"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.
