"Our church won't do any songs over a year old..."
Then write better songs. If you're sick of it after a year, it was never good enough.
A tweet from worship leader Aaron Keyes, 20 September, 2013
Part 1—What If There Were Less New Worship Songs?
Every time I go to select the music my church will sing during worship there is one simple question lurking behind every decision:
I wonder if people will still be singing this song in a hundred years?
And so Jesus, in answering the question "Who is the greatest?", said to his disciples "If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all," and then another time, referring to those who are worthy of following him, he said "Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." (Mark 9:35 and Matthew 10:39)
Christians have come to see the above contradictory statements as true not merely because their Lord said it to them, but because within the perplexing contradictions there is indeed great truth. This perplexity is the beauty and mystery of paradox, of two contradictory ideas coming together to form a greater truth, to reveal greater mystery. Some paradoxes consist merely of frustrating mind games which lead nowhere, but paradoxes of any worth lead us to greater heights, despite any initial confusion they may cause. So in the case of Jesus' latter paradox above, the only way to find our true life while on earth is to lose our lives entirely, only to be found in Christ. Thus, in giving up everything, we gain true life.
This is the aim of my series Worship in Full Spectrum: to find truths within the paradoxes of the Church's worship and its worship music. Or perhaps my aim is to create paradoxes about worship and worship music in order to lead us to a greater understanding of it. My belief is we will arrive at the greatest truths by simultaneously embracing concepts that seem to contradict each other, that in order to be what we want to be we will have to become its (seeming) opposite.
I am the worship and music pastor of a small church community in Peoria, Illinois. I have been planting this church with another pastor going on 5 years now and thus I am a bi-vocational pastor, taking in very little income from my ministry job.
Every week when I go to select the music we are going to sing at my church the next Sunday a number of immediate tensions rise up within me. Tensions in the form of questions so high in number that if I let them they would absolutely paralyze my ability to pick the music at all. For example:
To some people who read this blog it may seem like I do not like worship leader and church music
songwriter Matt Redman. Well, I wanted to do something to make it clear exactly where I stand regarding his work.
I happy to announce an article of mine, "Confession: I am an Irrelevant Worship Pastor" just went up on Worship Leader Magazine's website. I literally sent the article off a week ago, not knowing it would be published at all, and there it is up there now on the website.
The article is a very condensed version of an article that I will put up on this blog sometime in the future. It is the first part of a series I am calling "Worship in Full Spectrum", which is my take on worship leading and worship music.
Here's a brief excerpt:
I have actually chosen to walk away from the pressure to either be on the cutting edge of worship music or to know every worship song both past and present. Instead, I have made peace with slowly becoming an irrelevant worship pastor. I am fine with being out-o f-touch, out-of-date, behind the times, and ir-relevant when it comes to my song selection and my “style” as a music leader. I am not concerned with making my worship band sound like U2 or even Mumford and Sons, and I am not focused on trying to look the part of a stylish worship pastor. Instead, my time and energy is focused on the simple task of getting the people in my community to sing and to sing to God; to turn their song into prayer and the outcry of their heart into melody. This is and should be THE focus, the primary task of a church music leader.
Update: Worship Leader Magazine took down my article after a year or so, so here is a link to the larger version of the article on my blog:
And for posterity's sake (and the upholding of my reputation) here is a screen shot proving the article was at one time on Worship Leader's website:
