I was at a denominational meeting a few years ago at which a presentation made in which the word reconciliation was used. Afterwards, opportunity was given and a man who was visibly agitated stood up with a question. “I hear you using the word reconciliation,” he said, “and that’s a word that Rick Warren also uses. Is that where you got that word?”

Due to his low opinion of Mr. Warren, reconciliation was now a “bad word” and we shouldn’t be using it. But there was an obvious problem with his reasoning. The word reconciliation is a word that the Bible itself uses!

We tend to do this same thing with other words as well, and one of them is meditation. Growing up in a post-Beatles Christian sub-culture the word meditation carried only negative connotations.  Meditation, as we understood it, was something practiced by other religions in an attempt to appease or discover their gods, and so we were to have nothing to do with it.

But regardless of what baggage it has taken on or your discomfort with it, if you are a follower of Christ, you must do with this idea what you must do with every idea, thought, or way of thinking that you encounter. You must look into God’s word to see what he has to say about it.

And when we do that we see that some 58 times, the Bible uses one of the two Hebrew words that convey the idea of meditation. As it turns out, meditation, just like reconciliation, is a thoroughly biblical idea.

Psalm 1 tells us that the blessed man’s delight is the law of the Lord and that he meditates on this law day and night. What does this meditation look like? Is the blessed man sitting with legs crossed, fingers intertwined, emptying his mind of all thoughts, waiting to receive a serving of “cosmic energy”?

Nope. There is a difference between Biblical meditation and other forms. Other forms of meditation seek to empty the mind; Christian meditation has as its purpose to fill the mind with the words of God. This is not to say that there’s no value in clearing our minds, but as Christians an empty mind is NOT the end goal.

Distraction is the Enemy of Meditation
From the moment we wake to the moment we go to sleep we are surrounded with sounds and images – distractions for our eyes and ears and of course our minds.

And distraction is the enemy of meditation. Christian meditation is an attempt to focus intently upon the words of God, but distraction is always seeking to pull our thoughts in a hundred different directions. We live in a culture of noise and distraction.

And in the midst of all of this – of distractions, natural disasters, wars and more – we find Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.”

Puritan preacher and author Thomas Watson reminds us that, “Without meditation the truths which we know will never affect our hearts… As a hammer drives a nail to the head; so meditation drives a truth to the heart.”

Don’t avoid meditation simply because it has been hijacked by worldly thinking. Practice meditation as God intended you to.

I have come to believe that as followers of Jesus we shape our lives according to who we perceive Him to be. If you grew up in the church there are numerous Bible stories and sermons you were exposed to: not to mention those awesome flannelgraph storyboards! If you didn’t grow up in the church, then your perceptions of Jesus were likely formed by portrayals of Him in popular culture, and you probably don’t even know what flannelgraph is. (Ask the church kids, they know.)

But when you read through the gospels for yourself, Jesus is a refreshing figure every time. He is a boundary-crosser, a reputation-risker, and an iconoclast. He doesn’t tolerate racism or sexism; He doesn’t tolerate religious people who say they care about others but really only care for themselves.

And these are character traits and actions that are in short supply in every age of history, including ours. The flow of history is polluted with masses of people who float along with the current, blindly endorsing the most popular ideas of their culture, following the dominant trends, sucking up to people in power, staying clear of “scary” people, and idolizing the rich and famous. None of these practices are unique to our time or our culture and none of these practices are ones Jesus engaged in.

When He’s offered easy opportunities to take earthly power, He does something that we probably wouldn’t: He runs in the opposite direction. When He meets someone of influence, He is far more likely to challenge the content of their lives than He is to plead with them for their support. When He meets someone that He’s not supposed to touch or talk to, He usually talks to them and touches them.

For example, take the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman. We see that He employs a very strange evangelistic strategy. He engages in conversation with someone who is from a rival ethnic group, is a woman, and is notoriously immoral! This is quite the unexpected encounter.

Jesus shows a profoundly compassionate, boundary-crossing, suspicion-inducing, reputation-risking love for someone whom, to that point in her life, had probably never been loved by anyone before! From this most unexpected source she receives for the first time real love, real concern, and real compassion.

And what is her response to this? She becomes a witness, an evangelist! She rushes away in excitement to call others to meet him too. And it says “many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony.” People who were unlikely to experience healing experienced healing because Jesus crossed clear social boundaries in order to present the gospel.

What barriers have you set up for yourself, told yourself you will not cross, that Jesus would likely cross? With whom will you share the gospel? Your neighbor? An adulterer? A gay person? A Muslim?

There is no one that Jesus sees as beyond redemption and reconciliation with God. Not anyone from another country, ethnic group, gender, religion or sexual orientation. In every case where Jesus crosses paths with a reject, an outsider, an outcast, He embraces them. He loves them and has compassion on them.

And this is the kind of profoundly moving, boundary-crossing, suspicion-inducing, reputation-risking love that Jesus calls us to embrace.

The Internet permits everyone to have his or her say. We call this “progress” and extol the virtues of this great leveler. Fair enough, everyone has his say, but that doesn’t mean everything said is worth listening to.

Take naysaying, for example – the dull art of objecting to something so obsessively that you forget what you approve of. We church folk seem especially prone to this behavior.

I actually don’t think naysaying is inherently bad; in fact, on occasion, I engage in it. But this engagement is governed by certain principles. Absent these, it becomes a unique brand of herd mentality lacking the ability to stop and perform a reality check. Unburdened by principle, strident advocates of naysaying quickly adopt a line of logic that goes like this: “Someone I trust says this is bad so I don’t need to waste my time looking into it. I can say it’s bad with confidence. I can even quote the bad parts of it in order to deter others from looking at it!”

The Birth of the “Anti-book”
And here’s how it usually works: First, a trusted scout reads the source material. If, as expected, the source material contains some error, they return as heralds to report their findings. Next, the shepherds (pastors, bloggers, church leaders) are informed of the findings via a blog or a much-forwarded email.

These shepherds naturally take up the task of redistributing the information to their own flocks. In the process they appear to be doing the hard work of discernment, while in fact they may have done none. Whether their “flock” sits before them in pews from week to week or is only accessible via electronic media makes little difference. They are often less a flock to be cared for than a distribution network to be exploited. The distributed findings are accepted as damning proof against someone the recipients of said findings themselves have probably never heard or read.

Finally, if the scout is wildly successful, his efforts will culminate in the publishing of a book. No longer do these words exist solely as pixels on a screen. The incarnation of these findings in tangible form has an undeniable legitimizing effect. The publication itself is usually a scrapbook of sorts that claims to be authoritative on all matters relating to the persons or ideas that are under attack. The problem is the book, and indeed the entire process leading up to it, contains only the most inflammatory sections from other sources and arranges them in such a way that all context is lost.

No matter. This publication becomes a sword and standard in the hands of the assembled army, consolidating a unity of purpose that further fuels their efforts. In addition it is also passed around as a sort of gospel tract to outsiders, ensuring the recipient that reading the book will be of great assistance in correcting their misguided theology.

The climax of this crusade is a chorus of condemnation comprised mostly of people who haven’t read the source material but want to appear as if they have.

Avoiding Traps and Hazards
When you encounter a book like I’ve described above, if you begin to read it and find that you haven’t heard of or read anything by half (or more) of the authors you’re reading about, STOP READING, PUT DOWN THE BOOK, and most certainly do not distribute the book to others with an encouragement to read it.

I once witnessed someone make a strong objection to a proposed mission statement based on the fact that it contained the word “reconciliation.” The objector reasoned thus: “reconciliation” is a word used frequently by Rick Warren, whom he considered a heretic; therefore the proposal was to be rejected.

This clearly illustrates the danger of being blindly against someone’s ideology and naively hyper-protective of your own. It is also evidence that the person is spending more time reading anti-books than the Good Book whose honour they claim to be defending.

Often people are drawn into the practice of unprincipled naysaying because they lack the theological language to express themselves in any other way. In addition, their targets are often people who possess both theological confidence and rhetorical strength and this can be an intimidating façade to challenge.

We do need to confront each other, but we need to do so humbly and with much grace. Simply telling each other what we think is right and wrong is fruitless if we’re not standing on the word of God. The last thing we need is warring armies of sycophants, lining up behind the man or woman they believe to be most right.

No one, regardless of his or her status among those you trust, is infallible. Absolute trust in anyone leads very quickly to cultish devotion.

John Piper didn’t die for your sins. Neither did Brian McLaren.

In Matthew 28 Jesus tells His followers to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Disciples making disciples – this is what Jesus has sent us to do. As church leaders, it’s what we’re all about, right?

But it’s easy to build the case that disciple-making is a neglected practice, at least in part. We have failed to see the multi-dimensional nature of the task and this singular focus on one aspect has led to widespread neglect of the others.

We are not called merely to bring people through the front door of faith and then circle back to gather more recruits. In the context of local church leadership, disciple-making is at least a threefold task.

Invitation
First, there is the invitation. We appear to have done a decent job at this one. But whether we’ve truly facilitated a lot of conversions or merely secured uninformed commitments is up for debate. (Diminishing numbers of people participating in the body life of a local church suggests that the latter is more likely the case.)

“The longer you look at Jesus, the more you will want to serve Him in this world,” says N. T. Wright in his book Following Jesus. “That is, of course, if it’s the real Jesus you’re looking at.”

Sometimes the Jesus we invite people to follow is one we’ve created in our own minds, one who makes few real demands of us, who makes us feel happy from time to time, but doesn’t challenge us. The real Jesus was both demanding and challenging.

Our invitations to follow Jesus often fail to mention the potential for this following to cost something. This is a curious habit, considering it was something Jesus himself included in His invitations. He wasn’t interested in fair-weather followers and He wasn’t out to dupe would-be believers with bait, only to switch it out once they were hooked.

Take a long look at the Jesus you’re inviting people to follow; if He looks different than the Jesus in the Gospels, He’s probably not the real Jesus.

Care
The second component of disciple-making is caring for people after they have entered the family of faith. When the apostles Paul and John write to young believers they refer to them in affectionate, parental terms. They know that these are infants in the faith and that they will need to be treated as such at least for the initial phase of their new lives.

Often our disciple-making efforts birth new believers and then effectively leave an infant alone to care for itself. Caring for a human infant is time-consuming; it disrupts your pre-parental habits; it places enormous responsibility on your shoulders. Should we as spiritual parents expect any less from the spiritual infants around us?

To be blunt though, we don’t worry much about this since there are precious few new believers in our midst to care for! While this is the case in many churches and an effort should be made to correct it, as a first step I would encourage you to discover how many people currently part of your congregation are in a state of spiritual infancy. There are probably more than you suspect.

Even when there is a transparent invitation and ongoing care is given, there will still be times when people lose their way.

Retrieval
The third component is retrieving people when they wander off. This aspect of discipleship is by far the easiest to ignore since the “out of sight, out mind” principle is at work.

But both Paul and James give us clear direction in this area. Paul instructs us to gently restore someone who is caught in a transgression; James offers similar guidance to his readers at the end of his letter.

These are no less a part of the discipleship process than ushering someone into the Kingdom or caring for them when they get there.

But why is this so difficult to practice? There are many reasons, among them that it’s time-consuming and it can be messy, but by avoiding retrieval missions we give the impression that a “problem child” has left home and we’re not all that worried about it. After all, there seems to be a lot less drama around the house these days.

When we fail to budget time for retrieval, the faith communities in which we labour may become wider but they are sure to become shallower at the same time. And of course not everyone who is pursued in this way will be reconciled, but this is no excuse to avoid a biblical command.

The full work of discipleship involves invitation, care and retrieval. While new community is formed with the making of new disciples, deeper community is found only as we continue to invite, and pursue the other two aspects of disciple-making.

Until we see these three as interdependent and essential elements of a greater whole, the depth of fellowship in our communities of faith will remain shallow.

The rhythm of life as a family of faith must be both inward and outward, unseen and visible, internal towards fellowship and external towards evangelism. If we are weak, neglectful or intentionally avoid one dimension, it weakens the whole.

Every time a church music director receives a suggestion from a congregant about a new music team member, there’s a bit of a twist in our stomachs. I need to say this bluntly: non-musicians are not good judges of musical ability. They typically underestimate the amount of skill and diligence required to play in the setting demanded by most churches. They also often assume that if someone is judged to be “not good enough” then the music director’s standards must be too high, the thinking being that anyone with some ability and a lot of good intentions should be given a spot on stage.

Newer musicians themselves often overestimate the progress of their own development. Their actual musical ability is often far less than what they perceive it to be.

My response is usually this: There is no other aspect of corporate worship that is abandoned to people with good intentions alone – why music? So when the situation arises, music directors are often set up for a bit of an awkward conversation.

Musical people generally fall into one of the four following categories:

Beginner
This person has probably recently taken up an interest in singing or a musical instrument. At this stage there is a lot of excitement but very little self-awareness or competence. Beginners often bail when the going gets tough, when the process of learning becomes more difficult than they thought it would be.

Amateur
The amateur musician has persevered through the beginner stage and is becoming aware of their place in the spectrum of competence. This is still somewhat of a probationary stage, but this when they are probably ready to begin playing a small role in corporate worship. Pushed forward too soon however, it can shatter both confidence and the quality of the worship service itself.

Competent
A competent musician is a confident musician. At this stage they’re past having to look at their fingers at each chord change, for example. Having attained this level of competence, they are now ready to start playing a more prominent role in corporate worship, perhaps even to lead a team of their own.

Professional
If you live in a larger urban center you may have access to musicians who make their living playing or singing in a professional band or recording studio in the area. These people can be a great blessing to a music director if they have a good attitude. Sometimes however, professionals are prone to adopt the ways of the culture of idolization in which they spend the majority of their time.

If this is the attitude of a professional you have access to, choose not to access their talent.

There is one more category that I won’t name but will draw attention to: the competent or professional level musician who is a congregation member and a musician in addition to being music snob. (I’ve spent my share of time playing this role.) They attend services and judge what’s happening on stage to be “ok”, but they could certainly do better. So much better in fact that they won’t embarrass everyone else by making themselves known. Until that attitude is set aside, this type of person is of no use to you.

When joining as a new musician, regardless of your level competence, making a first impression as someone who is humble will go a long way with your fellow team members. It also acts as a deterrent to the idolization that people in our culture seem more than willing to engage in when they’re impressed by anyone on a stage.

Don’t give them opportunity to do so by appearing to bask in their adoration. If you become the focus it means that someone more import – Jesus, the one you’re supposed to be leading them to worship – is not.

Our standards CAN indeed be too high, and they are too high when they impede competent musicians from serving God with their talents. If an occasional off note is all it takes to keep someone from worshiping God, the problem likely isn’t with the singer.

But our standards are too low when we allow incompetent musicians to deter others from worshiping God. When we do this we put the congregation in the unenviable position of attempting to engage in worship while being led by someone with a lack of training or ability. We also set the unqualified musician up for embarrassment. Better a truthful word in private than an obvious embarrassment in public.

Having said that, we should not seek to “professionalize” our corporate worship services. Anyone who has attained the level competence required to avoid being a distraction should be put to use. And those who have not attained this level, and are willing to work toward that end, should receive the training they require.

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The virtues of interdependence are largely forgotten in our times. Even where there is very little grass to cut, most of us need to own a mower.  Thousands of people hit the highways each day, generally one per car, all going to roughly the same places. Inside each vehicle, the experience is highly customized—temperature, lighting and music are all adjusted to the liking of the solo passenger.

Manufacturers and marketers love this, but we’re losing touch with something along the way. We’ve come to think of ourselves as a collection of self-contained units, all able to get what we want without inconveniencing anyone else.Live this way all week and you’re bound to bring the same expectations into your weekly worship gathering.

If everything else we consume is bite-sized, individually packaged and tailored to our needs, why not our worship experience as well?

We demand personal, individualized expression. And wherever there’s demand, supply is sure to follow. On offer from the worship music industry is a preponderance of songs whose adverbial bias is tilted strongly toward the individual and personal.

As I study the repertoire of my own congregation, the trend is obvious. The text of the most prominent songs we sang in the previous nine months reveal a 6:1 ratio of individual personal adverbs used over words that indicate corporate expression like “we,” “we’ll,” “we’re” and “our.”

Even when we do stand corporately, we sing as individuals, and the way we sing is a metaphor for the way we go about our lives as the body of Christ. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with individual expressions of gratitude and worship; that has its place. But is that place standing with several hundred others engaging in the same individualized activity?

It’s easy to underestimate the importance of the words we put into people’s mouths when we lead in song. People are more likely to leave a worship service with the words of a song, rather than a sermon, stuck in their heads. The sermon does matter, but in the short-term our minds cling to what’s easiest to remember.

I do hope we’d rather lodge in people’s minds a clearly worded song like “In Christ Alone” than the ambiguously worded “Draw Me Close.” Lyrics like “You’re all I want / You’re all I’ve ever needed / You’re all I want / Help me know you are near” could easily be mistaken for a romantic ballad by someone who hears them in the wrong context.

This of course is not inherently sinful; after all, the Bible does use male/female “romantic” language at times. But as Keith Drury puts it in his chapter of the excellent book The Message in the Music: Studying Contemporary Praise and Worship: “None of us alone can be the bride of Christ; only together collectively are we His bride.”

Thus, the Church could use more lyrics expressing the love relationship between Jesus and the collective Church, replacing “I, my and mine” with “we, our and ours.”

In this group context, the romantic aspect—even the marriage metaphor—can be wholesome, biblical and proper.

Begin to use this “romantic” language in the context of individualized expression and things start to get a little weird. The lack of clarity may not be intentional, but it does have consequences.

Songs of individual expression have dominated in recent years. This is a result of both what the worship music industry supplies, and the choices of song leaders. We should avoid overcorrecting by banning the words “I” and “me” from our repertoire, but certainly there are songs written as individual expression that can be modified slightly to reflect a more corporate and congregational tone.

We should desire more body coordination and less isolated, individual movement. Changing our song lyrics to reflect that desire won’t cure the problem, but surely it’s a suitable token of our intentions.

Worship is about God, but that doesn’t mean it has no effect on us. We sing, “it’s all about you, Jesus,” but we say it in a way that makes it rather obvious that it’s about us, too. And it is about us too, because worship—if it is true worship—will cause us to be transformed more to the likeness of Christ, both as individuals and as His Body.

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Here’s a letter to the editor that came in to Christian Week after this column was published in print there:

Before I offer a mild critique of Michael Krahn’s last column, I want to encourage him in his work. I believe it is very important to think about how we worship God and I appreciate how he shares his thoughts on the subject with ChristianWeek readers.

Like Krahn, I am a musician and songwriter and I am sure he will agree that composing a song from a corporate standpoint can be difficult. I really only know how “I” feel. I don’t like to speak for anyone else when I am worshipping God. I really don’t like to speak for God either and refuse to sing songs that are written as though they are from God, unless I’ve amended the words into third person.

This phenomenon of individually expressive worship songs is nothing new. It can be traced back as far as Isaac Watts (“When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”). I often wonder if he appreciates his songs being sung almost 300 years later. He apparently wrote his songs in response to a growing discontent with traditional hymns, but that is another subject.

Krahn also singles out the song “Draw Me Close” by calling it ambiguous and that it could pass for a romantic song. Now, I must admit that I got the exact same impression when I first heard the song a few years ago. It’s kind of like an 80s romantic rock ballad. But who cares? Does Krahn think that God doesn’t know who I am singing to? The One who can read all of my thoughts surely knows who I am singing to. I guess the only danger in composing that song is that people will be tempted to use it out of context. There is an art of worship, and a heart of worship. We can’t fool God.

In the end, though, Krahn is correct. Worship in a corporate setting should be as such. We are a body. The bride of Christ.

From a songwriter’s perspective, I would prefer to avoid “I, we, my, our, me and us. I find it better to use You, and direct it to Him (God). Because that is who it is all about. Either that, or load the songs with biblical truths about Him.

Les Funk
MacGregor, MB
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Whether we are trying to look as perfect as a picture we’ve seen or sound as perfect as a recording we’ve heard, we are destined to fail.

We are commanded to sing! The word “sing” appears more than 100 times in Scripture, often as a command. Since God commands it, it is safe to say He gives the necessary abilities. The gift of song is universal.

I encounter more and more people who tell me they cannot sing. They do not lack the desire, but they have come to believe they lack the ability. This low singing self-image is one reason fewer people than ever are participating in congregational singing. But by what standard are they judging themselves?

To answer that question we need a short lesson in technology. Like Google, which started out as a company name but has now also become an action word, two other words have crossed the linguistic threshold to become verbs. With Photoshop, one can “improve” photos by removing skin imperfections or inches from waistlines. Using Autotune one can “improve” sound by removing imperfections in recorded audio. We google people; we photoshop images; we autotune sounds.

Why the lesson in audio and graphics technology?

I see a parallel between the lack of confidence in singing and the world of visual images in tabloid and fashion magazines. Photoshopped images create unrealistic body expectations. In the modern era of music autotuned recordings give us unrealistically perfect sounds.

The end goal of both processes is the same: the appearance of perfection. Whether we are trying to look as perfect as a picture we’ve seen or sound as perfect as a recording we’ve heard, we are destined to fail.

All of this has led to a crisis of confidence. Autotuned recordings have robbed average singers of confidence in the quality of their voices.

The problem is not that there are people with uncommonly attractive bodies or uncommonly strong voices; the problem is that we have bought into the idea that unless we possess perfection in body and voice we are in the minority and should keep ourselves both hidden and unheard. This idea is an affront to human dignity and to God, who created our bodies and our voices in all their glorious variety.

Inside the Church and out we are faced with a culture of idolatry. TV shows that encourage idolization do not help. In the age of American Idol, people expect to be judged. And judges abound.

Defy people’s expectations and refuse to accept their insistence that they can’t sing. Except in extremely rare cases, this is a lie they’ve been convinced to believe. If people struggle with singing, it’s probably because they’ve been deprived of opportunity and an encouraging place to try.

Within the gathering of a congregation there should be plenty of opportunity.

I led a hymn-sing a while ago. There may have been a few people among the 100 or so who lacked perfect pitch. Did it matter? Not really. The people there understood the purpose of our coming together. It was not to impress anyone or to win a competition, and it was certainly not to sit in judgment on someone else’s abilities.

It was to remember God’s goodness and to praise Him with our voices. Stripped of pretense and unbound by the desire to judge and be judged, a beautiful sound rose in the room. We were singing in four parts, but we were singing as one.

Never pass up an opportunity to talk about the purpose of congregational singing, which is not for the few with microphones to dominate, but for the congregation to sing. This may seem obvious to you, and it will seem obvious to them once they’ve thought about it, but it will take persistent attention to break down the barrier.
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Give people a concert atmosphere, and concert behavior is what you’ll get. Let’s reclaim worship as much more than a concert.

If you walk into almost any evangelical church and inquire about “worship,” you can expect to be directed to someone who leads music. “No, no,” you might say, “I’m looking for the people responsible for planning corporate worship at this church.” But it’s a lost cause.

In most churches, the battle is already over: music equals worship; worship equals music. The capacity to differentiate between the two is functionally non-existent. The “worship leader” is the person who leads the group of musicians we call the “worship team.” When these people are on the stage we’re worshiping; when they’re not we’re doing something else. Simple, right?

You may hear comments like, “After the worship, we’ll hear a sermon.” But if the sermon only begins after worship has left the building, we may as well head home before it starts.

This odd hegemony of music—not as one aspect of worship, but as worship itself—is a fairly recent construct. I believe it is a destructive trend in the modern church. What gave the music the right to demand so much?

Concert or community?

Mine is not your grandfather’s diatribe against the dangers of “rock and/or roll.” I’m a big fan of the genre. As a musician and songwriter I write, play and sing rock music (have a listen here). But rock and roll has some handicaps when, as a style, it is applied to Christian worship.

It can drown out the most important element: the human voices of the congregation. Rock music is inextricably intertwined with concert culture. It calls for big sound, bright lights and lots of juice to run it all. Anything less will be seen as a pale and inadequate.

Rock music isn’t primarily a participatory activity. The crowd might sing along at a concert, but they paid good money to see a performance. Give people a concert atmosphere, and concert behavior is what you’ll get.

I’m not proposing we abandon the notion of a designated song leader altogether. But the purpose of a leader is to lead, and I would suggest that if you are a song leader and very few people in your congregation are singing when you lead, something is not as it should be.

So what is worship, then? In his book, Vintage Church, Mark Driscoll defines it as “a response to the revelation of the Lord consisting of both adoration and proclamation of the greatness of God and his mighty works and of serving him by living out his character in gracious service to others.”

Can that include music? Absolutely. But it is so much more. So how can we recover a fullness of meaning? Let me make some suggestions.

What can be done?

1. Put music in its place
Music is not an inferior element of worship, but it is only one aspect of it. In many churches, the verbal proclamation of the gospel as a determining factor in the quality of corporate worship is secondary to the quality of the music. Every musician should strive for excellence, but when musical genre trumps truthful proclamation, we have an idolatry problem on our hands.

2. Win the battle for terminology
Whenever someone calls a musician or song leader the “worship leader,” suggest a better term. Whenever someone says something that narrows the scope of worship to music, draw their attention to that fact. This may be seen as nitpicking, but it does have an effect on how people conceptualize worship.

3. Redefine the “worship experience”
In modern terms, most people are convinced that they have not “really worshipped” or experienced intimacy with God if there hasn’t been an accompanying emotional high. Of course an emotional high can be part of a worship experience, but to suggest that this is normative or that you’ve failed at worshipping if you haven’t experienced it is ludicrous.

Every time we respond to the revelation of God through word or deed, through adoration or proclamation, through singing or by an act of charity, we are engaging in worship. If you are a leader in your church, it is worth pointing out that every believer is a worship leader.

Surely this recovery is an effort worth causing some discomfort in our churches.

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Other posts you might find interesting:

Book Review: Tim Challies – “The Next Story”
The New (global) Village Priests – An analysis of the John MacArthur/Darrin Patrick controversy
Tearing Down Our Idols – Hillsong, Chris Tomlin and the worship industry
A Different Kind of Fast

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Remember the enormous cassette collection that once resided in your church library? All of your pastor’s sermons were there for you to browse, sign out and listen to. If you wanted to listen to the sermons of the pastor of another church, you either needed to know someone who went to that church or go through the laborious task of ordering tapes by mail.

Then the digital revolution began to rumble and transform our media consumption habits. MP3s came along and after a while a 30-45 minute sermon was easy to distribute virally or via a website.

Fast forward to 2011. As newer technologies like podcasting and live-streaming become ubiquitous, previous barriers to obtaining content like geography and cost are suddenly insignificant. Any given pastor is as close as your connected device, his books and sermons available at little to no cost. The “global village” effect now permeates every area of life.

So more Bible teaching is available but most of it is generated, not by your local church pastor, but by someone at a distance.

The Virtual Pastor
Enter the virtual pastor – a.k.a. the new global village priest. The virtual pastor is someone who exerts significant influence over your spiritual growth and development to the point where his influence is more prominent than that of the pastor of the local church of which you are a member.

As technology continues to invalidate the strictures of geography, more complexity has been added to the concept of accountability.

John MacArthur

In the case of the virtual pastor for example, to what degree are we to submit to the authority of someone whom we’ve never met or spoken to, or even been in the presence of, for that matter?

Some are more than willing to be the new global village priests. Take for example the controversy that erupted after a recent online dust-up in which long-time pastor John MacArthur publicly took church planter Darrin Patrick to task for a short section in Patrick’s new book.

When defenders of Patrick’s ministry offered rebuttals to the criticisms, MacArthur’s team seemed incredulous that a controversy over his words even existed. At MacArthur’s web site the official response (read) to other church planters and defenders of Patrick was to not be “so thin-skinned.” In addition they were advised to, “Listen. John has more than 50 years of preaching faithfully, more than 40 years in the same pulpit – don’t you think you ought to listen?”

Patrick’s response (read) was admirable but a little confusing. He started by acknowledging that MacArthur had been a big influence on his ministry. He then spent several paragraphs defending himself against each of MacArthur’s criticisms. But then he issued a caution to those who have been quick to be critical of MacArthur. “Please remember,” he says, “that we all need to be corrected from time to time.”

A statement by the elders of Patrick’s church stated that they had asked him to respond to the concerns and then to, “meet with Dr. MacArthur privately to resolve any outstanding concerns.”

Darrin Patrick

They also added that, “We as an elder team do not feel that Pastor Darrin’s words in the questioned section need to be reworded or recanted.”

So, according to Patrick and his elders, mistakes were not made but the correction was welcomed. The question is why do these local church elders feel it’s necessary to so thoroughly respond to objections they believe are unfounded, especially ones made by the pastor of a church outside their geographic proximity?

Only in the global village of today’s technological world could a pastor in California make a critical comment about a book written by a pastor in St. Louis and in less than 24 hours have started a controversy with thousands of Christians across Canada and the United States.

My point here is not to deter you from listening to or reading this or that influential teacher, but to drive toward a way of being that that sets as a priority the teachers and leaders in geographical and spiritual proximity to you.

We would all do well to remember that just because someone can say something loudly enough for everyone to hear doesn’t mean that it demands a response. In a time when more people are saying more things more loudly than ever before, we’ll quickly exhaust ourselves.

Attention Surplus Disorder
Below the post at www.gty.org (read) is a display of what can only be described by coining a new term for a condition called ASD – Attention Surplus Disorder. There are 140 comments spanning some 30,000 words written by people who it’s safe to say probably have one or two local church issues of their own that they could have been attending to.

Of course, I’ve just added another 800 words to the repository of this particular controversy, and I too have local church issues that need tending to. So do you. Let’s get to them.

Status: PUBLISHED (in Christian Week)

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About a year ago a prominent Canadian Christian professor took aim at one of today’s most popular worship songwriters in a piece called “Chris Tomlin’s Worship Songs: We Have Got to Do Better.”

Setting the tone early in the article, one of the first things he says of Tomlin’s songs is that “many of them stay with you after church, even if you want them badly to go away.” He roundly criticizes Tomlin’s songs for their “bad lyrics,” “musical clichés” and “discomfiting lyrics.” He calls him an outright “bad lyricist,” who “either doesn’t care about rhyming and settles for the merest assonance, or he lacks the skill or patience to actually craft rhymes.”

Why stop there? The professor goes on to write that Tomlin also lacks a “strong grasp of Scripture, and particularly of the metaphors and allusions he uses.”

If this diagnosis is correct, then many of the rest of us are musical idiots who lack the ability to discern a good song from a bad one. He nearly says as much: “We are the most educated Christians in history, and yet our lyrics are considerably stupider than our much less educated Christian forebears…”

Chris Vacher, a worship pastor from Orangeville, Ontario and founder of a Canadian songwriting collective known as WorshipRises recently came to Tomlin’s defence.

Echoing my own experience, he says, “I do know this: more often than not, if I do a Chris Tomlin song with our church, they are singing their hearts out for the glory of God. As a worship leader, what more could I ask for? Why do I care whether the last word of each line rhymes? All I care is that I am putting words in the mouths of the people of this church which give God glory, stir the hearts of people toward Christ and proclaim the gospel to those who don’t know Him.”

If a loose rhyme scheme is all it takes to keep someone from worshiping God, the problem likely isn’t with the song.

At the other end of the spectrum is the widespread idolization of the band Hillsong United. With a cast of hip, young and good-looking band members and the Hillsong promotional machine in full force, United has become the “it” band in worship music.

In today’s industry, music and image are inextricably linked. Unfortunately, this is just as true of the Christian music subculture as its secular counterpart. The visual presentation of Hillsong United is a message to its audience: image counts for a lot.

One disturbing outworking of this message became evident to me recently as I was looking at the search terms that bring traffic to my blog. One of the top search terms is “Hillsong” and the words most commonly paired with that term are “girls” and “girl singer.”

The girl they’re likely searching for is Brooke Fraser, one of the aforementioned hip, young, and good-looking members the band. Type that name into a Google image search and you’ll see her in poses ranging from “cute” to what can reasonably be described as “seductive.”

This strong push toward image marketing says nothing about the quality of the music that emanates from Hillsong’s various incarnations, the quality of which ranges from lacklustre to profound. Fraser herself is a gifted writer and singer who penned the popular anthem “Hosanna” (the one that begins with “I see the King of Glory…”).

But it does say a lot about the methods they’re willing to use to sell worship music. When we see a “professional worship singer” posing for photos that are not-so-subtly seductive, it’s normal to experience some confusion.

There’s a difference between looking presentable and seeking to become the centre of attention. When sensuality is used as leverage—or worse, manipulation—to sell something for Jesus, we’re getting uncomfortably close to the line between acceptable and not-so.

All of this to say that we do still love to attend to our idols, whether by attempting to tear them down with undue criticism or via the adulation that makes them too high a priority in our lives. Given a choice between fickle fascination and condescending criticism, we should choose neither.

In one case, we’re tearing down something good for the sake our own over-refined sense of quality; in the other case, we’re praising something unholy because we’ve bought into the false god worship of celebrity culture.

Let’s allow the songs to be songs, regardless of who wrote them or what the writer looks like. Let’s neither use nor reject songs because they come from a certain artist.

I plan to continue to use both Hillsong and Chris Tomlin material when leading my church in worship music. I’ll also use anything else that’s singable and theologically sound. And I’ll continue to be diligent about avoiding the mixed messages of the visual presentation of worship artists.

Status: PUBLISHED (in Christian Week)

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