photo credit: Sid Turner (sidturner on Flickr)
I was in a conversation last night about “blended” worship… There was an issue raised about how best to mingle traditional songs with contemporary songs. Someone commented that it was “sad” how songs become obsolete so quickly in the post-modern church… I had used the chorus of a hymn in our worship set and someone expressed a desire to sing the entire hymn next time around…
I declined… I don’t really do entire hymns anymore…
It’s not that I dislike hymns, but I appreciate them in the same way that I appreciate Shakespeare and Thoreau… They are art from a bygone era, beautiful in their own way and certainly not to be discarded, but in the same way that many people don’t “get” Shakespeare’s humor or Thoreau’s existentialism, they don’t “get” hymns either.
To me, that’s the real deal-breaker in worship music…
Like it or not, our congregations are culturally bound… and in the 21st century, that means that they have short vocabularies and even shorter attention spans…
But there’s another even more compelling argument…
We talk a LOT around here about Romans 12:1…
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual (or reasonable) act of worship.
This is really the bottom-line for worship in our minds… “Offering our bodies” simply doesn’t mean laying ourselves on some altar… The Bible is talking about the stuff we do… for artists that means art…
For songwriters, it means songwriting…
The resistance of some to new music quenches the worship of the songwriters in their congregation… It literally limits the ability of these artists to obey God and offer the works of their bodies as living sacrifices…
There’s a reason why lots of new worship music flows out of churches like Hillsongs and New Life…
They have given their songwriters permission and opportunity to worship through songwriting…
And whatever you think about their respective theologies overall, these churches (local) have blessed the Church (Christians everywhere) with some incredible worship music…
If we devote our time in corporate worship to songs that are 30… 50… 100-years old, are we giving our artists permission to worship with their gifts?
What do you think?
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