About David
I couldn't say my own name.
Not the story most people expect from a man who now teaches worship leaders for a living. It is where his begins.
He was a stammerer.
A bad one. To get his own name out he had to hit his leg against the ground. It shaped more than his speech: it changed how he picked up language, which is why to this day he does not sing in the native dialects he loves hearing other people sing in.
He is an introvert. He is quiet. By his own account he cannot dance to save his life. He chose none of it, and God used all of it.
Give me my keyboard, and I'll worship.
People told him to try praise instead. The first time he tried it in church, the room laughed more than it worshipped. That was also the last time. For a long time afterward it seemed as though nobody was listening.
Today people are listening all over the world
He sang for seventeen years before he understood what he was doing.
He started in 1999, around nineteen, a pastor's kid in an a cappella group. It worked. Skill and talent carried them across Nigerian campuses and they became genuinely popular. God was using them. None of that was pretend.
But being gifted is not the same as understanding. Being used by God is not the same as understanding. He had the platform and the fruit, and still did not know what he was actually doing. In 2017 that began to change, when God reintroduced him to the architecture underneath the music.
What he has watched since is sobering. Not everyone he started with is still standing. Talent got many of them in. It did not keep them.
He spent three months getting one instruction wrong.
God gave him a burden to teach music ministers. His first response was not obedience, it was that he felt completely unqualified. When it would not leave him, he did the obvious thing and organised a conference.
Every date collapsed. For three months something always came up, until he finally said "God" out loud and got a question back.
Did I send you to do a conference? Sit down and write what I told you to do.
It was never meant to be an event. It was meant to be written. What he sat down and wrote became the course he has now taught to ministers in nine countries.
He was told not to rescue the choir he built.
He had stepped back on purpose. The choir declined. Two generations of leaders came and went, and he could feel the congregation looking at him, wondering how the standard could drop with him sitting right there.
One day it was too much and he decided to go back and take it on again. The answer was immediate and it was no.
Don't even try it.
Focusing on what he had not been sent to do would only pull him off what he had. The assignment belonged to somebody else who needed to step up, and his presence there may have been the very thing preventing it. There is no vacuum.
I don't teach theory.
I dare not talk about the things He hasn't taken me through.
David Nkennor
Where he is now.
He leads Worship Is W.I.D.E from Lagos, hosts a weekly online gathering called The Morning Dew, and teaches Understanding The Music Ministry twice a year to worship leaders across Nigeria and the diaspora.
His second book, Worshippers of the Last Day, argues that worship was never meant to be the calling of a few.
The short version
- Born
- 21 June. Nigerian. A pastor's kid.
- Studied
- Mathematics, University of Lagos. Trained as an educator.
- Began
- 1999, at about 19, in a six-man a cappella group called Baby's Heart.
- Founded
- Worship Is W.I.D.E, premiered 28 September 2008 in Lagos.
- Albums
- Worship Is W.I.D.E, volumes one and two. 2008 and 2015.
- Songs
- Without Restriction. Blessings and Honour. You Are Good. Oh My God.
- Books
- The Music Code of God. Worshippers of the Last Day.
- Teaching
- Worship School Lagos, The Worship Continuum, and UTMM.
- Family
- Married to Ugochi. Two children.