together, by early March we should have mastered audio files, and by late March we should have physical CDs.

Thank You

Thank you for considering partnering with us in this project. Please let me know if you have any questions. I look forward to how God will use this process for His glory!

For Christ and His church
David L. Ward

Follow comments or trackback from your own site.