Reviewed by Tony Cummings

The bi-line to this stylishly packaged new series is "A total worship experience" and though you can purchase separately any of the elements - the double CD, DVDs, the songbook (complete with bonus CD-Rom featuring chord charts and text files) - you wouldn't get the whole "experience" simply by getting the CD. Until now worship resources have concentrated largely on either the worship leader (with songbooks offering the words and music of a stream of the world's best songs and choruses) or the more general church-goer wanting to continue the essential worship dynamic outside of church meetings and celebrations by playing worship albums at home, in the car, or even on their portable stereos. Now Integrity Music (which, you'll remember, recently expanded to purchase INO) along with Maranatha! Music here offer not only 33 of the world's most popular worship recordings - Darlene Zschech's "Shout To The Lord", Paul Baloche's "Open The Eyes Of My Heart" and possibly the piece-de-resistance, MercyMe's "I Can Only Imagine" (which, in truth, isn't a congregational worship song but is one of the finest you'll hear this or any year) and added to many of them a whole new visual element. Two DVDs each offer visuals to accompany seven of the songs (don't ask me why they didn't put them all on one DVD) are the groundbreaking element of the whole iWorship project. Largely the film footage accompanying the songs concentrates on the glories of God's creation - so there's lots of beautifully shot and occasionally breathtaking images of sunsets, helicopter-tracked mountains, woodlands, deserts and of course, that most popular evangelical favourite, waterfalls. Now some of the more jaded post-evangelicals will view such film-and-song presentations as more clichéd kitsch akin to those sunsets-and-Scripture verses posters which were once so popular in the Christian subculture. And no doubt there are some pockets of the reformed church who will see a worship-with-visuals resource as perilously close to an incitement to idolatry that in ages past led to wholesale wrecking of statues and smashing of stained glass windows. But somewhere in the middle will be the majority of Christians who recognise that our modern culture, dominated by TV and film, has put increasing emphasis on the visual dimension and that the iWorship series is a useful attempt to recognise that fact as it seeks to draw us into worship. It's just been announced that the first iWorship project has already gone gold in the USA. Clearly those who've conceived this series have discovered a need within the Church.

The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those held by Cross Rhythms. Any expressed views were accurate at the time of publishing but may or may not reflect the views of the individuals concerned at a later date.

Interested in reviewing music? Find out more here.

This track data is supplied by the Cross Rhythms CD/DVD review library. Please note that CD tracks may vary according to release region or product version.