Camp Touchet Worship Class
This is for Jacob's Class on 11/1/2022 and 11/2/2022.
The Woman at the Well
Worship Defined
A World of Worship
Performance is often valued over participation, and technology over truth. Many songs have been written by musicians who don’t know their Bibles very well, resulting in songs that lack gospel and theological clarity. Worst of all, worship has been reduced almost universally to what happens when we sing.
Whether you see the “worship phenomenon” as a good thing, a bad thing, or somewhere in between, this much is certain: the worship of God matters. It’s never irrelevant. It’s never unimportant. The worship of God should always be a hot topic. And from God’s perspective, it is. There is nothing more foundational to our relationship with God and to our lives as Christians.
Why do we sing?
Word of Christ
Teaching and Admonishing
Teaching
Admonishing
One another
that those doing the teaching and admonishing do them in appropriate ways, governed by insight into the situation and the people being addressed.
Songs, Hymns and Spiritual Songs
First, the “message about Christ,” or, more broadly, we could say, “the word of God,” was central to the experience of worship. Second, various forms of music were integral to the experience. And, third, teaching and admonishing, while undoubtedly often the responsibility of particular gifted individuals within the congregation (such as Paul [Col. 1:28] or Epaphras [Col. 2:7]) or elders (1 Tim. 3:2; 5:17; see also, e.g., 1 Cor. 12:28; 2 Tim. 2:2), were also engaged in by every member of the congregation.
Beatles Song
What do we sing?
Music can be deceptive. I once heard of a Christian woman who spent time serving God in South Africa. While visiting a health clinic, she was deeply moved by the sound of the local Zulu women singing. Their harmonies were hauntingly beautiful. With tears in her eyes, she asked a friend if she knew the translation of the words.
“Sure,” her friend replied. “ ‘If you boil the water, you won’t get dysentery.’ ”
Now if that doesn’t make you want to worship, what does?
Being emotionally affected by music and actually worshiping God aren’t the same thing, and no one should know this better than worship leaders. All by itself, music—even instrumental music—can make us cry, motivate us to cheer for our team, provoke us to protest, or fill us with joy.
It’s part of the way God designed music to work in his creation. Now if we could only figure out how it works in worship.
What about new songs?
When it comes to innovations, remember that Scripture doesn’t mandate that we push the envelope, artistically speaking, on Sunday mornings. Artists will always be searching for new and fresh ways to express their gifts, but congregations must be able to hear the message without being distracted by the medium. When we meet to worship God, we’re not aiming to glorify creativity but the Creator.
And as a practical matter, edifying the church means using songs that everyone can sing. What’s on my iPod isn’t always the best place to start when I’m picking songs for congregational worship. I need to think through the musical level of the people I’m leading. I generally look for songs with melodies between a low A to a high D that are easy to learn and hard to forget. I also try to avoid complicated rhythms.
The words to our songs should be as strong and memorable as the tunes we set them to or the arrangements we put behind them.
At times I’ve chosen not to do a well-known song because I thought the music was more impacting than the lyrics. The catchiness factor surpassed the weightiness factor. I’m tempted to list some of those songs here, but that’s really a decision you have to make yourself. When in doubt, leave it out.
Songs can say something in different ways. Objective lyrics tell us something true about God that helps us know him better. Most, but not all, hymns from the eighteenth century tend to focus on objective truths.
Subjective lyrics express responses to God such as love, longing, conviction, or adoration. Don’t assume that a song that uses a lot of first-person pronouns is man-centered. Psalm 86 uses the personal pronouns “I,” “me,” and “my” thirty-one times in seventeen verses. But you’re never left wondering who the focus is. God delights in strong emotions that are a response to revealed realities.
Reflective lyrics describe what we’re doing as we worship God. We bring our offering, we praise, we sing, we lift up our hands.
These three categories aren’t hard-and-fast divisions, and many songs contain all three perspectives. All three can contribute to strong lyrics. But when we don’t major on objective truth, our songs can quickly drift into emotionalism and self-absorption. We start to worship our own experiences.
Again, that doesn’t mean all our songs need to be theological treatises. But if our primary criteria for using a song has to do with whether it’s popular or enjoyable to sing, we’re going to have a hard time persuading anyone that truth matters more than music.