Simon Brading is a 20 year old worship leader currently based at the Newfrontiers church in Brighton: CCK - the home of Stuart Townend, Paul Oakley, Kate Simmonds and Phatfish. Under the pastoral eye of Joel Virgo, Simon is the worship leader for Newfrontiers growing national youth event Newday and the Newfrontiers student events Mobilise. Originally based at the Coign Church in Woking, Simon is crafting worship songs that are the voice of a new generation of worshippers. Simon contributed 3 songs to the Newday 2005 album You Reign - most notably the title track which proved to be the most requested song.

Simon was brought up in a Christian family and actually personally responded to Jesus at the age of 8, while sitting in his older brother’s room. They were talking about Jesus and Simon decided he wanted Him to be Lord of his life there and then!

Simon grew up in a musical family with both his parents playing the guitar so from a very early age he learnt how to play both the guitar and piano.

In his early teenage years Simon played in a couple of rock bands and wrote a few songs back then. One of the leaders at the Church advised him to start writing congregational songs, so he gave it a go. Simon quickly realised that writing songs for the Church was so much harder than he’d imagined and regularly wanted to give up, being convinced he was the worst song writer in the world. Yet deep inside God was growing a passion for the Church and stirring him to keep writing.

“I still found it hard and wanted to give up, but finally I finished a song I was half happy with. I only played it twice at a youth conference and didn’t actually like it after that so never played it again. It took me over a year to write another song I was happy with and ever since then I’ve just been trying to write more and more. One of my biggest influences musically are the Beatles. My Dad’s a big Beatles fan and often played them at home, so I learnt a lot of their songs from an early age. Lyrically, the great hymn writer Charles Wesley is a big influence. Writing over 6,000 hymns covering every doctrine I can think of, he uses incredible imagery to paint the most awesome pictures of God and what He’s done.”

Simon’s first release ‘Going Your Way’ brings 7 great songs of worship including Newday favourites You Reign and I'm Alive. Delirious' Stu G is among the musicians featured.

“Going Your Way is a song about following God and going His way. It talks about surrender, submission, following where God leads and living a life that honours Him. The idea for the chorus came from a Poker expression, ‘all in’. When you play Poker, they say someone is ‘all in’ when they bet all their chips, not holding back, but giving all they have. This is what our worship to God should be like; not holding back but surrendering our all to Jesus, giving everything to Him; We’re all in, everything we have is Yours.”

“My favourite track keeps changing, but it’s probably You Reign. It was written out of a season that was very painful for our family, but since then as things have changed and God’s proved Himself to us time and time again, this song is a big wake up call to the faithfulness of God for me.” After Jesus, my biggest passion in life is the Church. Every song I write, I write for the worshipping Church in hope that it would point people towards God and help them respond to Him. Whether it’s in a car CD player or sung in a congregation somewhere, my biggest hope is that the songs I write would help the Church to worship God with all they have.”