Welcome to AI Worship Discovery, our weekly exploration of Christian music created entirely with artificial intelligence. This emerging form of music combines technology and creativity to produce original songs of worship, praise, encouragement, and faith. Each week, we highlight AI-created Christian music that offers a glimpse into this fascinating new frontier while keeping the focus where it belongs: on the message of faith and the worship expressed through the music.
This week’s AI Worship Discovery gives the timeless hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” a fresh ’90s rock-ballad treatment, bringing a familiar message of friendship with Christ into a whole new musical setting.
“What A Friend We Have in Jesus”
🐟
Some hymns seem to belong to a particular musical era. “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” with its familiar melody and traditional hymn arrangement, is certainly one of them. But underneath that familiar musical setting is a message that has never belonged to just one generation. This week’s AI Worship Discovery takes that timeless hymn and places it somewhere completely unexpected: inside the sound of a ’90s rock ballad.
The words of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” were written by Joseph Medlicott Scriven around 1855. Scriven was an Irishman who had moved to Canada, and the hymn is traditionally understood to have begun as a poem of comfort written for his mother, who was living in Ireland. Scriven himself knew considerable sorrow, including the tragic death of his first fiancée and the later death of his second fiancée. The circumstances surrounding the poem’s composition have been discussed by hymn historians, but its purpose is clear: it was a message of comfort centered on the reality of bringing our burdens to Jesus.
The poem eventually found its way into print, initially without Scriven’s name attached to it. The familiar music came later. Charles Crozat Converse composed the tune in 1868, and the words and melody were published together in 1870. Through hymnals, evangelistic meetings, churches and generations of Christian worship, the combination became one of the best-known expressions of Christian confidence in prayer.
And what exactly is Scriven telling us? The answer is wonderfully simple. Jesus is our Friend, He bears our sins and griefs, and we have the privilege of bringing everything to God in prayer. The hymn then turns the thought around: how much peace do we miss, and how much needless pain do we carry, simply because we fail to take those burdens to the Lord? Its central message is not complicated, but it is profound. We don’t have to carry everything by ourselves.
That brings us to this week’s AI Worship Discovery. This version takes “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and completely reimagines its musical setting as a ’90s rock ballad. The production, instrumentation, vocal performance and overall arrangement were created entirely with AI. Instead of the traditional piano-and-congregation sound we might associate with the hymn, the song is given the atmosphere of a powerful rock ballad—something that could have emerged from the musical world of the 1990s.
Yet that dramatic musical change actually makes an interesting point about hymns themselves. A hymn isn’t defined solely by the instruments accompanying it. The musical setting can change while the words continue to communicate exactly what they communicated generations ago. Here, the ’90s rock sound doesn’t rewrite Scriven’s message or attempt to modernize its theology. It simply gives those words a completely different musical voice.
And that is perhaps the most interesting part of this experiment. Imagine hearing this song for the first time without knowing when the words were written. The musical style might suggest the 1990s, but the message reaches back more than a century before that. The sound is new; the truth being sung is not. The guitars may be louder, the drums may be bigger, and the overall production may sound worlds away from a traditional hymnbook, but the invitation remains exactly the same: bring your sins, your grief, your burdens, your worries and your pain to Jesus in prayer.
In that sense, this isn’t really a new song at all. It is an old song wearing new clothes. The AI-created ’90s rock-ballad arrangement changes the atmosphere, but it doesn’t change the destination. “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” still points to the same Friend, offers the same comfort, and carries the same reminder that Christians have been singing for generations: we don’t have to carry our burdens alone.
🐟