Some years ago I was on a mission in London. After one of our meetings, another team member came to me and said: “Why don’t you hold out your hands when you sing?”  I have nothing against that practice. There are examples of it in the Bible. It can express something physically of what you feel in your heart. But I could not see why it seemed to matter so much to my friend. So I asked him, “Why should I?” He replied: “Because if you hold out your hands, you’ll receive a blessing from God. He will come close to you and you’ll feel his presence with you”.

He was expressing the view of many: we meet with God as we sing praise to him, especially when we do so in a particular way. The role of musicians and ‘worship leaders’ is to facilitate that encounter. [...]

The Bible never teaches that a feeling can take us into the presence of God. If that had been possible, God would have sent us a musician rather than a saviour. Only Christ can take us into the Most Holy Place in heaven, where we have direct access to the Father through faith in him.

The very common view that ‘worship’ is essentially a time of singing through which we are drawn close to God has a number of harmful consequences….

Based on the rest of the article, I understand what Roberts is trying to say: It is not through music itself that we come closer to God; don’t mistake an emotional buzz for Him. What I think is entirely missing, though (from this article and many others), is a good explanation of how we actually do meet God and draw closer to Him in corporate worship. It’s not all just in my head, is it? Are my emotions playing a smoke-and-mirrors game that tricks me into thinking I worshiped?

Roberts certainly isn’t alone in pointing out the theological problems with thinking that music or specific actions with worship function as a sort of mediator of God’s presence. Plenty of authors past and present have said similar things, and they’re right: sometimes people unthinkingly exalt music to sacramental status and treat it as if it functioned like a means of grace. My friend and pastor, Phil, said it well when he quoted John Calvin: “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.” If we don’t pay attention, we’ll start turning any good gift into an idol, and music is no exception.

But it would be awfully presumptive for us to assume that everyone who talks about experiencing God’s presence during worship thinks that the music itself is somehow making that happen. For those of us in churches that are largely nonliturgical, there is a sense in which our songs perform the function of liturgy. A good set of songs can take us on a corporate journey of praise, thanks, confession, repentance, forgiveness, and celebration. Passages like James 4:6-10 and Jeremiah 29:12-13 make it clear that God does indeed respond to us as we seek him in those ways. God doesn’t respond to our songs as such; he responds to the acts of worship that occur as we intend a song, making its words our words and its intentions our intentions.

I think it makes sense to say that singing functions not as a mediator or a sacrament, but as a concentrated setting for corporate spiritual practices. It is confession, or prayer, or praise, set to music. Singing—like every other spiritual practice—is not about manipulating God or hooking up to a special “worship grace spout” through which He pours Himself out to us. God does not require us to perform some action in order to experience His presence. He is always pouring Himself out to us, but we are seldom paying attention. It’s like Annie Dillard wrote: “You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”

Sure, worship singing functions vertically as praise to God and horizontally as encouragement to each other (as Roberts says in his article), but that is only part of the story. We should not ignore the fact that it also functions cohesively and inwardly. Cohesively, it acts like liturgy by allowing us to approach God together, with shared language and intentions. Inwardly, it acts by helping us “sit in the dark” and become undistracted enough to be aware of the presence and action of God that is already all around us.

Maybe Roberts is right in saying that worship is not a “time of singing through which we are drawn close to God,” but it fits with both scripture and experience to say that singing can be a time of worship during which we draw close to God—and He responds by drawing close to us as He promises.

There were several threads which ran through the conference, but the one that was most transformational for me was this, stated most succinctly by author Andrew Klavan: “A storyteller who doesn’t have the integrity to face the depth of the world’s darkness will not have the authority to lead people to the Light.” Not only writers are storytellers, of course. All art—all good art, anyway—tells a story. A song, a painting, or a film can tell a story. The structure of a worship gathering can tell a story, as can the elements within it.

The irony is that while Christians possess the greatest story of all time, much of the art perpetrated by evangelicals over the past hundred years or so has been, well, bad. I’m not even talking about Precious Moments figurines and Thomas Kinkade paintings. Everyone loves to hate on that stuff, but that’s because it’s easy and relatively safe for us to take potshots at Precious Moments. It is harder to talk about our churches. It hits closer to home and upsets more people when we evaluate what we hear, see, and sing every Sunday and find it wanting.

Often this shows up in our willingness to speak about and represent the scent of yesterday’s decay, that area we have conquered, but not to face honestly our own continuing darkness and struggle. As Dan Allender said at Story, our lives are not linear. They do not run cleanly from death to life, from darkness to light. Until the revealing of the salvation yet to come (as Peter would say), we are messy saints indeed, wrestling and writhing in Paul’s Romans 7 agony of the in-between. Even in Romans 8, with all of its beautiful freedom from condemnation, Paul states that creation continues to groan with the pangs of childbirth, and it will do so until Jesus makes all things new.

Never should our art revel in darkness. At the same time, we cannot ignore it or dishonestly whitewash it. The world is messed up. Everyone knows it. Especially in the suburbs, we spend our lives trying to avoid that mess and provide safe, healthy environments for ourselves and our families, but some things are more important than safety. I’m not advocating that we all move to Darfur and listen to death metal. I’m just saying that I believe Klavan is right: Our art—our films, our stories, our songs, our sermons—must be honest about the continuing battle that rages in us and in the world. We have nothing to fear from the truth; God owns it.

A photograph of pure white is about as profound as a blank sheet of paper. A song with no dissonance is cloying. A story with no tension or conflict is tedious. Hope is beautiful precisely because we have not yet received what we long for (see Hebrews 11). Let’s not short-circuit hope in favor of safety. When we have the integrity to face the darkness honestly, we will have the authority to speak love and light into people’s lives—and be believable.

I am not making light of worship style issues or suggesting that we shouldn’t discuss them; we certainly should have open conversation on the subject.  I am simply suggesting that it might help to approach these discussions from a larger perspective—globally, historically, culturally, and biblically.  And that is why I finally bit the bullet and preached a sermon on music style.  In it, I try to provide some of that perspective.

You can listen to the message here: or download it by right-clicking here.

Also, here is the video we showed at the beginning of the message:

This video became intensely personal for me at about two minutes, when Bell talks about inviting people into a life we are not living.  Every worship leader (really, anyone in “church work”, whether volunteer or paid) has felt this way during those weeks when everything is going wrong, every moment has been spoken for, and there is no end in sight.  We push through, only to arrive at our worship gathering anxious, exhausted, and uncentered.

The problem is that for many of us, these moments have become a way of life.  I know I’ve been there.

Most of us have heard talks or read articles about how to lead worship honestly from a place of surrendered brokenness, and we have heard something similar to the following: Moments of feeling completely overwhelmed are inevitable.  Fighting for joy and surrender in those times is critical, and crawling toward God in the midst of those things becomes itself an act of worship that will blossom into joy.  That’s all great stuff, and it’s true.  Those moments can center us and result in worship.

But the hard, unlovely fact of the matter is that for the most part, my times of exhaustion have not been God-ordained valleys I’ve had to struggle through; they have been self-inflicted deserts I’ve entered through overcommitment and spiritual malnourishment. Bell’s assessment is moving for me precisely because it has described me at different points in my life.  I’ve had to find ways of overcoming my own tendencies toward desert living.

One of the practices I have found is the “divine hours” or “daily offices,” which are essentially fixed-hour prayer and meditation.  I’ve only been struggling at it for a few months now, but already it has been one of the most difficult — and rewarding — disciplines I have practiced.  I suspect that this is because it provides opportunity for both spiritual centering and healthy daily rhythms if practiced consistently.  Also, the sort of prayers (often Psalms) used in these books are so different from my habitual prayers that they cause me to look at God, myself, and life in a different way.

If you’re interested, check out The Divine Hours trilogy by Phyllis Tickle and/or Celtic Daily Prayer by the Northumbria Community.  The first I picked up at my brother/friend Aaron’s house (I’d call him my brofriend, but that just sounds shady), and the other I stumbled across on Amazon.  I’ve found that the mixed use of both has been most beneficial for me.

When I was on the recent missions trip to Arrowhead Bible Camp, I was again reminded of how beautiful parts of Pennsylvania are.  Here are a few pictures, which as usual do no justice whatsoever to the real experience of seeing a patchwork quilt of tree-colors warming a mountainside on a crisp autumn day.  It was breathtaking.

The trees were just beginning to turn when we were there:

These are hay bales in a field across from camp (I love the lines in this photo):

Beauty does something to us.  I can’t put my finger on it, but it seems to be closely connected to experiences of joy and transcendence.  It somehow yanks us from our musty, ingrown drudgery out into the wide-open spaces of joyful wonder.  We’ve all felt it somewhere, sometime; and once we’ve felt our reaction to beauty, we want to experience it again.  It’s fleeting, though–rushing at us in unexpected places, but too often just out of reach when we seek it or expect it.  Beauty doesn’t arrive on demand, and our pace of life leaves us with no time or patience to wait for it.

In 21st-century USAmerican culture, perhaps more than ever before, people are starving for the experience of beauty and transcendence, turning to every simulation they can find.  Too many people experience nature on the Discovery Channel, intimacy through porn videos, art at the poster store in the mall, and spirituality in the self-help aisle. (For you philosophers out there, think simulacra.) I’m convinced that many of our addictions are rooted in a misplaced search for escape, transcendence, beauty, or whatever–trying to feel something real, or occasionally, just to feel something other.

This is one of several reasons why the Church and the world need creative arts ministry so desperately.  I am convinced that our human longings for joy, transcendence, beauty, and freedom are signposts that evidence our need for God and will only ever be fully satisfied by him.  As the Church, we come alongside people who are consumed and driven by their deep, unmet longings and we point them to God.  We attempt to show them tiny but faithful glimmers of His unimaginable beauty and sufficiency through story, music, art, poetry, film, drama, dance—every form we can imagine, every sense we can experience, always seeking new cracks through which we can peer at Him.  Sometimes we are just plain awful at it, and at other times we are astounded by the beauty of God’s glory inhabiting our little efforts (check out Annie Dillard’s “An Expedition to the Pole”).

These visceral ways of communicating often slip unnoticed though people’s walls and barriers, and to their surprise, transform a brief moment into a sacred space where they experience God. If just one person sees a ray of God’s beauty shining through and finds her or his deep longings met in Him, then we have ministered well.