The big 3 issues in church music

Published in Southern Cross, March 2007, Anglican Media, Sydney

Lack of understanding of the place of music in church

The New Testament paints a picture of church in which we see a mutual exercising of our gifts to build one another up into Christ. And heading those lists of gifts are the word ministries, by which Jesus places himself at the centre of his people. When Paul talks about singing, he also talks about it as a word ministry (Col 3:16). Singing is fundamentally a ministry of God’s word to us – but one in which we participate in order to build up our brothers and sisters in Jesus.

Traditionally, the church has used music in a semi-mystic sort of way, as a sacrificial worship offering or in a way to help us feel his blessing and presence. Historically, evangelicals have been better at using singing to engage directly with Jesus and to respond to what he has done – but still tend to envelop it in worship language, which brings with it a natural tendency to see singing as a work, rather than as a free expression of response to the gospel.
This fundamental problem leads to the following:

Fear of emotional expression

Rather than leading the way with good practice of music in the church, recent conservative evangelicals have tended to react against the problems they see in others. Contemporary congregational music has seen a massive revival over the past 20 years, led mostly by charismatic churches. And for whatever reasons, evangelicals have been
both slow to contribute new music – and quick to condemn any outward sign of emotional expression, for fear of appearing ‘charismatic’.

When we suppress emotion in church we train ourselves to lack excitement in the rest of our Christian lives. Paul, in Col 3:17, actually suggests that singing ‘heartfully’ to God is a way of training us to express gratitude in everything we do. Singing is the obvious place to show authentic and appropriate emotion in response to the gospel of grace – and it is this same response of gratitude that should mark the whole of our lives as his servants.

Undiscerning choice of songs

Related to the previous issues is the problem of how to develop a contemporary, biblical music ministry when all we have is the music and practices of other church traditions. Many who want to be contemporary in church practice, have no alternative other than to borrow the songs and practices of large Pentecostal churches. In doing so, we may import some emotion (although not always gospel-provoked emotion), but we also import theology of ‘works salvation’ and of ‘the self’.

Much of the new song writing in the Christian world will lean towards the theme of ‘what can I do for you God’, rather than ‘what God has done for me’ (the consistent theme found in the songs in scripture). We need to be more vigilant in seeking out and writing material that is both true to the Scriptures (announcing God’s faithfulness and acts of salvation), and reflecting the idea that song is God’s gift to his church to soak up the word of Christ, and to respond authentically and emotionally to that word.

3 songs that address the big issues

1. Jesus, Thank You - Pat Sczebel

The mystery of the cross I cannot comprehend
The agonies of Calvary
You, the perfect Holy One crushed your Son
Drank the bitter cup reserved for me

Your blood has washed away my sin
Jesus, thank you
The Father’s wrath completely satisfied
Jesus, thank you
Once your enemy, now seated at your table
Jesus, thank you

Pat Sczebel’s simple and beautiful song, follows the consistent pattern we see in the biblical songs – a simple statement of the profound work of what God has done to bring about salvation, followed by the singer’s/congregation’s response of genuine thankfulness.

2. See Him Coming – Mark Peterson

1. Glory and power to the One who loves us
Honour and praise him forever
Come Lord Jesus, Come Lord Jesus

2. Glory and power to the One who freed us
From all our sins by his blood
Come Lord Jesus, Come Lord Jesus

Chorus
See him coming on the clouds of heaven
Every eye behold him now
He’s the Living One the first and last
Who once was dead, but now he lives forever and ever.

Eschatology is one of the key themes of the New Testament, placing the present Christian life in the context of Jesus’ immanent return and eternity – an idea mostly ignored in modern congregational singing. See Him Coming, however, is a powerful song which picks up this theme using texts from Revelation, and in the way it calls for a universal acknowledgement of Jesus as the Lord who has saved us. This song will be most effective when played by a band with a strong rhythm section.

3. Revive Us, O Lord – Rob Smith

1. Father we come to you now
Trusting again in your power
Humble and heal us this hour
In Jesus’ name
Help us repent of our ways
Our failures in seeking your face
Open our hearts to your grace
This is our prayer

Revive us, O Lord
Send forth your Spirit
Unsheathe your sword
And break through our chains
By the power of your word
Revive us, revive us, revive us, O Lord

This song is both a corporate confession of sin and prayer for spiritual revival. Rob Smith reclaims phrases and terms that are sometimes associated with extreme charismaticism – setting them within their right biblical context, creating a poignant and emotional prayer for renewal by God’s Word and Spirit. The chorus has a challenging but rewarding melody – well worth the effort of conquering.

God is in the house

Author | Philip Percival
First published in The Briefing, Jan 2007, Matthias Media, Sydney
http://www.matthiasmedia.com.au

Imagine yourself as a peasant standing in the centre of a great European medieval cathedral. You are overwhelmed by a sea of sensory experiences—the vast space above you stretching up to the great vaulted ceilings reminding you of your smallness, the bright coloured light streaming through the massive stained glass windows, the wafting incense, and the ethereal monastic chanting which resonates around the chamber. It’s easy to think that you are experiencing, in some way, the presence of God, preparing to meet him face to face in the sacrificial offering off the mass.

Come forward 1,000 years. Imagine yourself in a huge stadium. You are overwhelmed by a sea of sensory experiences—the vastness of the arena, the pulsating colours of the spotlights, the fast-moving images from the crane-mounted cameras on the massive projection screens, the subwoofers vibrating your internal organs, the band, the choir, and the worship leaders. It’s easy to believe that you are experiencing, in some way, the presence of God (and certainly that is what the worship leader is telling you).

What do these two churches have in common? Driving them both is a form of mysticism—the idea that you have to experience God to know he is there, and that the rituals you perform in that setting will make yourself right with God. What is the means of the ritual sacrifice in the second church? Is it the mass? No, it’s the singing!

What I have tried to describe here (with a lot of gross generalizations) is a pentecostal ‘worship’ service. In this article, I would like to focus our attention on the role of singing in Pentecostalism, and help us think through the evangelical response. This is an important thing to do as evangelicals are currently evolving musical cultures which are either embracing wholesale pentecostal ‘worship’ models or reacting so far from them that we are crippling our music ministries. But I’ll return to this point later.

It’s worth saying upfront, though, that evangelicals often just don’t know what to do with pentecostal music. I think these problems stem from two issues:

1. Evangelicals do not (in general) have a good grasp of where singing fits into church—both in practice and in doctrine. (This is an issue that was around long before the rise of modern pentecostal music over the last 30 years).

2. While we want our church meetings to have a contemporary flavour, we often find ourselves singing songs originating from churches with markedly different theological views on church and worship.

Many evangelical churches have avoided working through these issues and have instead taken a pragmatic approach to music, which, to a large extent, involves absorbing the most prominent Christian music styles and cultures. This, they believe, will satisfy the desires and demands of contemporary congregations and musicians, as well as promoting a positive, modern image to outsiders. In support of this decision, most church growth experts now mark well-played culturally accessible music as a key factor in obtaining numerical growth. And if it works for large-scale pentecostal churches, why don’t we try it too?

Please note that my aim here is not to knock pentecostal Christians. All that I know are sincere and passionate followers of Jesus. Instead, my desire is to highlight the dangers for all churches when we use music and songs in a way that is at odds with how the Bible presents singing and worship. In addition, please do not think that I am attacking a vibrant, emotionally-engaged way of doing church. If anything, I think that being more emotionally vibrant would help many evangelicals to be more biblical!

What Pentecostalism promotes

So how do Pentecostal churches use music in their meetings and within their wider doctrine of worship? What do Pentecostal churches think they are doing when they sing?

Please be aware that I am about to make some more gross generalizations. But if what I describe happens in whole or in part in any church, there is cause for alarm.

“Take the place above all thrones, take the place of all power …”

Psalm 22:3 (“Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel”) is often used by pentecostal Christians to suggest that God needs our singing to lift him into a position of pre-eminence over the church that he wouldn’t otherwise have. When we sing well, we place God on his throne.

You don’t need to know a whole lot about the Bible to realize that this is dross. If you read this psalm in context, you’ll see that it has nothing to do with singing or public praise; it is simply saying that Israel’s holy God is the content of his people’s praise. He is the faithful deliverer to those who trust in him in adversity (hence Jesus’ quotation of this psalm on the cross). Nevertheless, this verse is used over and over again as the motivation for great and passionate music in church.

“God is in the house!”

Traditionally Pentecostalism has focused on physical manifestations of the Holy Spirit within the church meeting: tongues, prophesies, slayings in the Spirit, etc. All of these serve to show that God is actually present in the church meeting. While the pentecostal theological explanation reflects a desire to do church in an ‘authentic’ New Testament way, you will find in practice that having the actual presence of the Holy Spirit is more of a guarantee that you are doing church right and, by inference, that you are right with God.

However, you may have noticed that these days many of major pentecostal churches are going to some trouble to present themselves as ‘mainstream’ to the outsider. As a result, there are a lot less spiritual gifts being exercised in public meetings. Does this mean that pentecostals desire God’s presence any less? Not at all. As the more culturally bizarre practices have disappeared off the platform, in many cases, the place of singing has been elevated to become the guts of the service. This is not just because pentecostals love singing. It’s because singing for them actually has the same spiritual role as the charismata. In the absence of the Holy Spirit knocking people over or causing them to speak in tongues, singing is now the medium by which heaven and earth meet. In addition, human emotions are the gauge of how much the Holy Spirit’s presence is there. The logic works a bit like this:

How do I know if I am right with God?

Because God will manifest his presence.

How do I know if God is present?

Because I will feel right with God.

How do we make sure we all feel right with God?

We do all we can to ensure the emotions are stirred towards God.

If everything depends on knowing that God is present, and the measure of this is the emotions we feel as we sing, it’s easy to understand why so much time, effort and money is poured into the music in Pentecostal churches. The more emotive the singing becomes, the more likely that God will be called successfully into the midst of the church.
“I’m coming back to the heart of worship …”

I suggested earlier that one of the theological motivations behind Pentecostalism is the belief that the church should look and behave as it did in the New Testament. In practice, however, many of the explanations for what goes in pentecostal churches are drawn from the Old Testament. Whereas the orthodox Protestant doctrine of church sees church as the gathering of God’s people around his son Jesus (physically in heaven and, by association, in our meetings as we gather around Jesus by his word and Spirit), Pentecostalism uses Old Testament cultic or ritual worship imagery to describe and inform church practices. Images associated with the temple become the driving force behind language about the importance of ‘The House’, and events such as those in 1 Kings 8 where God’s glory manifests itself physically are assumed to be normative for Christian meetings. Church is, therefore, where we express our worship of God and where he reveals himself to us. But instead of sacrificing animals, the offering is now of ourselves - in our singing, the ‘worship leader’ acting as the priest leading us to the face of God[1] and the music acting as the emotional gateway between heaven and earth.

This doctrine of church is, of course, restricted not just to Pentecostalism. But because Pentecostalism has become the driving force in modern ‘worship’ music, you will find the influence of this doctrine reflected in much new congregational music released worldwide. Consider such songs as ‘Here I am to worship’,[2] ‘Come, now is the time to worship’, ‘The heart of worship’, and so on. We are allowing the notion of salvation by faith and works to creep back into the church: yes, I am saved by faith, but I need to keep topping up that faith with the offering of my songs and the accompanying emotional experiences.[3]

What the Bible says…

So what does the Bible say we should be doing when we sing? Thankfully it tells and shows us enough about singing to keep us on the right track.

Firstly, it shows us the content of songs. From the beginning of salvation history to the end, songs are the human emotional response to the acts of God’s salvation (past and future). Have a look at the songs of Moses (Ex 15), Hannah (1 Sam 2:1-10), David (2 Sam 22 and the Psalms), Mary (Luke 1:46-55) and the elders around the heavenly throne (Rev 5). Time after time, themes of God’s faithfulness and power to save are announced by the Bible’s singers.

Secondly, the Bible teaches us that singing is a ministry of the word of Christ. Through singing, God implants his word in us, we teach one another in song and we respond to God in thankfulness (Col 3:16).

Whereas singing in pentecostal theology is about enthroning God, offering him worship and receiving the blessing of his presence in return, the Scriptures teach almost the exact opposite—that singing is, firstly, a ministry of God’s word to us and, secondly, a means by which we may express an unconditional emotional response of thankfulness to the gospel of salvation. Christians sing (and worship for that matter) because they rejoice in being in Christ. We don’t sing to get ourselves there or keep ourselves there. Within the New Testament’s explanation of the gospel, we are urged to respond to salvation by living our whole lives in service to him (Rom 12:1) and by being thankful to him in everything we do (Col 3:17). Our singing is a key element in both expressing gratitude, and in training us to be thankful in everything.
Practical implications

What are some of the practical implications of all this for evangelical churches living in a world of pentecostal music? The reality is, that unless you only want to sing hymns written before 1890, you will be faced with a mass of music originating from or driven by the theology of Pentecostalism. You will feel pressured to use it as you see it on the shelves of your local Christian retailer, as you sing it at major conventions, and as it is brought along to church by young members of the band who have just heard ‘this great new song’ at the aforementioned convention.

Evangelicals, however, don’t have much right to complain about this situation. Because pentecostals value their music and believe that God has a universal purpose for their songs, they invest heavily in them—in composers, in equipment to perform them well, and in marketing and retail distribution. Evangelicals have invested well in training ministers who preach God’s word with clarity, but in other areas, such as church music, we have been found wanting.[4] We now have a difficult situation to correct both within the local church and the wider international body of Christ.

Here are a couple of thoughts on how to negotiate our present situation.

1. Choose songs wisely

It might seem obvious, but choose songs for their lyrics rather than their music. We need great music to provoke great singing, but great music should be subservient to content. Singing a song just because every other church is doing so is both naïve and potentially dangerous for your church.

Along the same lines, choose gospel-driven songs rather than emotion-driven songs. I’m not saying that we don’t want emotion in songs. We do! But right emotion is provoked by the acts of God to save his people.

Beware of songs that undermine salvation by grace. ‘Worship’ can be a slippery word, and it can easily be used in a way that undermines the sufficiency of the cross to deal with sin. Use the term ‘worship’ the way the Bible does and you generally won’t go wrong.

In addition, it is wise for more than one person to choose new songs, for example, the music leader and the minister, not just the drummer. (No offence, drummers!)

2. Be emotionally engaged

If there is anything that evangelicals have reacted too far against, it is the expression of emotion in church. I am not suggesting that we force ourselves to be demonstratively emotional if we are not inclined that way. But I think a lot of the time we lack normal, authentic, emotional expression when we sing. A good song, like those found in the Scriptures, will fuse the truth of salvation with an authentic, emotional response.[5] It is really sad to see brothers and sisters in Christ sing about the most profound truth of existence without engaging their hearts. I’m sure that at your last birthday party or the last sports game you attended there were plenty of healthy and authentic emotional responses. How much greater joy should we feel when singing of the gospel that saves sinners!

3. Don’t be drawn into models of successful music and bad worship theology

Evangelical churches must be careful not to swallow the current church-growth-through-worship models in their attempts to appear contemporary. In many cases, it’s not just the music that changes; commitment to God’s word ends up suffering as the church begins to love and chase growth and contemporary relevance rather than obedience to Jesus.

Evangelicals share some portion of the blame for the dominance of pentecostal worship theology in contemporary church music. Our lack of engagement with the rise of this new culture, our sluggishness in developing alternative models of contemporary church meetings (models which are creative, vibrant and Word-driven) and our poor investment in writing quality songs driven by Scripture have landed us in a position where we have little influence on the wider church. Furthermore, we risk alienating many who would otherwise be sitting under faithful Bible teaching but are not because they choose a church first for its ‘worship’ and second for its teaching.

Pentecostalism is rapidly becoming a mainstream Christian movement worldwide. Its influence will continue to put pressure on evangelical churches while at the same time drawing into its ranks many who have not experienced Jesus genuinely in his word and by his Spirit. However, to respond by suppressing anything in our meetings that even looks remotely ‘charismatic’, or by embracing music driven by pentecostal ‘worship’ theology, will only weaken our churches. As evangelicals, we should be confident in Jesus. We should be confident in his word as the driving force in the way we do church, in the songs we sing and in the way we sing them. Our challenge is to practise our singing according to the Bible—as a powerful and influential ministry of the word of Christ to his people.

[1] It is not the intention of this article to address the topic of worship other than to re-emphasize that Jesus fulfils the roles of temple, sacrifice and priest in himself. (See John’s gospel and the letter to the Hebrews where cultic language is used to explain his work of atonement.)
[2] “Here I am to worship / Here I am to bow down / Here I am to say that / You're my God” (Tim Hughes). This is currently the most sung song in Australian churches according to CCLI. Hughes’ lyrics are not inherently incorrect if you understand each statement within a correct biblical framework. However, while Hughes would claim to be within the evangelical camp, you can see how his poetry has been influenced by a pentecostal theology of worship: we come to church to worship, we come to church to offer ourselves to God (in some sort of sacrificial way), and we come to church to make a statement that we have chosen God to be our God, rather than the other way around.
[3] A good way of evaluating the content of our songs is to compare them to the songs sung by the saints in the Scriptures. This sort of language is never used by believers to address God. Yes, there are instances in the New Testament, such as when the Magi say, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship [proskynein] him.” (Matt 2:2). But in practice, you see that the expression of that sentiment is not in words but in their acts of service. The commonly used biblical phrase, ‘to bow down and worship,’ conveys a similar notion, particularly when it is better rendered ‘bow down [worship] and serve’. Presumably the use of this phrase indicates that our attitude towards of God (of honour and respect [proskynein]) is rightly expressed in obedient service (latruein). In short, no-one in the Bible ever says, “I worship you, God”.
[4] This is partly because we have been ignorant of its value as a Word ministry.
[5] The hymns of the early evangelicals—for example, Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley—do this extremely well.