Are We Headed For A Crash? Reflections On The Current State of Evangelical Worship

It’s good for worship leaders to experience this kind of wide-exposure  from time to time, and the National Worship Leader Conference certainly provides it.

Yet throughout the conference, at different sessions, with different worship leaders, from different circles, using different approaches, and leading with different bands, I picked up on a common theme. It’s been growing over the last few decades. And to be honest, it’s a troubling theme. And if this current generation of worship leaders doesn’t change this theme, then corporate worship in evangelicalism really is headed for a major crash.

It’s the theme of performancism. The worship leader as the performer. The congregation as the audience. The sanctuary as the concert hall.  Read the full article HERE

The Threat of Gospel Amnesia

I used to be a Christian who didn't think about Jesus. I was bored with him. I remember telling my husband one day that I was tired of hearing him say, "Jesus loves you, Luma." It all seemed trite and superficial. I wanted, I needed, something deeper. Something more challenging to my mind, more impactful than "Jesus died on the cross for your sins." That tired story, heard countless times since my father first spoke the gospel to me in a train station in Thessaloniki, rang hollow.

 

But despite my weakness, ambivalence, and even hostility, this same gospel has never let me go and will not let me go—through hardships, divorce, rebellion, passivity, legalism, and back again. Although I believe I've been a Christian since I was 8 years old, for many years my faith was accompanied by a cloudiness and distortion like that of the blind man Jesus healed: "I see men, but they look like trees walking" (Mark 8:24). It hurts to write these words, yet they must be written. They must be written for the sake of many who silently live the way I lived and think the way I thought.

Most of my life has been spent finding one way or another to atone for myself. Operating from a hazy understanding of what Christ did in his life and death to win my salvation, this self-atonement was like a vortex—a downward spiral into the depth of my amnesia.     Continue at Luma Simms

The Idolatry of Youth Culture in Worship

Worship leaders often talk about the tension between performance and worship. It's easy to get drawn into the spectacle of music in the church, with our primary examples and role models being professionals---often young, beautiful, and enormously talented.

In this third of three video discussions with Kevin Twit and Isaac Wardell, we talk about the idolatry of youth culture and how it has shaped our worship. Worship culture has followed the lead of culture generally, becoming obsessive about youth, perpetually introducing new worship leaders while introducing fresh songs, styles, and ideas. We're perpetually innovating, chasing the demand for being new and cutting edge.

How can worship be shaped in such a way that it confronts these obsessions? How does the music industry shape our expectations for worship leaders in particular and church leaders in general? What are some of the contrasts between the attitude of an aspiring artist and an aspiring servant. Wardell talks a bit about the difference between a "church musician" and a "worship leader," which I find to be a really helpful distinction.  Continue at Mike Cooper

An Open Letter to Praise Bands

Dear Praise Band,

I so appreciate your willingness and desire to offer up your gifts to God in worship. I appreciate your devotion and celebrate your faithfulness--schlepping to church early, Sunday after Sunday, making time for practice mid-week, learning and writing new songs, and so much more. Like those skilled artists and artisans that God used to create the tabernacle (Exodus 36), you are willing to put your artistic gifts in service to the Triune God.

So please receive this little missive in the spirit it is meant: as an encouragement to reflect on the practice of "leading worship." It seems to me that you are often simply co-opted into a practice without being encouraged to reflect on its rationale, its "reason why." In other words, it seems to me that you are often recruited to "lead worship" without much opportunity to pause and reflect on the nature of "worship" and what it would mean to "lead."

In particular, my concern is that we, the church, have unwittingly encouraged you to simply import musical practices into Christian worship that--while they might be appropriate elsewhere--are detrimental to congregational worship. More pointedly, using language I first employed in Desiring the Kingdom, I sometimes worry that we've unwittingly encouraged you to import certain forms of performance that are, in effect, "secular liturgies" and not just neutral "methods." Without us realizing it, the dominant practices of performance train us to relate to music (and musicians) in a certain way: as something for our pleasure, as entertainment, as a largely passive experience. The function and goal of music in these "secular liturgies" is quite different from the function and goal of music in Christian worship.

So let me offer just a few brief axioms with the hope of encouraging new reflection on the practice of "leading worship":  Continue at James K. A. Smith

Discerning a Legal Spirit Within You

The default mode of every fallen heart is to turn one’s obedience (works/performance) into the ground for one’s acceptance (justification) before God. It is as natural for a man to trust in his obedience (self-idolatry) as it is for a fish to breathe in water. And, it is about as unnatural for a man to seek peace with God by trusting in the gospel as it is for a man to breathe in water.

Yet, we must seek to always recall the simple yet elusive truth of the gospel, which is: You and I are accepted by God, not on the basis of our personal performance, but rather on the basis of the righteousness of Christ alone.

In Galatians, Paul rightly saw that this was the issue in regards to circumcision. He understood that the very integrity of the Christian faith and the eternal salvation of sinners were at stake.

To accept the demand of the “false brothers” for Titus to be circumcised (2:3-5) would have been to renounce the truth of the gospel (i.e., that justification comes by grace through faith in Christ alone apart from the works of the law; 2:5). Keep Reading>>>

Max McLean Performs Mark’s Gospel