If you’ve been following our journey you’ve probably discovered our song ‘Reigning Most High’. For quite a while it has been our flagship song.

When we first starting leading worship together it was never really our intention to write our own songs. There was such a wealth of great worship songs by other people that the thought of using songs that we had written almost seemed a little bit self indulgent. We loved (and still do love) learning and leading songs from the church all across the world so it wasn’t really on our agenda to think about writing new worship songs of our own.

So it was slightly out of the blue almost five years ago when Jess sent across a voice memo of a worship song she had been working on called ‘Reigning Most High’. Straight away the deep honesty of the song really connect with us and when we next met together we all learned it (because according to Dewey Finn in School of Rock, “That’s what bands do”) and came up with a basic arrangement for it.

We didn’t really have any plans to share or record the song but then a few months later, we were leading worship at a conference for youth workers. We had a great first evening and as ever it was a wonderful privilege to be in a room full of people passionate about Jesus and about young people. However at the end of the evening news about terror attacks in Paris began to reach us. While it is always devastating to hear of needless loss of life, there was something about those events that seemed to impact the UK, probably just by their proximity, more than many other similar events elsewhere.

On the Saturday morning of the conference there was such a different atmosphere in the room as we gathered to worship. While there are lots of big opening songs or rousing anthems we would normally draw on first thing on a Saturday morning to wake everyone up, none of them seemed right for what was on people’s minds and hearts. The only thing that really seemed to fit that moment were the words of the bridge of ‘Reigning Most High’:

We cry out to You
We cry out to You
We cry out to You our King of kings
We cry out to You
We cry out to You
We cry out to You our Everything

So we took a deep breath and taught people the song. We didn’t know what to expect, whether people would join in or get bored and wander off, or whether we even knew it well enough to play it live, but having prayed about it it just seemed like the right thing to do so we went for it.

We were amazed that as we were teaching it and hoping that people in the room might try and sing it back to us, what met our ears was a wall of sound, of voices crying out to God – when we played the song through from beginning to end that sound of worship and prayer only increased. It was an incredibly humbling experience that a song that God entrusted to us would give expression to people’s hearts at such a time. It was from this moment that we began to discover that crafting songs to share was part of what we feel called to do as a community.

Almost 5 years later we are at a time where we are even more aware of our need to cry out to God and to be reminded that He has already won! So here is a version of ‘Reigning Most High’ that we recorded last year in Christ Church Beckenham. Know that whatever you are going through you can cry out to the God who made you and loves you and you can know His victory in your life and situation: