Seriously, when was the last time you heard someone say something positive about their church’s worship music?
I don’t blame them. There’s no surer way to get myself in a deep funk (and I don’t mean the musical kind) than to watch some church’s live stream on Sunday afternoon after my own worship leading is over.
And sometimes, the service that depresses me is my own. Everybody has bad days, for sure. The fact of the matter is, worship leading is a tough job. You never, ever make everyone happy. And if you make pleasing everyone your goal, you will be certain never to please God.
That is just one of the many problems with trying to lead worship in an evangelical church.
The problem often is that some of us really don’t get worship at all. Sure, some services suffer from untalented or unqualified personnel. But many of our services betray the fact that when it comes to worship, we’ve completely missed the point.
One problem is churches often approach worship not primarily based on Scriptural content, but on human preference and musical style. While this shouldn’t be the case, we do have to admit that style and human preferences matter. They simply shouldn’t be ALL that matter!
So that’s another problem – balancing the priority of Scriptural fidelity with the human desire for music we enjoy.
Styles in popular music continually change, and this naturally affects the music in our churches. Songs are an important part of worship – they are the tools we give the congregation to worship with. Just as the wrong tool can create disfunction with a household chore, the wrong songs can make it difficult for a congregation to effectively enter into worship.
A Gregorian chant might have worked very well several hundred years ago, but today’s congregation will be hard-pressed to sing along with you in Latin. Likewise, the latest Christian R&B song may have scriptural lyrics, but a predominantly senior adult congregation will be giving you some passionate feedback at the end of the service.
So musical style does indeed matter. BUT…it should not matter most.
Got it? Yeah, it’s quite the balancing act.
The seniors complain we’re not doing enough hymns, so we create a “traditional service” to make them happy. We make the other service the “contemporary service”, and most of the young adults gravitate to it.
Everybody’s happy, right?
Not really. These services also divide the congregation along generational lines and inhibit healthy fellowship between those generations. They disconnect seniors from the new life that new worship songs represent – the “new wineskins” of what God is doing now in the church. They also separate the young adults from hundreds of years of tradition. Their kids don’t hear the songs that sustained their grandparents through seasons of struggle and tragedy. Their worship lacks gravitas and foundation: it’s only as good as the latest disposable pop anthem.
Drastically separating worship styles undercuts one of the important strengths of a multi-generational church. It disconnects seniors from the enthusiasm of young adults, while disconnecting young adults from the wisdom and experience of seniors. A congregation given inherent balance by God is divided into two separate UNbalanced congregations, each tipping dangerously in opposite directions.
If not “traditional” and “contemporary” services, what do we do?
Well, of course the answer must then be a “blended service”, where we will do BOTH hymns and new worship choruses in hopes this will make everybody happy. The reality is they often make both sides even more dissatisfied.
In most blended services, we choose a quota of hymns that are given new contemporary arrangements. Often, these arrangements make those beloved hymns mostly unsingable for seniors. Likewise, the new worship chorus arrangements are homogenized to sound like the “Muzac” one might hear in an elevator or dentist’s office. Those church orchestras, usually consisting of a bunch of high school level woodwind and brass players, drain all the life and power out of what were guitar-based songs.
Remembering hearing “Stairway To Heaven” played by Mantovani’s stringed orchestra? Exciting stuff, right?
This is about where most church pastors throw up their hands, throw in the towel and just settle for whatever they’ve been doing. Or they overreact and fire the worship leader in hopes that some new person will be the magical hire that make everyone happy.
Good luck with that. But maybe what we need is to step back a minute and remind ourselves what really matters in worship.
What matters is God. What He wants. What pleases Him. What draws His presence. We must put Him first and make sure he stays there in our hearts. Because when style is our chief focus, man is the one on the throne of worship. Not God.
In deconstructing our worship, we need to ask ourselves some tough questions about our church’s worship:
Is our worship man-centered, or God-centered?
- Do we really believe Kierkegaard’s example for Biblical worship, in that we view God as the true audience, and those on the platform merely the prompters for the congregation’s performance? Or have we switched places and put people as the audience, the worship leaders as the performers, and God is left outside doing parking lot ministry?
Does our worship give the congregation tools (songs) they can easily use to engage in worship?
- Are the songs not only Scriptural but also easy to sing? Do we introduce new songs in a way people can easily learn them? Do we show respect to seniors by incorporating hymns from their past?
Does our worship represent the full gamut of human emotion, or just one safe emotionless plane?
- Will people experience joy, lament, passion, and desire during our services? Or will we just stick to the medium-tempo, dispassionate but Scriptural centerground? If we do, can we expect people from other worship backgrounds (and ethnicities) to feel included in our services?
Is the congregation included in worship and encouraged to participate, or are they given a free pass to spectate on the sidelines?
- Do we actively encourage people to sing, to clap, to life hands, and other Biblical expressions of worship during our services? Are their seasons of prayer where they can express their need for intercession from brothers and sisters in the congregation? Or should they have just stayed home and watched the livestream?
I believe most churches I know need to start asking these questions and “deconstructing” their worship. They need to put the man-centered questions of style aside for a while, and first make sure our hearts are in the right place and God is in His right place.
Frankly, it’s not OK that we’re about to lose several hundred year’s worth of hymns. They are an important part of our spiritual heritage. Many hymns need to be preserved so we can remember who we are and from where we came. But it’s also not ok to ignore God’s command to “sing to the Lord a NEW song”. And it’s not OK that prayer is relegated to a perfunctory task, often delivered devoid of purpose or passion.
Our worship needs to reflect not only the God of Scripture but also the people gathered to worship Him. We need to incorporate a variety of musical styles, as opposed to everything sounding the same in a service. We should be using different instrumentation to create different moods. And passion must be an essential ingredient of our worship.
If we aren’t hungering and thirsting after God, we should not expect Him to be drawn to our services.
In fact, we may not be the only ones dissatisfied with our worship today…
“I can’t stand your religious meetings. I’m fed up with your conferences and conventions. I want nothing to do with your religion projects, your pretentious slogans and goals. I’m sick of your fund-raising schemes, your public relations and image making. I’ve had all I can take of your noisy ego-music. When was the last time you sang to me?” – Amos 5:21 and following (The Message)
Maybe we’re dissatisfied because His Spirit is within us, and He’s dissatisfied too. So let’s allow Him to tip over the tables of our temples if He chooses. It may stir up some dust in the process, but God’s presence in our worship will be more than worth the trouble.
Because if God’s presence isn’t there, is it really worship? That’s the most important question of all.