I went to a Christian bookstore, aka “marketplace” yesterday and browsed through the CDs. Honestly, I shouldn’t be doing stuff like that, it gets my cynicism levels up like an overzealous spike of cholesterol levels. CD after CD flaunted titles like “today’s best” worship and “ultimate worship”. Because after all, selecting worship music is all about us. Told you I was cynical. Worship industry. Bah. I think I saw everything but purpose-driven worship. Now, I can’t stand anything that even has a whiff of the commercialization of spirituality, and that’s why I need to stay out of most of these stores as much as I can.
Anyway. I’ve recently been reading some people’s thoughts on worship. Yeah, I know, I don’t equate worship with music, but you know what I mean.
First off, there’s the question of how christian musicians are treated, which is sometimes more than a little pathetic, as Fernando Gros discussed last week.
If we want better music in our churches, we need to encourage the spirituality of our musicians and develop less coercive relationships with othem. We can start by recognising the sacrifice musicians make to develop their craft and the financial opportunities they forgo to provide music within church settings. We could drop the language of gift and recognise that music is , more than anything, a craft and a skill. We would do well to encourage our musicians in their spiritual journey, recognising that at times playing music in church may be in conflict with what they need for their spiritual development. We have to recognise that musicians not only need to play outside church for their creative development but that in doing so they create a fantastic opportunity to be missional through their profession.
He’s promised to follow up with an exploration of “some ways to better understand the role of theological content in worship and worship songs.”
Good thing, too… we need better theology in some of the songs we sing. In fact, a few of them could use any amount of theology, which would be an improvement. I’m quite glad to see a trend gaining steam with a lot of the current crop of worship leaders, the infusion of traditional hymns into their repertoire. It’s a good alternative to something else I was reading last week, from an interview with Michael Frost.
I write about this stuff as a disempowered critic. I have no ability to change it myself because I can’t write music or play an instrument. But I’m getting tired of singing love songs to Jesus-my-boyfriend. And frankly I feel silly when I have to sing songs so sentimental and cloying they could have been written for a 1990s boy band….
….it’s not singing that I don’t like. It’s the kind of singing that I’m expected to engage in. As much as this romanticising of worship bothers me, even more disturbing is the recent trend of singing worship songs in which I have to pledge my unfaltering devotion and service to him. You know, the ‘Jesus, I will never let you go…’ type song. In these songs I have to declare that I will follow him to the ends of the earth and that I will praise him all my days. In one sense, there’s nothing wrong with making such promises to God. The Psalmist does so on occasion. But frankly, I’m so much more comfortable with singing about the fact that Jesus has promised that he will never let me go. My promises seem hollow and unreliable. It’s God’s promises to me in Christ that are solid, reliable and unfaltering.
Frost nails it. Maybe this is part of the feminization of church that’s being talked about lately. Adam Cleaveland picks up the theme too, taking Craig Musseau to task for “Arms of Love.”
If there is any song that perpetuates the “Jesus is my boyfriend”-gospel, this song would be it. Singing a cute little love song to Jesus? Oh my loving Jesus – my precious (I couldn’t get Gollum’s voice out of the back of my head during this song). And of course, there is no place I’d rather be – I want to be in your arms Jesus – I want you holding me close, holding me near…oh to feel your touch Jesus. Oh to feel your arms of love…
Good old Cleave. He caps it off with a link to The CCM Patrol, “where christian music is allowed to get bad reviews. Really bad reviews.” Oh man, can I ever relate to this blog’s byline.
“Ultimate worship?” Give it up, that’s “industry” talk. Ultimately, you just worship, and I hope that the years ahead in the very near future will produce music to facilitate this, music that’s weighty… well-written, well-performed, and well-produced. Oh, and modestly-marketed at most.
Better still is the realization of what true worship looks like, and apparently it’s not an event. Fred Peatross posts Sally Morgenthaler’s views on the subject… one she’s written on in the past. He says she “has come to the conclusion that worship is not an event that will connect the believer with the missing.” He quotes her,
We have come to realize that it is time to move on. Sacramentis still believes strongly that corporate worship is central to the life and vitality of the Church. But we have become convinced that the primary meeting place with our unchurched friends is now outside the church building. Worship must finally become, as Paul reminds us, more life than event.
Excellently done. We can flesh this out by going to the source of the quote, Sally’s Sacramentis website for further (brief) info. Sacramentis, for those who don’t know, sums up it’s role up to now in this way:
Sacramentis has been a pioneer site on worship and culture for seven years. From the beginning, it has been a gathering spot for the best worship resources available. Sacramentis has also been a place where church leaders could go deeper into what classic Christian worship is and does, and where they could re-imagine worship for communities where church-going is no longer the norm.
They’re winding that all up and moving on… Fred has already quoted part of that explanation, but we might add the paragraph which follows after the one he quotes:
To this end, Sally Morgenthaler and the rest of the Sacramentis team will be focusing on the radically different kind of leadership it will take to transform our congregations from destinations to conversations, from services to service, and from organization to organism.
Now that’s exciting… and note how it’s turning missional, which brings us back to something Fernando was saying. And, of course, it catches my attention. Worship is not flocking into a building and singing about Jesus our boyfriend. It has much more to do with taking the majesty of God with us into everyday life. And above all else, it’s so much more about who God is than how we feel about it.
David Fitch in The Great Giveaway has some excellent thoughts on this.. and some of them I posted just recently again in relation to the issue of restorationism and the pursuit of feeling in worship.
Feminisation of the church? What would be a better alternative? All worship sounding like a WWE event? Lots of testosterone there!
Just being facetious, sort of…
Why do we only have to sing officially “sanctified” songs? We did a service this past summer that explored the idea that there might be something sacred in all music. That because we each are made in God’s image and have that desire to create as we were created, there is a spark of the sacred in everything we do create.
My other gripe is that “worship” has become a euphemism for singing and music. Yesterday we had a confluence of events that did not allow for one note of music during our service … and boy o boy did we worship. I wish we could blow out the dust on that definition and expand it’s borders a bit.
Sorry … just a few tender spots.
I still think it’s always context. If I was working in a context where folk in the neighbourhood had a disproportionate number of Mariah Carey cds in their collections [alongside Shania and Celine] and chat in the local coffee shop was mostly about Canadian Idol, then praise/worship music makes sense – at least in form. I just wish they’d do something about the content. Surely someone could say something profound even in that rather predictable format.
Oy. One (or at least me) hardly knows where to start. The very fact that this is apparently some big fat hairy issue with so many folks speaks to there being something so deeply flawed here in so many of our assumptions to begin with….
Just one and only one thing and I quit because I’ll start to rant, and rants don’t look good on me:
“Worship” has little or nothing to do with music. Maybe that’s where everybody needs to go back and start.
A has an interesting point. I worked for 12 years as pastor of a Deaf church – as we worked toward truly indigeneous expressions of worship we stopped all song signing – this was a relief to many, but for me, as a Hearing person, it took some time to adjust – particularly in terms of then what part of the liturgy do the laity truly own, what then clearly belongs to them. In the Protestant hymn tradition, the hymns clearly belonged to the lay people [ = don’t mess with them]. But it’s worth noting that that is not the only tradition – it was probably less so, for example, in catholic or orthodox traditions. In a number of alternative worship contexts that i’ve been in, there has been no singing. Still works. Still worship.
Oh well. When I said in the post, “Yeah, I know, I don’t equate worship with music, but you know what I mean” I thought maybe we wouldn’t end up on that sidetrack… I know this is a hot-button issue for some, and I really don’t see worship as = singing. As a word, “worship” is like “sheep” …I can talk about sheep and you might think I mean the whole flock rather than just a single animal. Ok, wait, that analogy sucks. Singing is a subset of expressions of worship, and expressions of worship are a subset of worship itself. I’m sure I’ve written on this before, and perhaps I’ll need to do a whole post on it again, but it’s largely a non-issue for me.
What I’m really discussing in this post is music as a subset of the various expressions of worship that we engage in. Perhaps it’s this overemphasis or this idea that worship = singing that helps fuel the stuff I’m complaining about here.
otoh, lest we come down too hard on the worship = singing idea, we should remember that music or song is a frequent enough expression of worship in the Bible. We shouldn’t divorce the two ideas too harshly, but I think we need to remember that song is an expression of worship, which is not the same as saying they’re the same thing.
As I’ve sketched it out here, music is two steps removed from worship. This is the first time I’ve really expressed it this way, but I think there may be something to it. Worship occurs in the heart, and is given expression in a variety of ways, one of which is song. Gotta think on that one some more.
Note though that the original post deliberately starts with an overemphasis on the hottest songs and ends with reimagining leadership leaning specifically for a missional context. Another way, it moves from how we feel about Jesus to how we serve others. Ah. Under the subject of “worship,” now we’re getting somewhere, no?
Maynard- My take is a little different. I think there are a lot of artists out there in the CCM community that are writing worthwhile stuff, much of which is focused on the mission of God, faithfulness in suffering, sactificial living, etc. instead of track after track of lovey-dovey praise (I’m thinking right now of Jason Morant’s Open, but there are several others…). The problem, as I see it, is that – at the consumer level – feel-good, lovey dovey praise is all anyone wants to sing, so thats what ends up on the radio and on the order of worship in your local church. Plus, the labels know exactly how to sell it: “Ultimate Worship” – just using the same adjectives they would use sell the next big WWF match, if need be.
I also think its possible to become overly cynical, even snobbish about this stuff, if you’re not careful. It may not be my thing, but if someone has found a way to express adoration for God in music that is moving to them, that has to have some value, doesn’t it?
Blessings gives me a headache. To think I actually purchased books from there.
Always good to see you at church, Brother. ;)
Matt — I don’t doubt there is good stuff out there, but I just have a hard time digging through all the other stuff to find it. I kinda gave up on christian music in the early 80’s, and haven’t been overly impressed ever since… at least not by most of what I hear. I always have to get other people to recommend stuff to me that I would like. Yes, I can tend toward being overly cynical (which is where guys like Robbymac are there to box my ears for it). If people find that some of the sappy music (or whatever) is helpful to them in expressing worship, that’s great for them… but I do wonder what real lasting value this form of worship has over time. I don’t think that it inhabits the soul in the same way, it’s more like cotton-candy worship. Ah, there goes my cynicism-meter again. What I’m saying is that these forms of worship can build your emotions and you walk away happy, but I suspect that they don’t as much nourish your soul and build your faith in a lasting way.
Jarrett — now I’m trying to figure out if or how I would know you and which church I would have seen you in… St. Ben’s or Soul are the only 2 local churches I’ve dropped in on with any regularity in the past 18 months.