How wide and how deep is your sung worship vocabulary?


This is a question I have been asked before and I have recently come across again. It is one of those questions that I think will always remain valid and is always worth considering: How wide and how deep is your sung worship vocabulary? In other words, how wide and how deep are the songs we sing at our churches? Are the lyrics digging deep into God's word and mining into His truth and revelation, causing us as the worshippers to consider and ponder and learn new things about God, causing us to change? Or are we only scratching the surface, merely putting yet another thin coating of some over-used cliches on top of a shallow theological understanding and view of God?
Here is what the songwriter Robert Sterling says in his book 'The Craft of Christian Songwriting': "Christian music is produced and marketed with the same basic goal as pop music - sell more music. If the goal is to have larger sales, it stands to reason the product will be aimed at a broader, and shallower, audience. Everybody can swim in the shallow end of the pool, so let's make the music a little less deep. . . . If pop music has sacrificed substance for style, then Christian music has sacrificed substance for the appearance of substance. Today's popular Christian songwriter has learned that if you string together enough spiritual catchphrases and repeat them ad infinitum, you really don't have to say anything at all."

Worship Leaders

  • When choosing songs to add to the body of worship songs to be used by your church, do you fall into the trap of finding out what's on CCLI's Top Ten and simple adding them purely because they are popular? Making the songs sung on Sunday a 'Top Of The Christian Pops'?
  • Do you look at the content and themes dealt with in the songs you've already got - find theological gaps - then try to find a song that helps to fill that gap of our undertsanding of who God is and how we should be living as Christians?
  • Do you have songs that span the decades and centuries? The church has a great depth of history and singing songs rooted in the church's past help to connect us to this deep and vast heritage. Old hymns also are jam-packed full of really deep theology. So even if you use a more modern re-worked version of an old hymn, it could be really useful and precious.
Songwriters

  • Are you aware of the spiritual cliches that can be so easliy thrown in to a song?
  • Do you re-work your songs before deciding they are finished? Perhaps even letting them brew for a year or two, thinking about the themes and the way in which your words paint the picture, using new images and phrases to make your songs different and fresh?
  • Do you co-write? Other people can help to add freshness to a song as they bring a different perspective and life experience.
  • Do you submit your song to your Pastor so it can be checked for theological accuracy and soundness? People take the songs they hear at church away with them, more than they do the words of the sermon. Songs teach people about God, so it is very important that we are teaching them things that are true! It's a big responsibility.
I hope these questions will help you, as they have helped me, to think more purposefully about the songs we sing at church and help to make our sung worship wider and deeper!

If you have other similar questions that have helped you, or if you want to join the discussion, or simply leave a comment, please feel free to do so below.

Comments

  1. It's good to read I am not the only one thinking along these lines. In the latest edition of 'Worship Leader Magazine' from the US (September 2012 - 'Include'), the CEO/Publisher Chuck Fromm has written a very poigniant article:'Setlist or Hymnal?' that sits very nicely alongside my comments and thoughts above.

    "A glance of the topical index of a printed hymnal gains you suggestions on the ways each hymn can be used in the service of worship, thematic information, and Scripture references." Fromm goes on to talk about the birth of our contempory worship scene and chellenges us as 'curators' of worship today to ask ourselves important questions:

    What is the hymnal of your church?

    Are you collecting te best in terms of heart poetry to God?

    Are your hymns representative of historical Christianity as well as modern?

    Are the songs you sing representative of the multicultural, multiethnic, multigenerational nature of the kingdom of heaven?

    Do the hymns carry deep theological truth as well as beautiful metaphoric imagery?

    Fromm also urges us to look through our church song databases and ask ourselves if we are covering the whole nature of God and the Christian experince with the themes dealt with by the songs we sing. He notes that a recent study on the top 25 CCLI list from 1989-2004 found that there was not one song in that repertoire which represented God as the Trinity - This is just one example, but I think it helps to make the point.

    He concludes: "the worship leader is more than the creator of a setlist. Worship leaders carry the pastoral responsibility to steward the community's hymnal . . .and to curate songs that not only soar musically but resonate truthfully with the gospel of Jesus Christ."

    Thanks Chuck for some great thoughts on the topic!

    ReplyDelete

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