Contemporary…Traditional…Blended…Old…New…Their music…Our music…
I’ve never been a fan of all the labels we’ve managed to place on music in the church. In doing so, churches have often ended up isolating each other – dividing their people and distracting them from focusing on the goal to join God in His mission to restore a lost world to Himself.
There is no doubt that music can move us, and that we each have significant differences in what we personally enjoy listening to – differences in what moves us. And as a worship leader, trying to keep those differences in mind as you plan can quickly send you to the loony bin. Why? Because there is absolutely no way to satisfy everybody on any given Sunday, in any given worship service. It can’t be done. It doesn’t matter whether you are a contemporary church using only contemporary music, a traditional church using only traditional hymns, or a blended church using a mixture of both, personal preferences will always influence what someone likes and how they are moved. Trust me, there will always be someone (EVERY WEEK) who thinks the music was awful, and someone (EVERY WEEK) who absolutely loved the music (and they were likely sitting right next to each other).
And so for me, as I sit down to plan a worship service, my goal (first and foremost) is to seek God’s face in revealing exactly what songs should be used (no matter what the “style”). Each week, I MUST push personal preferences (my own included) to the bottom of my worship-planning agenda. I’ve been entrusted with a great privilege of helping God’s people engage in worship through music, and it is only through the Spirit’s leading of me in the planning and of His people in the service, that true, God-glorifying worship can take place. Anything else, and anything less, is just a self-glorifying jam session.
That being said, I do think we, as worship leaders, do God (and our people) an injustice when we isolate our planning to include ONLY one style of music. Not that there won’t be weeks where only one style is present, but that should be the exception, not the norm.
Those who use ONLY hymns, cheat themselves of engaging with a God who is still speaking to men & women today, just as He spoke to Charles Wesley, Fanny Crosby, King David, and so many more, so many years ago. On the other end, those who choose to limit themselves to ONLY contemporary songs (or even ONLY contemporary arrangements of hymns) cheat themselves from the opportunity of joining the “great cloud of witnesses” who have gone before us – men & women who share with us the same truths about the same unchanging-God. The message through music that God has given us today is a continuation of, not a replacement for, the same message He has been communicating through songs for centuries. When we allow ourselves to include the full range of God-glorifying music (traditional, contemporary, or whatever you may call it), I truly believe that we will experience worship as it was meant to be.
The video below (the impetus for my blog today) contains interviews with Stuart Townend, Vicky Beeching, Tim Neufeld (Starfield) and Noel Richards (some of today’s contemporary song writers) regarding the use of hymns in contemporary worship.
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