During my second semester at a Christian college, an event-sponsoring committee produced a creative and brilliant idea into quite the attended bash: a full-blown rock concert where the repertoire was exclusively the Christian rock hits of the mid-to-late 90’s, with a few more throwbacks even further into the past.
Hundreds of young Christian collegians, myself included, scrambled into the small and dusty chapel building. This event likely garnered more attendance in the outmoded sanctuary than most other events, including mostly classical recitals and non-campus-wide worship services. Like I said, this concert was a hit. The vast and mosh-pitting audience was happily flashed back to junior high school memories as the peer-composed rock band cranked out tunes from the Newsboys’ “Going Public” album, dc Talk’s “Jesus Freak,” and they were some extra cheers for the surprising performance of Michael W. Smith’s “Place in This World.”
It’s rare, surprisingly, that you would see such a diverse group of collegial Christians in one room and so unified in enjoyment of and connection with the music and with each other.
But was it worship? Not so much.
Since I was there, and a happy attendant as well, I include my own heart in that assertion. Let’s take, for example, the Newsboys’ song “Spirit Thing.” It was played that night. It’s a great song that helped to teach me, in my adolescence, about submission to the work of the Holy Spirit in my daily life. I still have the chorus memorized:
It’s just a Spirit thing. It’s just a holy nudge. It’s like a circuit judge in the brain.
It’s just a Spirit thing. It’s here to guard my heart. It’s just a little hard to explain.
Now, I will confess that, during that song’s “bring-back” in that chapel, I was not thinking much about how I’m currently submitting to the Spirit’s influence in my daily life. And I don’t imagine that really anyone else was, either. We weren’t paying much attention, in our minds, to the applicable didacticism of the songs or, in our hearts, singing some of the God-attributive lyrics directly to Him as a prayer. We were rather bathing ourselves in a wonderful nostalgic experience, going back to the good times of junior high school.
Now a purposeful time of nostalgia is not, inherently, a bad thing in itself. But it is if it replaces and undermines what is meant to be a environment of corporate worship. This is because you’re not thinking about the lyrics, and you’re not communicating with God. You’re thinking more about the memories (even good and spiritual memories) that are brought back by that song or style. Just as poor musical execution and many other things can be explicitly “bad” distractions for a worshiping heart, fulfilled nostalgia can be a subtle “good” distraction.
And it’s really hard to argue against nostalgia, sometimes, because some people have wrongfully pinned down a certain musical style, worship philosophy, and/or various method as the singular functional way to lead worship.
What we need to do is check our minds during musical worship. What, exactly, are we doing? Are we focusing our hearts to use the words of the songs as an honest and direct statement to God, all the while listening to what He might say via the music, Scripture or a friend? Or are we privately analyzing the logistics of the service? Or are we remembering the good old days?
How distracted are we? How distract-able should we be? In our minds, are expectations for musical worship’s accompaniment and logistics so specific and absolute that our minds lose track of God easily?
When it comes to musical worship, it’s a big and complicated world. I say that because things are changing and diversifying to the point that even remembering the Christian music of my junior high years (15 years ago) was a true nostalgic experience. In high school, I could name every artist on the pre-dominantly pop/rock Billboard and enjoyed going to Christian rock concerts. Now, the Billboard is no longer filled with pop-rock artists (who I can’t even name anymore) but with rap and hip-hop icons who aren’t my cup of tea. The Christian music industry is arguably on a decline, but worship music (which I define as music written for corporate singing) has become its own genre. This is only scratching the surface.
Big changes. Lots of music. I’ve got a lot of history to learn and a lot of culture to keep up with and understand (I’m only 27 and I already sometimes feel “out of touch” in even understanding pop culture). There’s so many different types of people out there.
But every once in a while, I meet a holistic worshipper at my church. Someone that doesn’t care about style or even execution, but who will always use the theologically rich and deeply poetic lyrics of the songs I choose and reflect upon them, using them as an edifying conversation between him/her and God. Musically and logistically, I could really botch things up, but he/she doesn’t care.
That’s what a focused worshipper looks like. And that’s what we all (myself included) need to strive to be.
3 comments:
its tough to not become distracted by logistical things such as sound mix, speaker placement, nice guitar,bad note, etc.. especially when you've been one of those doing the mixing and the like.
Focus grasshopper! Focus. (ON GOD)
Any suggestions?
As someone with musical training who is paid to foster an environment of musical corporate worship, I can more than relate to you. It's the biggest struggle. Even when I'm out of town and on vacation, attending a worship service that I have nothing to do with, I'm still tempted to "research and evaluate" how worship leadership is logistically done elsewhere.
As Christians, we're often called to resist our inner nature. In this case, some extreme mental discipline is required for me, so I can just focus on the words and my own relationship/prayer with God. One thing that also helps is to hold hands with your spouse during worship.
Thanks!
Post a Comment