An Important Dialogue About Worship Music

This has been floating around in many of the online circles I run in.  It's a very, very good dialogue between three guys who I admire for thinking theologically and pastorally about worship--Kevin Twit, Mike Cosper, and Isaac Wardell.

Here are some of my takeaways:

• On the topic of songs and "singability" of modern musical idioms:
  • It is often said that a lot of "contemporary" music is unsingable...too many flourishes, too many pop-vocal-isms.  People say that about U2's music--too high, too irregular.  And yet, for many reasons, you attend a U2 concert and you find thousands of people joining in songs, where many people who would normally say "I'm not a singer" or "I can't sing" find themselves singing away. There is something profound about this observation.

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Worship and the Physical Body: The Earthen Vessels Symposium - Part 1

I have the privilege of contributing to a blog symposium, along with several other authors and bloggers, on Matt Anderson’s terrific book, Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith.¹  Matt is a fellow Biola-grad, lover of Christ’s Church, and blogaholic over at Mere Orthodoxy and Evangel.  Even as I interact with the book, be sure to check Mere-O in a few days from this post to see Matt’s interaction with me.

The final chapter of the book, “The Body and the Church,” instead of focusing on ecclesiology (the study of the church), in general, zeroes in on doxology (the study of worship) in particular.  To structure the dialogue, let me first attempt to summarize the chapter in a thesis statement, along with his subsequent supporting arguments.  Anderson’s chief point is that the physical body matters to corporate worship.

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An Art Project Worth Supporting - Bifrost Arts

When I heard the first Bifrost Arts album, Come, O Spirit, a few years ago, I was excited to hear the wedding of the emerging Seattle-esque, pop-orchestral song style (perhaps made most famous by one of the album's producers, Sufjan Stevens) with historic Christian hymnody and liturgical service music.  It is a truly unique venture.

When I heard Bifrost's commander in chief, Isaac Wardell, share from his mind and heart at the Bifrost Arts conference earlier this year, I came away with an even deeper respect and appreciation for the (quite robust) vision of Bifrost Arts, of which music-making is only a part.  Bifrost's leader thinks theologically and biblically about worship, and God has given him a platform to reach and influence scores of young evangelical worship leaders who need to hear what he has to say.  

When you support Bifrost Arts by contributing to the seed money for their third album, it should be obvious that you're supporting more than a sweet, artsy album.

Please consider supporting this vision by contributing to the Bifrost kickstarter project.  

GO HERE.

If you haven't heard Bifrost's material, here's a free sampler to get you started!

Why Architecture Matters: Our Quest to Unify Organ and Drums for the Sake of the Gospel

Philosopher and liturgical theologian, Nicholas Wolterstorff, recently reminded listeners at the “Liturgy, Music, and Space” Conference hosted by Bifrost Arts this past spring that the architecture around and in your worship space makes theological statements whether you like it or not.  For instance, a tall, raised platform at the front the sanctuary with the Communion table positioned in the very back can make the theological statement that the Lord’s Table is so holy that its access must be limited and guarded.  Or, think of a worship space in which the seating is arranged in a circle or semicircle around the leaders in worship in the middle.  This can make a statement about the unity of the people of God in worship and the tearing down of sharp divisions between the congregation and the worship leaders.  Or, think about the warehouse with a huge stage and lighting structure.  It says, “we’re here to perform for you…sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.”  Architecture tells the story of your theology of and priorities in worship.  I want to share with you how we’ve chosen to let some recent changes to our sanctuary’s architecture inform our theology of worship. 

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Experience: Analyzing a Supreme Value of Modern Worship

Any time you want to go deep quickly, I’ve found this question to be one of the most helpful of analytical grids: “What are the values which shape our practice?”  This single question is applicable in so many sectors of human life, and it is penetrating in its findings.

I am a lover of and believer in modern worship.  When the contemporary worship movement began in the 60s, and when it blossomed into what many now call modern worship in the 90s, I believe that the Holy Spirit was behind this fresh wind.  I believe that God was stirring things up in American/Western worship to awaken us to deficiencies, lopsidedness, and overly hardened practices.

However, every human movement is flawed because it is human, and many times these flaws can be traced back to underlying values, either imported from without or manufactured from within, which have unwittingly seized preeminence in the minds and hearts of people.

Tim Keller is often heard saying something to the effect of, “Idolatry can happen when you take a good thing and make it an ultimate thing.”  A cousin of this idea is that problems can arise in one practice when one elevates a value to an inappropriate height.  Modern worship has elevated the value of the “experience with / encounter with God” to a very high place.  In fact, it is so high that one can quite easily observe this value in everything from the top CCLI songs of the last twenty years to the pressure a lonely worship leader feels in his or her office on a Monday as he or she looks to the following Sunday.  Lester Ruth, in a penetrating chapter analyzing top modern worship songs for their Trinitarian content, makes this statement as a side note to the summary of his findings:

If explicit witness to the Trinity is not the high priority [in these contemporary worship songs], then what is? The songs demonstrate a common concern: the priority of a shared affective experience in the worship of God.¹

Put another way, Ruth is saying that, upon observation of these songs, a major value of contemporary/modern worship is having an experience of God which is tangible and moving.  Do I really need to elaborate on this value?  Isn’t it clear from the way we structure our services (to drive someone toward an affective experience of God)?  Isn’t it clear from the questions we often ask in evaluating whether a service was “successful” (e.g. Were people really “into it,” evidenced by their posture, body language, or facial expression?)?  Isn’t it clear from the language of our worship songs (e.g. “rain down,” “come down,” “we are waiting on you,” etc.)?

Now, is valuing a “shared affective experience of God” wrong?  Absolutely not!  We are whole beings encountering a real, personal God.  We should expect to have a shared experience which moves us—mind, body, will, emotions.  But the question for modern worship remains: Has this value moved to an improperly high status on the hierarchy of priorities?  I believe so.

Symptoms that the status is too high include:

• disappointment a worship leader feels after a service when the people sang with stoic faces and unmoved bodies
• conclusion by congregants that a worship service was “bad” if they did not have an affective experience
• language in our worship songs that betray we are seeking an experience of God rather than seeking God Himself
• pressure a worship leader feels to plan a song-set or liturgy which flows to some climax or peak intended to create that moment of supreme affect

We lovers of modern worship can embrace a helpful corrective: worship is just as much act as it is experience.  A while ago, I posted a more lengthy explanation of what this means, but suffice it to say here that worship, because it not only involves affections but actions, can be meaningful even if the actions lack affect.  Like many others, I use the language of “I truly worshiped” when I am speaking of affective experiences of God in the worship context.  But we mustn’t let such language fool us that action without affect is not true worship.  Perhaps it is not the richest or most holistic form possible, but act-worship is not void of all power and consequence. 

At the Bifrost Arts conference a few weeks ago, Pastor Greg Thompson reminded us that our worship is habit-forming, even if we don’t realize it.  This means that worship-as-act is not inconsequential.  Think about routine exercise.  Those committed to it don’t necessarily demand an affective, euphoric experience every time while working out.  But exercise, nevertheless, forms a habit of health and muscle-use.  Think of worship as “spiritual exercise.”  You certainly hope and wish for the type of exercise-experience which is deeply emotionally satisfying, but when it is not, you haven’t not exercised.  Yet, how many times have we thought we “haven’t worshiped” when we haven’t had an affective experience?

So perhaps what we are learning is not that desiring an affective experience with God is bad, but that desiring it to the level we do is placing it on the wrong level in our value hierarchy.  There are manifold, unintended consequences of misplaced values, but exploring this would open another discussion for another day.

¹Lester Ruth, “How Great is Our God: The Trinity in Contemporary Christian Worship Music,” in The Message in the Music, ed. Robert Woods and Brian Walrath (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 37.

The Latest Developments in Thoughtful Worship

This blog is dedicated to discussions surrounding worship, church, theology, and culture.  A subtext of that agenda is to encourage Christian (and particularly evangelical) worship along its trajectory toward more thoughtfulness, biblical reflection, theological awareness, and historicity.  A sub-subtext of that subtext is to encourage this growing movement of folks dedicated to the setting of old hymns to new music.  I do this not because hymns are the be-all and end-all of the deficiencies of modern worship, but because this one practice embodies so many of the subtext's aforementioned values.  Many hymns are thoughtful.  Many hymns are soaked in scripture.  Many hymns are written from a fiery theological heart.  And all hymns except current-day ones force the Church to reckon with the fact that she is a body rooted in history--a history of God's past worth celebrating. 

So, people might get tired of me barking about this very specific thing called the "hymns movement," but they must remember that this movement is a herald of the shifts taking place with these bigger, more fundamental issues in American/Western Christian worship today.

I am therefore excited to share a brief "status update" of the movement.  More rumblings, more exposure, more buy-in.  The hymns movement continues to affect and infect the Church with greater potency and wider distribution.  Four things stand out.

Less than 48 hours ago, the 2011 Gospel Coalition Conference kicked off with none other than a hymn sing, gathering together and exposing before a new generation of eager, cross-denominational, Gospel-loving evangelicals some of the heavy-hitters in the hymns movement: Kevin Twit and Indelible Grace (Sandra McCracken, Matthew Smith); Mike Cosper and Sojourn Music.  As Cardiphonia likewise reported, Noisetrade is giving away a free sampler of these artists.  One more indicator that the next generation of pastors and church leaders care about deep, substantive worship, exemplified in hymnody.

Seven days ago, High Street Hymns released their third major hymns album, Hearts and Voices, centered on hymns for Lent, Holy Week, and Easter.  It is available at a very affordable price on bandcamp.

In less than two weeks, Sojourn Music will release another album, The Water and the Blood, a second installment of an ongoing project to reshape the hymn texts of Isaac Watts for new ears.  As will be explained in my upcoming review, Sojourn continues to push out the narrow musical boundaries of contemporary/modern worship, forging ahead while reaching back hundreds of years into the vault of Christian hymnody.

In five days, an album will be released which features a bunch of well-known mainstream modern worship leaders headlining re-tuned hymn-texts of Charles Wesley.  It is called Love Divine.  I have already spoken about what a significant mile-marker this is, notwithstanding the fact that it will probably go unnoticed (though I hope not).

A little over two weeks ago, a unique conference took place in St. Louis.  Hymns movement leader Bifrost Arts hosted a gathering on "Liturgy, Music, and Space."  The average age was interestingly young, given that the topics discussed at the conference were ideas that contemporary worship used to say that only "older people" cared about: liturgy, history, aesthetics, theology, inter-generationalism, etc.

Folks, there's no organizing force behind the coincidence of these things...at least no human one.  This can be characterized as nothing short of a movement of the Spirit through renewal of the worship of God.  All this is very significant.

My Bifrostian Journey: Video Blog and Reflections

I decided to try my hand at video-blogging.  I hope that for those of you who weren't able to attend, you're able to see and hear more clearly the sights and sounds of what made this conference special.   

Cardiphonia has put together a great run-through of the entire conference.  Check it out.  And here are some of my random takeaways.

The Best Thing About the Conference: Love Challenges Hipsterdom
I'll be honest.  Bifrost Arts is just hip.  Sufjan is VERY in right now, and Bifrost Arts--a railcar on his musical train--has a musical style that makes one feel quite "cool" when listening to it.  One would have expected that this conference would attract hipsters.  And it did.  Fitted jeans, black-rimmed glasses, and beards were plentiful.  Anticipating all of this, my expectation was that the conference leaders were going to give off a "We're cool, aren't we?" vibe (which shows how little I often think of people, by the way...Lord, have mercy).  I expected pot shots at non-liturgical worship or subtle jabs that Bifrostian pop-orchestral styles were the ideal form for worship.  Isaac Wardell, the figurehead of the event, dispelled all such nonsense quite immediately.  I was impressed and even admonished by the humility and love-focus of leaders like Wardell.  The message was loud and clear: when the church is truly being the church under Christ, the gospel shapes local communities to be marked by love, self-sacrifice, and deference.  Perhaps my greatest takeaway from the conference, then, is a vision for church-wide worship discussions which can be formative rather than adversarial.  Worship is not about being cool, and I think everyone benefitted, in one way or another, from that meta-message.

In the Presence of Greatness
My video only gave a snapshot of the rich connection I had at this conference.  Over the last few years, as my blog has grown in reach, I've come into contact with some amazing people who I would consider "greats" in my field of pastoring in worship, music, and arts.  Some have been more professional-style online acquaintances.  Some have developed into full-blown friendships of resource-sharing and mutual prayer and support.  Many have been in between.  One of the blessings of the Bifrost Conference is that it attracted many of those people to one city for a few days, and I got to meet many of them, all at once.  Relationships beat out sleep this time.  I was blessed to finally put names with faces, and "online personas" with true hearts.  I was encouraged that there are a lot of great worship leaders out in Evangelcaland, thinking critically, prayerfully, theologically, biblically, liturgically, and culturally about local church worship.  I was blessed to rub shoulders with some truly gifted songwriters, like Bruce Benedict, Matt Stevens, Alex Mejias, Michael Van Patter, David M. Bailey, Rick Jensen, and Nathan Partain.  These are folks doing the painstaking but heart-driven work of setting old hymns to new music, and in some cases writing new texts and tunes for the church.  I don't know that any one of us will have breakout exposure, but meeting this iron-clad batallion gives me great hope that the collective work will continue to have an increasing influence on mainstream evangelicalism.  There's just too much excitement, too much vision, too much passion, for it to not take effect.

The Shape Note Surprise
I was shocked by how much I personally enjoyed Matt Hinton's breakout session on shape-note singing.  Perhaps the earliest uniquely American musical tradition, shape-note singing developed as a style of music education in the South and solidified into a movement.  The sound is atypical of Western music in that it breaks standard conventions for part-writing (e.g. parallel fifths).  I was taken aback by the joy and vigor of this communal enterprise.  My mother grew up in rural Alabama under the influence of this tradition, and though I am far from a southerner (I grew up in Hawaii), something in my soul stirred.  I think my roots were tickled.

Notes from the Conference
Some of my notes are more piecemeal than others, but if they're helpful, I offer them here.  I obviously missed some (great) sessions, either to decompress or to spend time with other attenders.

Greg Thompson - The Order of Worship and the Order of Love
Isaac Wardell - Formative Practices for Worship
Mike Farley - The Formative Role of the Body in Worship
Nicholas Wolterstorff - Does Your Church Building Say What it Should Say?
Isaac Wardell - Teaching Liturgy, Music, & Space in Your Congregation
Matt Hinton - Shape Note Singing
Kevin Twit - Hymns

Bifrost Arts Conference: Liturgy, Music, & Space - Nicholas Wolterstorff on Why Church Architecture Matters

CHECK OUT MY VIDEO BLOG OF THE WHOLE CONFERENCE

Go to Bifrost Arts Conference Video Blog

INFO

Plenary Session: "Does Your Church Building Say What it Should Say?"

Nicholas Wolterstorff was the Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University, and taught at Yale from 1989 until he retired in June 2002. Previously, he taught at Calvin College, the Free University of Amsterdam, and the University of Notre Dame and was visiting professor at several institutions. After concentrating on metaphysics at the beginning of his career (On Universals), he spent many years working primarily on aesthetics and art philosophy (Works and Worlds of Art, Art in Action).

SYNOPSIS

Too often we think of church buildings purely in functional terms.  However, the human being's natural propensity toward evaluating "fittingness" (how fitting something is for its purpose) and processing with "synesthesia" (other senses being triggered and affected by input from another sense) necessitates that we understand ecclesiastical architecture in theological and affective terms.  In other words, architecture matters because it both speaks of our theology of worship and shapes us as worshipers.  A brief journey through church history illustrates this (Wolterstorff walks through various eras, discussing how architecture reflected varying degrees of passivity and active participation of the laity in corporate worship).  Wolterstorff encourages a balanced perspective when thinking about and planning our worship spaces (i.e. vertical/transcendent/majestic dimensions, coupled with horizontal/familial dimensions) and offers practical illustrations of what that looks like.

OUTLINE

Here's a PDF of my outline from this session.