City News sat down with founder of California-based Mandarin worship band Stream of Praise, Sandy Yu to talk about the importance of worshipping God as a church, and about the new opportunities Covid brought to the ministry.
Stream of Praise is arguably the most well-known Mandarin worship band in the world today. Singapore received the group with much excitement on the weekend of 22 to 25 June as they conducted the Singapore leg of their Asian tour. Their trip also included a Worship Revival Summit for worship leaders in local churches as well as a children’s worship camp.
It has been 30 years since Sandy Yu had a dream to bring Mandarin worship to different Chinese churches across the world. She started Stream Of Praise Music Ministries with a group of friends in 1993 in California, as a registered non-profit organisation. With their first album Let Praise Arise (1995), they established a unique position in the worship scene that has only grown stronger over the decades. Stream of Praise has released more than 30 Mandarin praise and worship albums, and various other releases (instrumental, piano albums, live worship, encounter worship, Korean worship). They tour the world, bringing their worship to places from the US to Panama, Australia and New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore. Today, Stream of Praise is on a mission to bring Chinese worship to more people in the aftermath of Covid through its tour, and also by bringing revival to worship teams around the world through their Worship Revival Summits which they conduct with various churches in countries they visit.
As the worship band graced the hall of City Harvest Church on 25 June, City News took the chance to sit down with Pastor Sandy to talk about the conference, and how Covid has affected worship around the world.
The theme for this year’s tour is “Revive Our Worship”. What inspired it?
During Covid, and even now, post-Covid, a lot of people decide to stay at home to worship and they feel very comfortable about that. But when you worship at home, your fire cannot grow as much as when you worship corporately.
Corporate worship is so important because that’s key to blessing your city. Just like in the Old Testament, when people gather to worship, that’s when God comes. Of course, you can worship at home and God’s glory will still be there, but worship at the corporate level and personal level is different. When you worship privately, God will bless your home, bless your life, but when you worship corporately, God will bless the city, bless the land.
And we see that restoring corporate worship is not just the effort of one person or a group. I feel that every worship team, every church, each of them carries a piece of stone and worship is rebuilt piece by piece. Just like in the Old Testament, when they want to rebuild their temple, it is not the effort of just one person. The people carried the stones, one piece at a time to rebuild the temple. That is the same for rebuilding corporate worship.
Our prayer is that during our worship, we can reignite people’s passion for the Lord and to really understand the importance of this corporate worship.
In 2022, Stream of Praise restarted its Asian tour. It was also the first time you organised a Worship Revival Summit. Can you tell us more about that?
Last year was the first time we did a Worship Revival Summit for worship leaders. The reason why we started it is because we know that during Covid, a lot of churches stopped worshipping together, which then meant that many worship team members were dismissed. Some churches with the means to, can still worship online, but most churches around the world are not so equipped. It’s very hard for them to push everything online all of a sudden.
We saw that a lot of worship teams were very discouraged and so last year, we wanted to use the summit to bring worship teams back together and to help them rebuild their team—to encourage them and to get them to gel together again.
Most of the time, worship team members don’t get to worship together, especially for small churches where the number of people serving in the team is so limited. You’re playing the drums and then the next moment, you’re on vocals, and then you have to manage the soundboard as well. So, it’s a rare chance for them not to have to worry about anything but to just come and worship.
Last year’s turnout was very, very good and we felt that we want to continue to do that because it is so powerful when the worship teams in the cities gather together and worship. The summit we did in Singapore, I felt like it was very, very powerful. It felt like we were able to build on top of last year’s summit.
Since we are on the topic of Covid, did the pandemic affect Stream of Praise much?
I think we only had to cancel our Asian tour in Taiwan for one year. But we couldn’t go to other countries, like Hong Kong and Singapore. We were in Los Angeles, US and I think we only had lockdown for half a year to a year, then things went back to normal. We also spent some time in Taiwan, and at the start of the pandemic, Taiwan only had a few Covid cases and they were still able to gather for church. So, at that time we were still able to minister there. By the time Taiwan shut down their activities and we went back to LA, the lockdown in LA was almost over so we could go back to work.
However, thank God that two years before Covid, God inspired us to start doing worship videos. Because at that time, we felt that there were very limited resources on Chinese worship, whether on Good TV or on YouTube. There were so many people doing English worship but not many groups were doing Chinese worship. We felt that it was our calling and we just had to do it.
Two years before Covid, we started Tian Tang Jing Bai (“worship in heaven”), which consists of short episodes of 20 to 25 minutes of worship. That was also when we started to get into live filming and live recording.
When Covid hit, we had to cancel some of our trips but we could still worship with people online. God had prepared everything for us. Everything was already online. During Covid, we also started online worship school. Everybody was stuck at home so that was the best time for them to take classes on Zoom to learn about worship.
I think God has prepared us to be ready to meet any kind of challenge. When any challenge comes, we just need to find a way to continue to minister and I believe there’ll always be a way to do it. Covid to us was an opportunity to venture into new things. And it was fun for us.
Do you have any revelations that came out of Covid?
It’s really just an understanding of the power of social media and the power of being able to bring worship to even more places through the Internet. That’s something we can take great advantage of. Even though we still want to push for corporate worship, there are also things that live worship cannot do. Live worship cannot go to every city in the world—so the Internet gives more people the chance to worship with us.
Let’s talk about Stream of Praise’s new album, Revive Our Worship.
Everything is on digital, and we have about 10 new songs. Every time we produce an album, it is always what we receive from God that year. We’ll always pray, “God, what do You what to speak to the Chinese churches for the next five years?” We have that in mind every time we produce an album. For this album, we felt that restoring worship—giving honour to Jesus through worship—will bless the land. We felt that this is what the Lord wants us to communicate for the next five years.
