On Church Music
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006
After reading some controversial blog posts/comments on music & worship, my friend Chad wrote a post about church music, worship aesthetes, snobbery, etc. on his blog, and he asked my opinion on the subject. So here are a few thoughts off the top of my head.
First: My favorite book on music in the church is Music Through the Eyes of Faith by Harold Best. It’s definitely worth a read for anyone thinking through these issues.
As for Chad’s post: I know what you mean, and I’m not generally a fan of worship songs someone could sing just as well to his/her lover without changing any words. I’m also not a big fan of anthropocentric music (in which we sing a lot about ourselves and not much about God) and highly repetitive music (in which we sing the same words over and over). But not every song in which we mention ourselves is anthropocentric, and not all repetition is bad.
Once, after reading someone’s complaint about the use of the word ‘I’ in worship songs, my curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to do some research. I counted that 102 of the 150 biblical Psalms use the word ‘I’. They are surprisingly concerned with giving personal expression to God (of grief, joy, anger, worship, etc). However, they are balanced – there are other Psalms that exalt the person, character, and works of God, and do not mention us. Some do both at once. Repetition gets its place in the Bible, too. For instance, Psalm 136 says “His lovingkindness is everlasting” in every verse. And in Revelation 4, we find four creatures who constantly say, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.” That’s all they ever say, apparently. And God likes it.
I like songs with deep, thoughtful lyrics. I also like basic songs that are profound in their simplicity. The key is that there should be balance. Using all deep, complex songs can overload people. I find that after meditating on a rich song like “And Can It Be” or “How Deep the Father’s Love For Us,” sometimes I need to respond in quiet wonder and simplicity by singing something as basic and repetitive as the chorus of “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever.” We should sing loudly about God’s majestic greatness and awesome holiness with many words full of meaning, but we should also quietly, and with only a few simple words, tell God about the state of our hearts and our desire to love Him and serve Him, and thank Him for His goodness.
Worship leaders are teachers, whether we try to be or not, and the warning of James 3:1 falls on us. We will be judged more strictly. We have a responsibility to sing things that are true, to lead people in songs that are not incorrect. We also have a responsiblity as teachers to share both the “milk” and the “meat”, the basic and the deep.
As far as musical styles: Various kinds of music have been either encouraged or suppressed by various branches of the church for thousands of years. In the 300s, the Council of Laodicea banned congregational singing, the use of instruments, and the singing of anything other than Psalms and Canticles. In the 800s, the Catholic Church banned various alternate chant traditions in favor of Gregorian chant. In the 1500s, some reformers (especially Zwingli) disallowed instruments in the services, sometimes removing all music from church services. Calvin only allowed the singing of Psalms. When Isaac Watts started writing hymns in the late 1600s, people got torked off at him because he wanted to sing songs written by a human. They used to save the hymns until the end of the service so people could leave before the hymn-singing if they wanted to. When I was growing up, we were allowed to use organs and all kinds of instruments, sing hymns and some newer songs, but we were not allowed to use drums in the church. In nearly all of these cases, the churches later allowed, and even thrived on, the very things they had previously banned.
People in the church have a long history of declaring one type of music to be better than another, or even saying certain music is evil/worldly/unbiblical. My opinion: In various cultural settings, certain types of music actually are better than others in order for meaningful worship to take place. The snobbery, though, occurs when people try to take what they find to be effective in one local church setting and make it normative (i.e., “all churches must do this”). Personally, I have never read a theological/biblical case for using only certain musical styles that was any good at all. Usually they’re full of passages taken out of context & misused/abused in order to prove someone’s personal theory. What I think is clear in Scripture is that God wants us to worship Him, singing and music are biblical ways of worshiping God, God wants us to be creative in our worship of Him, and ultimately worship is not about the specific media, methods, locations, or styles that we use, but about exalting the worth of God by the power of the Spirit.
After reading some controversial blog posts/comments on music & worship, my friend Chad wrote a post about church music, worship aesthetes, snobbery, etc. on his blog, and he asked my opinion on the subject. So here are a few thoughts off the top of my head.
First: My favorite book on music in the church is Music Through the Eyes of Faith by Harold Best. It’s definitely worth a read for anyone thinking through these issues.
As for Chad’s post: I know what you mean, and I’m not generally a fan of worship songs someone could sing just as well to his/her lover without changing any words. I’m also not a big fan of anthropocentric music (in which we sing a lot about ourselves and not much about God) and highly repetitive music (in which we sing the same words over and over). But not every song in which we mention ourselves is anthropocentric, and not all repetition is bad.
Once, after reading someone’s complaint about the use of the word ‘I’ in worship songs, my curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to do some research. I counted that 102 of the 150 biblical Psalms use the word ‘I’. They are surprisingly concerned with giving personal expression to God (of grief, joy, anger, worship, etc). However, they are balanced – there are other Psalms that exalt the person, character, and works of God, and do not mention us. Some do both at once. Repetition gets its place in the Bible, too. For instance, Psalm 136 says “His lovingkindness is everlasting” in every verse. And in Revelation 4, we find four creatures who constantly say, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.” That’s all they ever say, apparently. And God likes it.
I like songs with deep, thoughtful lyrics. I also like basic songs that are profound in their simplicity. The key is that there should be balance. Using all deep, complex songs can overload people. I find that after meditating on a rich song like “And Can It Be” or “How Deep the Father’s Love For Us,” sometimes I need to respond in quiet wonder and simplicity by singing something as basic and repetitive as the chorus of “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever.” We should sing loudly about God’s majestic greatness and awesome holiness with many words full of meaning, but we should also quietly, and with only a few simple words, tell God about the state of our hearts and our desire to love Him and serve Him, and thank Him for His goodness.
Worship leaders are teachers, whether we try to be or not, and the warning of James 3:1 falls on us. We will be judged more strictly. We have a responsibility to sing things that are true, to lead people in songs that are not incorrect. We also have a responsiblity as teachers to share both the “milk” and the “meat”, the basic and the deep.
As far as musical styles: Various kinds of music have been either encouraged or suppressed by various branches of the church for thousands of years. In the 300s, the Council of Laodicea banned congregational singing, the use of instruments, and the singing of anything other than Psalms and Canticles. In the 800s, the Catholic Church banned various alternate chant traditions in favor of Gregorian chant. In the 1500s, some reformers (especially Zwingli) disallowed instruments in the services, sometimes removing all music from church services. Calvin only allowed the singing of Psalms. When Isaac Watts started writing hymns in the late 1600s, people got torked off at him because he wanted to sing songs written by a human. They used to save the hymns until the end of the service so people could leave before the hymn-singing if they wanted to. When I was growing up, we were allowed to use organs and all kinds of instruments, sing hymns and some newer songs, but we were not allowed to use drums in the church. In nearly all of these cases, the churches later allowed, and even thrived on, the very things they had previously banned.
People in the church have a long history of declaring one type of music to be better than another, or even saying certain music is evil/worldly/unbiblical. My opinion: In various cultural settings, certain types of music actually are better than others in order for meaningful worship to take place. The snobbery, though, occurs when people try to take what they find to be effective in one local church setting and make it normative (i.e., “all churches must do this”). Personally, I have never read a theological/biblical case for using only certain musical styles that was any good at all. Usually they’re full of passages taken out of context & misused/abused in order to prove someone’s personal theory. What I think is clear in Scripture is that God wants us to worship Him, singing and music are biblical ways of worshiping God, God wants us to be creative in our worship of Him, and ultimately worship is not about the specific media, methods, locations, or styles that we use, but about exalting the worth of God by the power of the Spirit.
