Tag: church with utb

Announcement – UTB Songs

Posted on by Phill Sacre

Over the last 18 months I have been working on Church with UTB – basically a service delivered online which is designed to facilitate church in people’s own homes (and other places). One of the challenges I’ve found during that time is getting good-quality songs which are appropriate to sing as part of a worship service.

I had been searching YouTube for the songs I wanted, trying to find a decent lyric video. This has proved to have many challenges:

  • Not every song is available to begin with. There are some hymns and songs which simply have no recordings available. Sometimes, even if there is a recording available, it’s totally unsuitable for congregational singing. There have been many times when I wanted to include a particular hymn or song, only to find that it didn’t have an appropriate recording.
  • The number of videos with good lyrics is even smaller. Often the videos are not made with congregational singing in mind, so they will have ‘artistic’ lyrics which don’t quite come up at the right time, only display one line at a time – that sort of thing.
  • Many of the songs are professional recordings, which are sometimes not ideal for congregational singing (e.g. they have long instrumental sections).
  • The songs which have been recorded at conferences often have things like clapping at the end – which personally I find off-putting.

A few weeks ago I launched the UTB App, which does make it easier: I am no longer limited to lyric videos, I can pick any recording on YouTube – including YouTube music. The lyrics are displayed by the app. However, that doesn’t solve the other problems.

For a recording to be used in Church with UTB, it needs to be:

  • Singable – in the normal vocal range of the average person;
  • Reasonably paced – not too slow and not too fast (professional recordings are often slower than you would sing the songs in church);
  • ‘Clean’ – that is, simple audio without any clapping or other distracting sounds, and not including anything else before or after the song;
  • Well produced – i.e. not sound like it’s been recorded on a smartphone.

Consequently, I’ve decided to start Understand the Bible Songs. It’s a YouTube channel where I aim to upload songs with those criteria. The songs are designed to be used in Church with UTB, but could be used anywhere.

At the moment it’s me recording using my own equipment, but I am hoping to branch out and get more people involved. As you can hear, I am really not a singer – I am hoping to find some more vocalists soon!

My aim is, where time permits, to record one new song per week to use in Church with UTB, and eventually to build up a resource of songs that churches can use.

I does surprise me that more churches haven’t had the same idea – many of the recordings available on YouTube from churches are poor quality. It seems that, despite what happened during covid, churches are still not taking the internet seriously as a resource to be used.

Anyway, if you use Church with UTB you will be using UTB Songs, but if not I hope and pray that UTB songs might be a helpful resource for you.

UTB Songs YouTube channel
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Update on the Understand the Bible App

Posted on by Phill Sacre

Back in 2020 – during those long, dark days of lockdown – I decided to create an app for Understand the Bible. Suffice it to say that it didn’t exactly set the world alight, and I decided to mothball it a few months later. Last year I created Church with UTB, and developed an app to go along with it. Although it still didn’t set the world alight, I have been using it regularly in our own church. With the experience I’ve had of developing the two different apps, I thought the time was ripe for putting that to good use and developing a new app which will combine them both.

So, as of today, the old Church with UTB app will no longer work, and instead you can access it using the new app. I’m pleased with it so far, but there is still plenty of work to do.

However, I’m releasing it now because I’d love your feedback. Please do let me know in the comments what you think of it – if you like it, if you have any comments or suggestions, etc. I’m willing to hear all of it!

I think the new app is a big improvement on both the apps which I’ve developed so far:

  • You can do a certain number of courses on the app (I haven’t put in Firm Foundations or the Holiness course, for example), but all the basic courses are there.
  • The app will remember where you are up to – i.e. which courses you have finished, which you are working on, and which session you are currently on. (You don’t have to be signed in – it just saves that information to your browser).
  • Church with UTB has a new ‘fullscreen’ mode which I hope will make it easy to use on a big screen.

Please do try it, and please do let me know what you think!

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Church with UTB – summer 2023 update

Posted on by Phill Sacre

A few months ago I announced the launch of Church with UTB, which was an attempt to help people start doing church at home. (For more background to my thinking about it, please see my announcement.)

However, I think the initial concept was a bit over-complicated. Over the last few months, I have been doing Church with UTB in our church at home, and I am now ready to put the lessons we’ve learned into practice. I am working on completely revamping the Church with UTB section to make it much easier to use.

In particular, I have been developing an app which will basically provide an order of service each week, including all the videos (songs, sermon), readings, and prayers within the page itself. You will be able to download the app to your phone or mobile device, or you can view it on a laptop or computer. You can take a sneak peek at it by looking here. But please bear in mind that this is still under development and subject to change! Also bear in mind that the content is still only for testing. All that being said, if you do have any comments I’d love to hear them – please leave a comment below or get in touch.

Over the next few weeks, once the App is finished, I will be working on the service itself and looking to develop a Biblical, contemporary service format which can be used regularly.

However, I will be away this coming Sunday (13th August), so there will be no Church with UTB on that day. There are many sermons available on the website – if you’re looking for some Biblical input, why not pick one?

And if you’ve benefitted from Church with UTB, or you would like to use it, please do get in touch and let me know!

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Introducing: Church with Understand the Bible

Posted on by Phill Sacre

I have an exciting announcement about Understand the Bible! I am going to be starting a new feature here – ‘Church with Understand the Bible’. The basic idea is to give people a resource to help them start up a house church.

But before we get onto that, let me explain some of the background.

Church to meet the needs of the 21st Century

The world has changed rapidly in the last hundred years. The world is now more secular than ever before – most people don’t have even a rudimentary understanding of Christianity. Church is seen, at best, as an irrelevance to life – something which only particularly ‘religious’ people get involved with.

At the same time, people are also living more and more atomised lives. Social media has not made us more social but instead has driven us apart – we spend more time on our screens rather than with others face-to-face. As a result of this, and various other factors, young people are feeling more and more lonely.

Despite these challenges, I think many churches are still operating as if we were still in Christendom – in particular, assuming that most people have more knowledge of the gospel than they do. I do not believe this is going to be effective going forward – surely, the experience of the church through the last 20-30 years has demonstrated this. Dwindling numbers of young people would testify to the fact that what we are doing is not working.

I have come to believe that churches, rather than continuing to do what they’ve done for years with diminishing effect, need to intentionally refocus on two key areas:

  1. Discipleship. That is, helping people make the journey all the way from knowing nothing about Christianity to living for Christ every day. Practically speaking, this means a revival of catechesis (see why Sinclair Ferguson says this is important) as well as the traditional sermon. We need to take people deeper in the faith than we have been doing.
  2. Relationship. I wrote a while back that being at church was not the same as being church. Church, fundamentally, is not a building or event but people – specifically, people loving one another. This is our witness to the world. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). This, more than anything else, is what will demonstrate the reality of God to a watching world – the reality of the love Christians have for one another. Francis Schaeffer once commented on these verses, “the final apologetic which Jesus gave is the observable love of true Christians for true Christians”.

It has become more and more clear to me recently that it’s not going to be easy to implement these changes in traditional churches. Churches – as with many institutions – are like oil tankers: it takes a long time to turn them round. Once people start to think “we’ve always done it this way…”, it’s very difficult to persuade them otherwise.

Plus, unfortunately, churches are often so busy running events and doing their regular activities that the fundamentals get squeezed out. Many churches have so bought into seeing church as an event that it’s hard to row back and see the bigger picture. Churches are rushing about doing stuff, when what is needed right now is to stop and refocus.

All this is why I took the difficult decision recently to leave the church I have been with for nine years and start a house church. I believe that we needed the space to ‘reboot’, to focus back in on what is essential and rebuild church from the ground up.

Is church at home real church?

It’s important to deal with the question of whether church at home is real church. Many of us have been so used to going to a church building for church that it’s almost impossible to imagine anything different. I have been challenged on this recently by a friend of mine who started a house church a few years ago. He said to me that if you read the New Testament, it was very common for Jesus and the Apostles to teach in a house. In fact, virtually every church in the early days of the church would have been a house church. For example, Paul says:

The churches in the province of Asia send you greetings. Aquila and Priscilla greet you warmly in the Lord, and so does the church that meets at their house.

1 Corinthians 16:19

Obviously, in those days there were no church buildings – apart from public places, there was no other place for the church to meet. It seems to me that, if we are to be truly Biblical, we need to recognise a ‘house church’ as at least as Biblical as churches we have become used to. Possibly even more so.

But is that valid, according to the definition of a church given by traditional denominations? This is how the Church of England defines a church:

The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.

39 Articles, Article XIX

In other words, there are two things necessary for a church to be a church: (1) the pure Word of God – the preaching and teaching of the Scriptures; (2) the Sacraments – baptism and communion. Those two things can be present anywhere – in a home, or a traditional church building. Notably, it doesn’t mention anything about priests, bishops, church buildings, and the like. That’s not to say that bishops etc are a bad thing, but rather they are not essential for church.

The practical need for house churches

Quite apart from the theological case, there is a more pragmatic, practical case for house churches. Over the last few years, a number of people have got in touch with me to say that they’d love to start going to church but there are no suitable churches in their area. Unfortunately many churches have fallen into liberalism, and you are more likely to hear a sermon about climate change or Black Lives Matter than you are about Jesus. But even if every church remained faithful, there is simply not enough space in church buildings for everyone.

Let’s take the town where I live as an example. There are about 53,000 people living here. There are approximately ten churches across the town. If 25% of the people of the town wanted to go to church, that would be 13,250 people. If you distributed them evenly across every church, you’d have to have 1,325 people in every building! That would be absurd – there are simply no church buildings big enough. That’s not to mention other factors such as parking and facilities: some parts of town are further away from church buildings than others – they seem to have clustered around the town centre.

I, along with many other people, have been praying for revival in the UK – for God to bring many people to faith. If he is pleased to bless us with spiritual renewal, then we are going to have to face the fact that that will not happen in traditional church buildings: there simply isn’t enough space. Not right at the moment, anyway.

There are other issues, for example the fact that we don’t have enough theologically trained leaders to go round. Many churches are struggling to fill vacancies.

What I believe we need to do is – as I argued a few years ago – make smarter use of the internet. That’s where Understand the Bible comes in.

Church with Understand the Bible

My plan is to publish a weekly service outline which could be used and adapted by a house church. I will provide the sermon in video format, and probably also a short catechesis video. I would then publish here on the website the videos along with some suggestions for songs and prayers and so on. I am also planning to publish other resources, e.g. a downloadable service sheet with elements such as creed, confession and so on.

The idea is that the service could be used and adapted by anyone even if they had no theological training. Because the Biblical input would come from Understand the Bible, everything else would be doable. However, I hope that churches would grow in maturity and eventually God would raise up local leaders who were not dependent on Understand the Bible.

I have previously talked about how it’s not possible to be a Christian without going to church. But, as we have seen, a house church is proper church. Church with Understand the Bible isn’t a replacement for proper church – it’s designed to enable it.

I hope that this resource will help people to have the confidence to get together with some friends and start worshipping God together. Church shouldn’t be complicated, and I hope that refocussing us on the essentials of church will help bring about a spiritual renewal across the country.

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