Who Should Pick the Music?

“I just want to know who’s in charge?” That sentence brought light to my situation. I had just preached my candidating sermon, and was about to grab a brief lunch before Q&A with the congregation. But instead of eating, the chairman of elders and the interim executive pastor whisked me to a back room for a hastily convened meeting with the pastor of worship. He didn’t beat around the bush but got right to the point:

If I was called as lead pastor, who would decide what happened in the Sunday morning service prior to the sermon? Who would pick the music? Who would determine the order? Who, in short, would be in charge?  Continue at Michael Lawrence

Serving Appetizers: Worship Services That Keep Their Promises

As a worship pastor, I am saddened to read polls reporting young people leaving our churches. True, this happens in each generation (remember the Boomer-angs who returned to church in the 1990s?), but how can service planners encourage the continued participation of young people within our churches?

One of the regular ways churches respond is to adopt a more contemporary style of music. But if you know two different teenagers, you recognize the disparity of musical preferences among young adults. And if discovering their preferences seems difficult, actually performing that music in church will seem impossible.

Yet I have been surprised by conversations I’ve had with actual students leaving the church. These students were not leaving the church because of outdated aesthetics; it is not that easy. Many of them leave because of disappointment with their local church; they have unmet expectations. And the saddest part is this: often the church is the one creating the very expectations that it cannot meet. We seem to be teaching our people to expect too much — at least in this current age.    Continue at Matthew Westerholm

Tragic Worship

The problem with much Christian worship in the contemporary world, Catholic and Protestant alike, is not that it is too entertaining but that it is not entertaining enough. Worship characterized by upbeat rock music, stand-up comedy, beautiful people taking center stage, and a certain amount of Hallmark Channel sentimentality neglects one classic form of entertainment, the one that tells us, to quote the Book of Common Prayer, that “in the midst of life we are in death.”   

It neglects tragedy. Tragedy as a form of art and of entertainment highlighted death, and death is central to true Christian worship. The most basic liturgical elements of the faith, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, speak of death, of burial, of a covenant made in blood, of a body broken. Even the cry “Jesus is Lord!” assumes an understanding of lordship very different than Caesar’s. Christ’s lordship is established by his sacrifice upon the cross, Caesar’s by power.

Perhaps some might recoil at characterizing tragedy as entertainment, but tragedy has been a vital part of the artistic endeavors of the West since Homer told of Achilles, smarting from the death of his beloved Patroclus, reluctantly returning to the battlefields of Troy. Human beings have always been drawn to tales of the tragic, as to those of the comic, when they have sought to be lifted out of the predictable routines of their daily lives—in other words, to be entertained.

From Aeschylus to Tennessee Williams, tragedians have thus enriched the theater. Shakespeare’s greatest plays are his tragedies. Who would rank Charles Dickens over Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad? Tragedy has absorbed the attention of remarkable thinkers from Aristotle to Hegel to Terry Eagleton.    Continue at  Carl R. Trueman

Destroying the Sacred-Secular Divide

Dancing. Sports. Caffeine. Rock and roll. Food and drink. The college campus is a kind of microcosm of the flashpoints we face “in the real world,” just with the volume turned way up. And lots of video games.

For over a decade, this has been the everyday life and ministry context for Matt Reagan, Campus Outreach director at the University of Minnesota and elder at Bethlehem Baptist Church. Into such potentially contrasting environments, he has sought to bring an old, old story with all its biblical textures and hues and the mind-defying life-change it boasts. It’s emphatically not an easy day-to-day parish for gospel ministry, but some love it. Matt does.

Over the years of laboring to press the gospel deeply into students of increasingly postmodern orientation and sensibilities, Matt has discovered that one of the most important topics to tackle with freshman collegiates and new believers is the so-called “sacred-secular divide.” We all participate in this to certain degrees, and the lessons are relevant far beyond the college campus and this perhaps strangest of life’s seasons. It quickly gets us into realities as central as our hearts and as important as the realization that God is not boring.

With such application far beyond the college campus in view, we sat down with Matt to have him explain what is this sacred-secular divide, and how Christian theology and the biblical gospel takes it head on.    Continue at David Mathis

CHH: “Christian Hip Hop” or “Controversial Hip Hop”

I’m just back from a refreshing and edifying time with saints at New Word Alive. New Word Alive is a family Bible conference held each year in North Wales. If you’re in the U.K.,  I can’t recommend it enough for its focus on the word of God, evangelism, and Christian fellowship. It was a joy to take part.

Of course, spending a week at a largely internet-free campground in North Wales means you’re a little out of the loop when it comes to the goings ons of the Christian world. And when it’s the world of Christian hip hop, the cultural black hole is even more pronounced. I loved the saints at New Word Alive, and the worship was wonderful, but there wasn’t much boom-bap happening.

So, I was a little surprised to see some of the internet brouhaha over shai linne’s new single, “Fal$e Teacher$.” In the single, shai takes aim at a host of prosperity gospel and word-faith teachers. It’s not the first time he (or others for that matter) has critiqued such teaching in his music. In response to the single, Bradley Knight, son of Paula White, posted an open letter to shai in defense of his mother’s ministry. Christianity Today picked up on the issue. Lisa Robinson at Parchment and Pen offered reflections based on her years inside prosperity congregations. Mark at Here I Blog added some source support for the song’s denunciations. Those were the first 4-5 entries in my quick google search. I’m sure there’s tons more opinion out there!

The back and forth has conjured the usual questions about whether private conversation should have happened first, whether public criticism and naming names is appropriate and under what circumstances, and whether Christian unity and charity ought to rule out polemics.   Continue at  Thabiti Anyabwile

Did Shai Linne Really Name “False” Teachers?

I recently posted about a new Christian hip-hop song: New Song Drops Names: “False Teachers” by Shai Linne. This song is off Shai Linne’s new album Lyrical Theology, Pt. 1: Theology which releases April 9, 2013.

In the song Linne names 12 false Bible teachers which I listed in the above post. A

commenter in that post suggested some evidence needs to be shown why Linne and others call these 12 false teachers. Hence, my question of whether the teachers Shai Linne named are really “false” teachers.

Below I’ve provided a examples of false teachings from each of the teachers Linne mentions in his song. Most of the quotes were take from Christianity In Crisis: The 21st Century by Hank Hanegraaff as footnoted. I used the Logos Bible Software edition so there are no page numbers. Hanegraaff did not write much about Eddie Long so I’ve referenced some material from Victor Stephens as you’ll see below. I used YouTube as well which allows you to hear each person teach in their own voice. For the record, I don’t endorse everything on a person’s YouTube channel that I’m linking to.

Joel Osteen

• Professed that Mormons are Christians. (Source)

• Our words are vital in bringing our dreams to pass. It’s not enough to simply see it by faith or in your imagination. You have to begin speaking words of faith over your life. Your words have enormous creative power. The moment you speak something out, you give birth to it. This is a spiritual principle, and it works whether what you are saying is good or bad, positive or negative.  Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (New York: Warner Faith, 2004)   Continue at Here I Blog      

60 Things to Think About

Dane Ortlund: Listened to some music and thought about Jesus this week. Here’s what I jotted down. 

1. His forgiveness gets down underneath not just our conscious, willful sins, but everything that is broken within us.
 

2. He ate lunch with hookers and crooked businessmen, not the conservative seminary professors.
 

3. Discipleship to him does not involve attaining a minimum level of competency. No resume is needed. Discipleship to him involves humbling ourselves, putting ourselves low, not high, and anyone can do that, if they will simply let Self die and be swallowed up by light and beauty and joy.
 

4. Those in union with him are promised that all the haunted brokenness that infects everything—every relationship, every conversation, every family, every email, every wakening to consciousness in the morning, every job, every vacation—everything—will one day be rewound and reversed.
 

5. Those in union with him are promised that the more darkness and hell we experience in this life, to that degree we will enjoy resplendence and radiance in the next (Rom. 8:17–18).
 

6. He never, ever asks his friends to walk through a trial that he, as the Pioneer-Author-Founder-Trailblazer (archegos: Heb 2:10; 12:2) has not himself, in an even more profound way, gone through himself.
 

7. His sinlessness does not encourage him to be aloof from us, holding us at arms length, but a substitute for us.
 

8. Unlike the laws of ritual cleanliness in Leviticus, Jesus’ touch of messy humans like me does not contaminate him. It cleanses me. In the OT, clean + unclean = unclean. With Jesus, clean + unclean = clean (Mark 1:41).   Continue at Dane Ortlund

Attractional Church: All Bait, No Switch

A few days ago I tweeted the following: “At our church we want our music to be as good as it can be without having people come to our church because of it.” Some of the responses were rather telling, some folks reading what I didn’t write, asking me why I want to promote bad music and why I’m against people finding music attractive. For the record, I’m not a fan of bad music (in lyric or tune or style), and I’m not against people being attracted to music (and the arts in general). 

Taking a step back, though, I find a lot of the leaping to hearing what I didn’t say indicative of the fundamental problem. It happens whenever one decries pragmatism and is asked why they want to be impractical. But pragmatism and practicality aren’t the same thing. And neither is the attractional paradigm of “doing church” identical to wanting an attractive church.  Continue at Jared Wilson

Name Brand Worship

A few days back I wrote about how music mood is closely knit to the theology behind those singing it. Those who have a shallow theology will sing with a whimsical shallow happiness, but those with a deeper theology will have a more serious sound to their music. On the heels of that thought, I have also noticed how this reality makes itself known through the various brands of worship music that you can adopt in your church. I've been to different styles of church worship and noticed that they all have a particular brand of worship music and style that even has labels and trademarks. This will probably be the future of Christian music in the American Church. To identify yourself with a certain philosophy, a church will pick music from a particular brand name to draw people to the kind of "worship experience" that they are guaranteed to get. The worship wars have ended and the Traditionalists lost. It used to be traditional versus contemporary service. The only contemporary music that was available was pretty much stuff by the early CCM pioneers like Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant, Rebecca Saint James, Steven Curtis Chapman, etc... Now, CCM is not just vanilla flavored anymore, they have morphed into a wide variety of new brands to choose from and identify with.

For example, If a church uses a large number of Hillsong United songs in their regular worship times, then there are a few things associated with it: Willow Creek church growth methodology; a life coach smooth talker pastor who's probably in his 40's or 50's trying to look young and cool; programs galore to keep people entertained and busy!   Continue at Reforming Baptist

God’s Method for Church Growth

Ask the average Christian why he or she goes to church. It is not for the dynamic praise band, or the convenient parking, or the programs, or whether or not they have a coffee stand, or because the pastor wears the latest fashions, or preaches from his iPad or possesses great leadership skills. Non-Christians may care about those things. The Christian, however, wants to hear the Word of God preached by a man who knows the God of whom he speaks. Who has been in communion with God in prayer and the study of His Word and now comes out to speak to the people. To be fed the Word of God through solid exposition. To worship the Lord with fellow believers singing songs, and hymns, and spiritual songs, encouraging one another and enjoy fellowship with one another.

 

What does the average Christian find on Sunday morning? Usually, cool music, hip clothes, a dizzying array of programs. A lot of songs, a lot of announcements and finally a 30 minute sermonette or devotional. Some personal stories, anecdotes, some jokes, and movie illustrations. And leaves, without being fed and without being nourished. Learning no more than could have been learned at home with a cursory study of the text. Leaving, neither edified, challenged, or convicted. The disgruntled churchgoer is then of course blamed for his or her lack of prayer for the pastor, coming to church for the wrong reasons and for being too critical. And while I am certain that may often be the case, that is only a part of the story.

If you were to look around at the evangelical landscape today you would see a lot of activity. 

You would see churches being planted, growth strategies strategized. Issues such as social justice or politics or how to engage the culture or how to redeem the culture (whatever that means)  are emphasized. Everything centers on man and his felt needs rather than God and His glory as seen through His inerrant Word. All of this creates  impoverished spiritual lives.  Continue at Eric T. Young

Ten Principles for Church Singing (Part 2)

 (Go here for Part 1)

6. We should strive for excellence in the musicality and the poetry of the songs we sing.

I’m not for a moment suggesting elitism. A tine has to be relatively simple for hundreds or thousands of people to sing it at the same time.  But we can still insist on undistracting excellence (to use Piper’s phrase). We want the cross to be the stumbling block, not our poor musicianship or faltering powerpoint.

While I believe a wide variety of styles can be used in worship, I am not a musical relativist.  Some songs are better than others. Some styles work better than others. And when it comes to lyrics, we should avoid obvious sloppiness like using thee and you in the same song or heaping up trite cliches. I heard a song on the radio a couple weeks ago whose chorus had something about a fragrant rose in the early spring and an eagle soaring to spread its wings. If your church sings this on Sunday, love your worship leader all the same. But if you’re the worship leader picking this song, try for something with a little more artistry, something that doesn’t sound like it came from a random page in your inspirational pocket calendar. Keep Reading...

How a Worship Format is Destroying the Evangelical Church

During my lifetime, many evangelical churches in American have moved from Bible-oriented gatherings to music-dominated meetings. Interestingly, both sets of religious gatherings typically bore the title, “Worship Service.”

When the evangelical church was Bible-oriented, this “worship” paradigm was in place:

(1) Not all elements of the service were considered equally important; the exposition of Scripture was clearly the first and foremost priority. All other competitors vied for a distant second place.

(2) When the term “worship” was used, it was the equivalent of our modern casual expression, “doing church.” It is important to note that the preaching of the Word was considered part of worship, as were announcements, testimonies, communion, prayer, singing, the offering, and special music. This was the typical structure of a “worship service” before 1980.

(3) Many evangelicals viewed music as a “warm up for the sermon.” In this regard, many leaders did not seem to often respect music ministry as actual ministry but many others did. Continue Reading>>>

Worship: It’s Not About the Music!

Dan Lucarini, who used to be a ‘worship leader’ of a ‘contemporary praise team’ wrote of his journey out of the CCM circle in his book Why I Left the Contemporary Christian Music Movement.  I have that one coming in the mail; more on that later.

For now I want to point out his follow-up book, It’s Not About the Music (Darlington: EP Books, 2010).  In this book, Lucarini debunks the modern notion that the heart of worship is music.  He quotes a CCM musician to prove his point, who said CCM artists gravitate “toward a U2-esque sound built around a true worship song, giving the listener a deeper worship experience.”  I know quite a few Christians who would agree: the heart of worship is our singing to God, and the better we feel about it, the better the ‘experience.’  Lucarini disagrees (as do I!). Continue Reading>>>

The Scandal of Pagans Leading Worship

Collin Hansen has a fascinating series of interviews on the Gospel Coalition today asking a variety of pastors whether they allow those who make no Christian profession, who regard themselves as non-Christians, non-believers, those we used to call “heathen” or “pagans” to lead worship through leading or playing musical instruments. The responses vary from yes (Scotty Smith, a PCA pastor), to “No” (Mike Cosper, and Jonathan Leeman), and “maybe” (Zach Nielsen). This discussion was stimulated by a post by Bob Kauflin. Collin draws attention to the arguments made by Tim Keller (a PCA pastor) in favor of including self-identified non-Christians “in our services” in musical ensembles on the grounds that it fits with Redeemer’s version of the “Reformed world and life view.” Continue Reading>>>

Is My Music Warping My Child?

The Deep Depths of Relevancy

The Cornerstone Music & Arts festival is an annual, four-day event held on a 500-acre plot in central Illinois. The main attraction is the music. Multiple stages showcase many different artists and bands who are supposedly Christian. You will probably recognize some of the bigger names: Toby Mac, Skillet, The David Crowder Band, Switchfoot, and the like. While these in and of themselves may present their own problems that would require another blog entry, the Cornerstone Festival has shown itself to have an evil underbelly that is not just a masked attack upon Truth but is bold and blatantly demonic.

The Apprising Ministries blog recently posted an article written by an attendee of the festival who experienced and saw things that are not only shocking but being passed off as Christian. Typifying the worst of the musical acts was a band called Grave Robber whose influences include bands and singers such as Alice Cooper, Type O Negative, GWAR, and Black Sabbath, just to name a few. If you aren’t familiar with these ‘artists’, consider yourself blessed. They are among some of the most evil and, yes, even bloody and gory acts that have been popular in the past 30 years. Grave Robber, decked out in masks and costumes that make them appear like, well, they were just dug up yesterday, even sometimes share the stage with members of the aforementioned bands. They refer to Jesus as the re-animator, and themselves as zombie slaves. Continue reading>>>

This Is The Way It Ought To Be

I Worshiped Music—Now I Worship God

According to Wikipedia, "'Selling out' refers to the compromising of one's integrity, morality and principles in exchange for money, 'success' or personal gain."

I was completely sold out. Not for Jesus, but for music. Not because I actually made money or had much actual success in the biz, but because indie rock seemed to have this ominous "saving ability."

The culture. The cred. The freedom of playing music on my own terms. All of these things I wrongly believed would save me from living a meaningless life, working in a depressing career field, or having to do anything that wasn’t fun.

The sad truth is that though God had truly saved me at 18, I continued to pursue my salvation through music, and lived a life devoted to that belief for years afterward. Read the rest HERE

This Little Child by Scott Wesley Brown

HT: Lighthearted Calvinist

WHAT MAKES MUSIC... CHRISTIANLY?...contending for biblical theology in CCM

Knowing God - Not Feeling God
In Christian music we are missing the key pillar, the cornerstone, which the other two rely upon - sound doctrine! There has already occurred a much needed return to praise and worship in the church and we’ve observed that across the board in evangelicalism. There is also a renewed heightened call for more personal ecclesiastical accountability.[6] Though we have not arrived in those areas, we are on the path, nevertheless, the Achilles heel of our industry is the blatant absence of sound biblical theology which has effected every level of Christian music.

This is most evident in it’s message. Christian music, originally called Jesus Music that once fearlessly sang about the gospel, now sings of a Christ-less, watered-down, pabulum-based, positive alternative, cream of wheat, mush-kind-of-syrupy God-as-my-girlfriend thing. There is an obvious reason this has taken place: artists primarily feel; theologians primarily think. We need artists who will balance their zeal with knowledge[7] to invest their lives in the daily discipline of Bible study, and then, to write with the fire, passion and enthusiasm which that study has illumined to communicate the glorious language of the church - the holy Word of God! Until this occurs, we are guilty of sentencing a generation of Christians to simply “feel” their God, rather than to know their God! In the early days of my own music ministry I wrote songs that neither represented good music or precise theology. It is out of the crucible of those experiences that God convicted me, which drives me to speak passionately to these issues. Read the rest HERE