Have you noticed what they do on TV awards shows when they want to really sell a song? What do they do to put their big inspirational numbers over the top? They bring out a choir, usually in traditional robes, singing strong and loud behind the soloist.
Yes, that’s what I said… a choir. You remember those, don’t you? Those antiquated artifacts of church life from way back when. Those musical dinosaurs most experts tell us are just taking up space on the platform that could be better used for a new video wall. And yet, when the world wants to celebrate and inspire joy, they do what is only natural – they call in the choir!
Back in 2020, people were making a lot of predictions about how the pandemic would affect the church. One thing most all the prognosticators guaranteed was that choirs were history. Seriously, how could you rationalize 50+ people spitting germs right at the congregation? Churches busted out the back risers on their platform and told the choir to go home. Entire choral music companies went out of business. But guess what started picking back up within just about a year? Choir attendance.
Sure, it’s not back to where it was. People have been predicting the death of the choir for the past 30 years or more. But it’s now clear they only die if you do everything you can to kill them, which is exactly what many churches have done! So why are some churches so eager to pull the plug on them?
KILLING THE CHOIR
One reason is that we’re just lazy. Choirs require a commitment from a large number of people. It takes work to keep people coming to rehearsal and worship week after week, year-round. But once you get used to having a strong choir in the service, any worship time without one seems like it has had the power drained out of it. And if a church is trying to soft-sell commitment, it can be a real chore to keep a choir going. It’s easier for a “church-lite” congregation to just find six good-looking, talented young people (some of which may be paid) to commit to leading weekly worship.
By the way, that’s also less people you have to buy music for, and less of a music library to have to maintain. Also, if your worship leader doesn’t have to prepare for and lead a choir, your church can get by with paying some dude with a guitar to lead on merely a part-time salary.
Not only laziness and expense, but another sad reason is the Church’s love affair with worship fads. Choirs have gotten a stodgy image, and I admit that some of them deserve it. A lot of what’s in your average church’s choral library are the equivalent of “elevator music”, with a homogenized, corny sound.
Many worship leaders need to take the time to painstakingly transition their choir from singing dusty “anthems” to fresh soul-stirring ballads. But instead, they’ve stood by as the “old wineskins” broke apart and died a premature death. What could have been recast with a new mission and vision has been trashed.
CHOIRS BRING POWER TO A WORSHIP SERVICE
That’s too bad, because a choir can do things that a praise team just can’t. For one thing, there are some songs that just don’t sound the same with fewer people. Majestic hymns like “How Great Thou Art” and even some modern worship choruses don’t have the same power with 6 people singing as they would with 60. You really are hard pressed to do some songs with just a small ensemble, no matter how loud you turn the sound up. As a result, we have greatly limited the music we can use when we give the choir their walking papers.
A choir is also a terrific training ground for new singers. There are lots of people who could one day be fine soloists or praise team members, but they have no “laboratory” in which to sharpen their gifts. Choirs offer a first step to the timid and untrained, so they can hone their skills in a supportive environment.
There are also some people who will never be great soloists, but nevertheless are called by God to lead worship with their exuberant spirit and their visual expressiveness. When the congregation sees all different kinds of people worshipping God, some of whom look just like them, they just can’t help but join in the celebration.
A CHOIR IS NOT A PERFORMANCE GROUP
Some churches treat their choir like a performance group, whose job it is to entertain the congregation. These groups attract those interested in the performing arts – theater, symphony, choral. etc. – and the church choir becomes another outlet for them to showcase their specific talents.
While I love musical theatre and the Arts, those things have little at all to do with what we are doing each Sunday in worship. The church music ministry has no place for those just interested in showcasing their talents. We use our talents to glorify God and to edify the whole church body. We are all on the same team, and the goal is to glorify God…not self!
That is why there should be no competitive spirit in getting solos in the church music program. Since we perform only for God’s glory, it should be just as acceptable for someone else to get a solo as for me to get it. Unfortunately, some music ministers have to be so careful about how many solos they give to one person, because the other soloists will get jealous. But if I perform for God’s glory, then I can rejoice in your talent when you sing a solo that I might have wanted. There should be no competition in a worship ministry, because the spotlight belongs to God and God alone!
A CHOIR PUTS POSITIVE PEER PRESSURE ON THE CONGREGATION
I love the worship of most African-American churches because it is so much more in tune with human emotions than many predominantly white churches. Even as a Anglo man, I am drawn to the music’s passion! After growing up in a hyper-restrained Caucasian congregation, I now believe Black Gospel to be the perfect expression of the joy of the Christian life.
Capturing that joy and passion is something that our traditional Anglo churches have had trouble with over the years. One of our problems has been our presumption that expressive worship was just a “black thing” or a “Pentecostal thing” that we couldn’t capture in predominantly white, non-Charismatic churches. I’ve talked to fellow music ministers who say patronizing things about black churches like “Those people really know how to worship”. While the black church culture has helped to nurture expressiveness, there is nothing inherently different about how specific races of people worship. We all have the same Holy Spirit, and we are all built with the same set of emotions that respond to how God is working in our lives.
The big difference is that some of us have learned to turn off those natural emotional responses to God. And that’s a shame!
We have wrongly believed that kind of passionate worship was just a “black” thing, when it is really a “God” thing! True Biblical worship, with its references to percussion instruments and clapping hands, has more in common with high-energy praise than it ever has with low-energy liturgy.
My life was forever changed by a black choir. Years ago, I was a youth pastor in a Midwestern city. My desire for passionate worship had kept me working with youth, because the adult worship in the churches I had served was usually pretty cold. That was the case at the church I was serving.
One of my Sunday School teachers told be about a need at the plant where he worked. There was a group of workers who met each week during their lunch break to sing as a choir. But they needed a pianist who could play by ear and would come and play for free. When I showed up to do my friend a favor, I discovered that the group was made up completely of African-Americans. I was the sole Anglo in the room, and needless to say I was a bit out of my element.
As we started working on the music, I noticed that their director didn’t conduct by waving his arms in a time pattern like I was trained in school. He had all sorts of little signals and cues, and he would jab his fists at the choir to accentuate the rhythms in the piece.
These people who could have seen me as a poser trying to play “their music” accepted me whole-heartedly. What was most striking was the joyful abandon they sang with. They had twice the volume level of the “white” choir at the church I served, which was many times their size. And the expressions on their faces were beautiful. I found an intensity in the music that challenged me as much as it invigorated me. As I would drive back to my job at my predominantly white church one day, my eyes filled with tears as I wondered why worship couldn’t be like that every Sunday.
It was then I knew God was calling me to focus completely on worship, and to strive for the passion that I had seen in my friends at the plant. And I learned a lesson that’s stuck with me to this day. If all our churches showed that much love for God in their worship, the world would not be able to resist!
I am convinced that if we truly want people from all different backgrounds to feel welcomed, we must adapt the way we do worship. Our music must be accessible to all people, not just to white southerners from the Bible Belt. I think God wants us to do the type of worship that we will be doing in heaven – worship representing all cultures, led by worshippers of all races, lifting up the name of Jesus to every nation!
With the way demographics are changing in the United States, most communities reflect a high level of cultural diversity. It is up to you to decide if your church will rise to the challenge. If you do not, God will surely find someone else who will share His passion to reach the lost around us. As for me, I’m selfish. I want to be part of that church He is using.
A WORSHIPPING CHOIR IS AN ARMY
If you’ve been thinking about putting your choir out of its misery, I’d like to encourage you to reconsider. The best reason I can give you to do that is simply this: choirs are Biblical. A quick trip to II Chronicles 20 will illustrate that.
Most of us know at least the pertinent details of King Jehoshaphat and his predicament. His kingdom was about to be attacked by forces too strong for him to resist with his conventional army. When he recognized he was powerless to fight against such a huge army, he humbled himself before God and called on his people to pray for God’s deliverance.
Instead of fighting, God told the king to simply “stand still” in faith and trust, and he would soon “see his salvation”. While those words sound pretty spiritual to us right now, it might not seem like the most practical advice to a king facing destruction at the hands of a might enemy. But God reminds him that the battle is not his – “the battle is the Lord’s” (vs. 15). Since the king had humbled himself and asked God’s help, God took up their problem as His own and determined to make a way for His people.
So what did God decide was the best way to answer their prayer that would also bring Him the most glory? His plan was to show them how puny their weapons were compared to His strength. The way He would do that is by sending the choir into battle first – in front of the army!
I wonder how many people showed up for choir practice after Jehoshaphat announced that new tactical strategy!
While this plan might seem ludicrous to any typical army general, it made sense on the battlefield of spiritual warfare. You see, instead of relying on their own military power, the choir leading the way with praise showed they relied on God’s power alone to save them. I know some pastors and worship leaders who need to learn that lesson! Instead of relying on our talent, our budgets, our numbers, or our extravaganzas, we need to put our personal arsenals aside and take up our song of worship! Unless God shows up in the power of His presence, our churches are just buildings and our worship is a sad charade.
That battle formation is a perfect picture of how we enter into worship every Sunday. The choir is not a performance organization; it is a tool for spiritual warfare leading the charge against the Enemy. Satan hates Godly worship, so we are storming the gates of hell when we take up our song of praise to our Champion. It is not our programs that are going to defeat the forces of evil; it is our God rescuing us when we cry out to Him. Our worship says that we are depending on Him to win the victory, not on our own strength. And when we lay down our weapons and take up our song, God responds to His children… in a huge way!
“Now when they began to sing and to praise, the Lord set ambushes against the people…and they were defeated.” – Vs. 22
Notice that they didn’t just sing: they began to “praise”. Lots of churches sing songs about God each Sunday, but the ones where God shows up are the churches that are truly giving God praise. Many praise teams have perfectly coiffed hair, and many choirs sing with the most accurate diction. Yet God responds to churches that put their hearts and minds on Him above all things during worship.
Jehoshaphat’s people were also willing to sing God’s praise right in the face of their unbelieving enemies who surround them. They risked looking ridiculous, not to mention losing their lives, to show their dependence on the Lord. So God will also show up when, in the face of opposition inside or outside the church, we boldly lift Him up in the face of the opposing opinions of others.
PUT YOUR PRAISE ON
In this Bible story, God wants us to learn to put down the suit of armor we’ve been protecting ourselves with and put on praise instead. He wants us to put down the weapons the world has convinced us are smart and up to date, and instead take up our song. When we start seeing our hearts as the true battlefield and worship as the true weapon, then we stop fighting each other and start fighting together.
God has given each of us a powerful song to sing: the testimony of the wonders He has done in our lives. And that testimony has the power to send demons sprawling across the floor disoriented and destroyed. When we take up our song, we encourage each other to keep in the fight.
On one side of the sanctuary, there may be someone facing a huge struggle. It might be their health, their job, or their family that’s falling apart. But then they see a fellow believer that has gone through the fire, singing to the top of their lungs “The Goodness of God”. A young adult struggling with depression and singleness sees a friend in the alto section with the very same challenges in life, singing their praise right in the midst of their doubts. Across the room, a senior citizen facing cancer treatment looks into the face of an older man in the choir loft who has just lost his wife, and yet he proclaims “The Longer I Serve Him… the sweeter He grows”!
The choir is a singing, worshipping army for spiritual warfare, using our testimonies as the weapons to fight for the hearts of our congregation!
Our praise doesn’t just send the Enemy into disarray. Worship has the power to take our focus off our problems and put it on the One who holds our lives in His hands. And when we look to Him, our perspective changes and we see things as they truly are.
So next time you feel the urge to take the battle into your own hands, take up your song instead. Next time you wish you could take the easy way out, take up your song. When you want to take up an offense with your brother, take up your song.
And when you are starting to take God’s blessings for granted, take up your song and praise God just for who He is! That’s when you’ll see your world changed by the power of worship.
