Eclectic Christian

Recently, I have read quite a lot about contemporary versus traditional music used in churches. I think its time we took a step back and looked at our own heart attitude. When we let ourselves get all worked up about what type of music is played on a given Sunday, we lose our ability to worship. Worship is not about a particular style of music it is about our response to God.

God desires for us to be honestly seeking him, to be honestly responding to what he has done for us, and to love him with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. This is what true worship looks like. If the music helps us to respond in this way, great! If not, we still have the responsibility of giving God the honor he is due.

I particularly liked what Tyler had to write about the topic:

Often times we call music in church, worship. We have a genre of Christian music called worship. We call Sunday morning a worship service, and we have worship pastors. The list could go on.

When I think about music in church I almost automatically get caught up in musical style and the current really awesome “worship” song. The problem is that when worship becomes about those things, I don’t think it’s worship…it’s just music.

The thing I love the most about worship is that it is completely focused on God. It is a surrendering of myself to God. It is honoring Jesus with everything I am.

Tim Hughes defines worship as this: “Worship is the total alignment of our heart, soul, mind and strength with the will of God. It is our whole-hearted response to God’s extravagant love and mercy.”

I confess that far too often what I desire to be worship falls well short of being such. When we focus on the style of music, I believe that what we call worship becomes simply music.

Mike Pilavachi recognized this problem in his own church. He wrote that:

We were singing the songs, but our hearts were far from God. We had become connoisseurs of worship instead of participants. We had made the band the performers of worship and ourselves the audience. We had forgotten that we are all the performers of worship and that God is the audience. We asked ourselves individually, ‘What am I bringing as my contribution to the worship?’ The truth came to us, worship is not a spectator sport, it is not a product molded by the taste of the consumers, it is not about what we can get out of it, it’s all about God. – ( Source: http://www.christianstandard.com/pdfs/457.pdf )

Out of that experience came a new song from his worship leader, Matt Redmond. In his, “Heart of Worship” he wrote:

I bring You more than a song
For a song in itself
Is not what You have required
You search much deeper within
Through the way things appear
You’re looking into my heart

I’m coming back to the heart of worship
And it’s all about You
It’s all about You, Jesus
I’m sorry Lord for the thing I’ve made it
When it’s all about You
It’s all about You, Jesus

Perhaps Todd G.’s proposal for an intergenerational based worship is common ground where we can stop worrying about the style of music, and start to worship again. Todd writes:

The larger picture is that church is perhaps the last place on earth where all generations come together and participate in something in common. The larger problem is that unity can sometimes be threatened when we become too concerned with whether we should be more contemporary versus more traditional. Those are only style preferences, and if one must have one’s own style preferences in order to “worship”, then perhaps one misunderstands the sacrificial nature of worshipping.

Recently I have been saying to myself, that on Sunday morning I will choose to worship, no matter what the song is, no matter what the style of music is, no matter if the sound system is too loud, or too soft, no matter if the drummer is drowning out the other instruments, and no matter what the people around me are doing. You know what? It seems to work. If I go to church on Sunday morning with the right heart attitude I find that I can indeed truly enter into worship.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 10:27 pm and is filed under church life, worship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.