Hip or Holy? Can We Be Cool and Christian?

Marty Sampson, former songwriter for Hillsong

COOL OR CHRISTIAN (excerpt from God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To)

Co-opting the entertainment ethos as many churches have done, has brought some large hipster churches to the attention of the mainstream media. And they’re not all critical.

“The music! The lights! The crowds!” gushed a reporter on a CNN segment after a visit to an 8,000-member hipster church in NYC. “It looks like a rock concert. And the lines around the block are enough to make any nightclub envious.”

Sophisticated, men’s high-end fashion and lifestyle magazine GQ embedded a reporter, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, in a Hillsong worship service “to find out if Christianity can really be this cool and still be Christian.” Studying the 8,000 attendees entering the worship center, including Justin Bieber, Akner gave her first impression: “It’s where the cool kids spend Sunday morning after Saturday night at the club.”  

The GQ journalist continued, “the singing is hot-breathed and sexy-close into microphones.” But she wrote, “It made my body feel confused.” After listening to the singing for a while (there’s more music on the stage than anything else going on in most cool churches), Akner’s assessment was that the songs had “melodies that all resemble one another, pleasingly, like spa music.” She admitted to being drawn into the ethos, at least to some extent, by songs that “call to mind deeply sincere love songs.”

Though not falling on her knees in repentance, by any stretch, Akner’s over-all assessment was tentatively positive. She even confessed to wanting to raise her hands the morning after her visit to Hillsong. But not everybody who comes agrees, and not everybody stays.

“Hillsong has done for Christian music,” wrote feminist writer Tanya Levin, former Hillsong Church member now atheist, “what the Dixie Chicks did for country and western: made it blond, sexy, and mainstream.”

Put another way, they made it seem cool.

CLEVER DEVIL

Does anyone actually think that if God came down, he would dress that way, talk that way, sing that way? Would God sing “hot-breathed and sexy-close into microphones”? Would God our Maker “who gives songs in the night” (Job 35:20) sing those songs in anything that could remotely be labeled “sexy and mainstream”? None of this is God’s way. It seems blasphemous even to consider it.

Would God inflect the way some cool pastors inflect? You’ve heard it, the perpetual up lilt, as if every statement is a question; it sounds so breezy and urbane, as if to say that you alone have come to pose the questions no one else is asking. What’s more, by your seeming spontaneity that showcases your cleverness and wit, you let others know that the answers come easily for you.

God, for whom alone answers do come easily, doesn’t talk that way. His voice does not sound that way, he does not sing that way. It’s as if we think he ought to, but there is zero biblical evidence that God, who is “a consuming fire,” takes a casual, cool, hipster approach to anything. Nor should we.

“Preacher, give up trying to be cool,” wrote Southern Seminary President Al Mohler. “Cool changes so quickly… Do what cool can’t do. Bathe your heart and mind in the ancient Scriptures. Devote yourself to proclaiming the eternal truth of God.”

A heart bathed in God’s holy Word produces one thing. A heart bathed in pop entertainment and celebrity culture produces quite another. One cannot have it both ways. 

Even agnostics Strunk and White, in their classic book on writing, understood that an affected and artificial tone of voice and manner of communicating was indicative of pride: “Do not affect a breezy manner. The breezy style is often the work of the egocentric.” They strongly suggest avoiding “uninhibited prose” that “creates high spirits.” 

The “breezy manner” sounds suspiciously like the hipster cool voice in the pulpit on the stage. These egocentric pretentions place the author, the pastor, or the music leader at the center. This comes so naturally to the entertainment ethos because that’s how it all works. The performer on the stage is there to perform, and the fawning crowd are there to be amused, to take for themselves, to be entertained. It’s how it works, regardless of the words. Remember, most of us don’t listen to the words.

The focus of breezy entertainment is me-centered. The focus of worship is God-centered, and there is no place for breezy when entering the presence of the living and holy God.

There were versions of entertainment evangelism long before anyone used the term hipster (a term that may outlive its cool status soon enough). Even in Charles Spurgeon’s day. “The Devil has seldom done a cleverer thing,” he wrote, “than hinting to the Church that part of their mission is to provide entertainment for the people, with a view to winning them.”

A DANGEROUS PLACE

However in step with the popular culture entertainment worship may be, it is profoundly out of step with the Bible. Like his Father, Jesus was not cool. The Son of God was so radically out of step with the culture around him that viscous critics tore off his robes, flogged him until his naked back was raw and bloody, and then they nailed him to a cross, suspended him in mockery and shame, and crucified him, the world looking on, deriding and making sport of him. No, Jesus was not cool. The world hated him.

Holding the hipster approach to worship and singing up next to the persecuted church further unmasks the fallacy of cool. It is not cool to be a Christian in Nigeria today, or China—the list is long. Imagine the bewilderment of any of our brethren in the persecuted church as they try to get their minds around the notion that it’s cool to be a Christian, at least cool if you identify with our brand. They would likely think that it was something else altogether, not the Christianity they experience. It would seem ten million miles from the cost of following Christ in their bloody world.

“Consumer-based, me-centered, music-driven, reductionistic, therapeutic, and theologically vacuous Christianity,” wrote Gospel Reformation Network Executive Coordinator Jon D. Payne, “is ten million miles from the real thing. It mirrors the world more than Scripture.”

There’s little argument that no single entity has more shaped music-driven, entertainment worship in recent decades than Australian mega-church Hillsong.  In a period of just eighteen months, there were 760,000,000 downloads of Hillsong songs, creating vast sums of money for the writers of those songs. Amidst a wave of apostasy among high-profile church leaders, one of Hillsong’s songwriters, Marty Sampson, joined in the trend. “I’m genuinely losing my faith … and it doesn’t bother me.”

It ought to bother the Church, however, when a key contributor to the lyrical content of what millions of professing Christians sing in worship says of the gospel, “it’s not for me. I am not in anymore.”

Dr. Payne helps us connect the dots. “It’s no wonder, then, why so many celebrity pastors and leaders are abandoning the faith for the idols and approval of our culture. It’s the culture, not objective truth, that has been chiefly shaping their thinking all along.” Pew Research Center findings concur, but it’s not just celebrity leaders abandoning the faith. In our rapidly secularizing society, there’s a spiraling decline of people willing to identify themselves as Christians. Especially young people. Which is odd considering the rationale justifying the use of the entertainment ethos is evangelism and church growth. If it's working, statistics ought to be showing an increase in young people identifying as Christians... 

Douglas Bond is author of Grace Works! (And Ways We Think It Doesn't) and twenty-seven other books of historical fiction, biography, devotion, and practical theology. He is lyricist for New Reformation Hymns, directs the Oxford Creative Writing Master Class, speaks at churches and conferences, and leads Church history tours in Europe. His book God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To), from which this post is an excerpt, is available at bondbooks.net/shop; order today and receive a free Rise and Worship cd.

Horror and Heroism at Pearl Harbor

John Hemminger with his P-47, Edna Mae

“Tora! Tora! Tora!” Elated in the cockpit of his Nakajima B5N carrier-based torpedo bomber, Capt. Mitsuo Fuchida shouted into his headset, “Charge! Torpedo attack!” the code indicating that, as planned, in defiance of international law, the Japanese attack caught the American Navy by complete surprise.

It was December 7, 1941, 7:55 am Hawaii time. Japanese torpedo planes, high-altitude bombers, dive bombers, and fighters—180 Japanese aircraft in the first wave alone—followed Capt. Fuchida, unleashing 1000s of tons of explosive ordinance on the unsuspecting U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. America’s isolationism was over.

For two chaotic and bloody hours, American forces fought valiantly. What could have been a total loss, was diverted by the heroism of men like Cook Third Class Dorie Miller. Below decks doing the ship’s laundry when the attack commenced, Miller ran onto the strafed decks of the USS West Virginia. After rendering aid to his wounded and dying comrades, including ship’s commander, Capt. Mervyn Bennion, Miller manned a 50-caliber antiaircraft machine gun, a weapon on which he had no training. Of the twenty-eight Japanese planes shot down, Miller may have hit as many as six enemy dive bombers before he ran out of ammunition and was ordered to abandon ship.

Though none of our aircraft carriers were at rest in Pearl Harbor that morning, American losses were massive. Eight of the nine U.S. Pacific Fleet battleships were either sunk or badly damaged. Eleven other Navy ships were lost, and 188 US planes were destroyed. The loss in human life was greater still. Along with sixty-eight civilians, 2,335 American servicemen died that fateful morning. Many others were badly wounded. The toll would have been unimaginably cataclysmic had it not been for men like Dorie Miller, the first black serviceman to earn the Navy Cross. In 1943, his ship came under heavy torpedo bombardment and sank in the Gilbert Islands. Along with many others, Miller was killed.

“A day that will live in infamy,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said of the attack on Pearl Harbor as he declared war on Japan, and the United States of America entered WWII.

Fight to the death

            We all need heroes. We were wired for celebrating heroic deeds and looking up to people like Dorie Miller. One of my heroes growing up was P-47 World War II fighter pilot, John Hemminger. He lived with his wife and three children on American Lake, a five-minute bicycle ride from my childhood home. I was the neighbor kid who always hung around in the summer, fishing, swimming, and doing wood-working projects in the basement. Along with the stray dogs that attached themselves to kind-hearted Mr. Hemminger, I too adopted the Hemminger family as my own.

John Hemminger was a man of deeds and not words, and so I rarely heard him speak about the war, and never about his role in it. I was forced to piece things together from pictures, his kill record document, and from stories others told about his role in that great conflict.

“The greatest catastrophe in history,” Stephen Ambrose called World War II and “the most costly war of all time.” In April, 1945, 300,000 Americans attacked the Japanese island of Okinawa, while the U.S. Navy was pounded by 350 kamikaze planes. We lost thirty-six ships. In human life, the casualties were beyond staggering: 49,200 men in one battle. The Japanese lost 112,129 human lives at Okinawa. Still they fought on.

Germany surrendered in May, but by summer, it appeared that Japan would fight on until there was not a Japanese soldier who remained alive. A full-scale Allied invasion of Japan seemed the only option, but it was an invasion that would have cost 1,000,000 American soldiers their lives. President Truman opted to drop two atomic bombs on Japan in hopes of breaking the enemy’s will to fight to extermination. It was as if the entire nation had become kamikaze flyers.

           

Fighter pilot greatness

In 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America joined the war, and can-do men like John Hemminger were desperately needed to fight. He said goodbye to his childhood sweetheart, Edna Mae Firch, and joined up.

The picture I will always have in my mind of him is of a quiet young man in a leather bomber jacket, a shy, boyish grin stretching across his handsome features, posing with his beloved P-47, affectionately dubbed Edna Mae. Though called on to do highly dangerous and daring feats, there was no hint of the cocky, swaggering dog fighter in his looks or carriage.

John Hemminger loved machines. I can only begin to imagine his fascination at first sight of his P-47’s Pratt and Whitney, eighteen cylinder, 2,800 horsepower engine, or the heart-pounding thrill when he first accelerated into the heavens at his plane’s maximum speed of 433 mph.

He was a gentle, peace-loving man, so I particularly wonder what his first thoughts were when he laid eyes on the eight 12.7mm Browning machine guns bristling from the wings of his P-47, a machine engineered for killing. One thing I’m sure of: there was no better cared for fighter plane than his, and likely none more skillfully used for its designed purpose.

John Hemminger was credited with the last P-47 kill of the war. By some accounts, he and the Japanese pilot were slugging it out somewhere over the blue waters of the Pacific, September 2, 1945, while American top brass accepted the Japanese unconditional surrender on board the USS Missouri. The facts are unclear, because John Hemminger rarely spoke about the war, and boasting was something he never did.

What is clear is that John Hemminger, along with a generation of Americans, was a humble servant hero who did his duty, and then, unlike many with whom he fought, he returned home. Bidding farewell to his P-47 Edna Mae, he married his beloved Edna Mae, raised his family, and lived a long, seemingly insignificant, life. John Hemminger and his dear wife were not bombastic about their faith in Christ, but few people have more consistently lived out the Lord’s injunction to love their neighbor as themselves. Consequently, their home was a quiet, contented one, filled with stability and service.

In the world’s eyes, after the war John Hemminger lived an ordinary life, some might have called it boring. But not so to the dozens of missionaries he supported and took fishing when they were home, and whose decrepit cars he repaired, rebuilt, or replaced, often at his own expense. And all done hush-hush, so no one would give him credit for his latest acts of generosity.

True greatness

Jesus told his disciples, if they wanted to be great, to become servants. He didn’t say to become great baseball players, or inventors, or CEOs, or powerful politicians, or celebrity pastors, or best-selling authors—or even fighter pilots. “Whoever wants to become great,” Jesus said, “must be your servant” (Matthew 20:26). In my eyes, John and Edna Hemminger were great Christians, because they were great servants.

My hero John Hemminger died of Parkinson’s Disease, December 27, 2006. His wife Edna Mae suffered for decades with Multiple Sclerosis before her home going. But I never heard either of them complain. They bore their trials with patience—even with smiles. Nor did I ever hear either of them speak critical words about others. I think they were simply too busy, in Christ’s name, loving and serving their neighbors. This is true greatness.

“Remember Pearl Harbor!” became the battle cry of the American troops fighting in all theaters. There would have been no D-Day and Normandy Beach landings without Pearl Harbor. Nobody should want a war, but one thing that WWII teaches us is that out of the furnace of warfare emerges the Dorie Millers and the John Hemmingers, and the host of other nameless soldiers and sailors who did what they had to do to serve and love their neighbors, those next to them serving and giving their lives for others in their squad, platoon, company, battalion, regiment, brigade, division, corps, and army.  

Douglas Bond is author of twenty-eight books, including The Resistance set in enemy occupied Normandy, and two-time Grace Award book finalist; he directs the Oxford Creative Writing Master Class, is an award-winning teacher, podcaster, speaker at conferences, and leader of Church history tours in Europe. He is currently writing a historical fiction book set in WWII in the Pacific Theater. Learn more at bondbooks.net.

Lewis's Oxford and grave (he loved cats--especially lions!)

On this day, November 22, 1963, Aldous Huxley died in LA of an LSD overdose, JFK died in Dallas from an assassin's bullet to the head. And on the same day at The Kilns near Oxford, C. S. Lewis's devoted brother Warnie brought a cup of tea to his ailing younger brother. Moments later, Warnie heard a clattering fall. Lewis had tried to get out of bed but had collapsed. He died of kidney failure. "Men must endure their going hence," was the Shakespeare quotation from the calendar on the day Lewis's mother had died many years before when he was nine. Warnie had the words chiseled on his brother's grave marker in Holy Trinity churchyard in Headington Quarry where you can see them today.  Eclipsed by the high-profile deaths of the author of Brave New World and an American president, in the drenching November rain, only a handful of friends showed up for Lewis's funeral and burial. 

In a chapter of God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To), I explore a number of the things C. S. Lewis wrote about congregational singing and hymns, by no means all complimentary. Early in his Christian experience, he thought the things his unsophisticated neighbors tried to sing in church were "fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music." He revised that as he matured spiritually. I conclude that chapter with the following:

LEWIS SINGS NOW

In a thrilling moment in The Magician’s Nephew, Lewis gives us a peek into the irrepressible force of music, perhaps what he truly longed for in singing. He has Aslan utter

"...a long single note; not very loud, but full of power. Polly’s heart jumped in her body when she heard it.

She felt sure that it was a call, and that anyone who heard that call would want to obey it and (what’s

more) would be able to obey it, however many worlds and ages lay between."

We can be pretty certain Lewis and his brother would not be bolting from their pew at the end of the church service and heading for the exit sign during that kind of anthem.

Though Lewis may have been overly opinionated about congregational singing in worship, and wanted “fewer, better, and shorter hymns,” over time he did come to see “the great merit” of the voice of the congregation, untrained, but singing from the heart, voices joining together, making a joyful noise unto the Lord.

Three hundred years before Lewis’s time, another Oxford-trained poet, Thomas Ken, wrote of glorified saints singing in heaven:

And hymns with the supernal choir

Incessant sing and never tire.

We’re safe to assume that C. S. Lewis is doing it as we speak, singing more, the best, and longest hymns, incessant ones, right next to the man in elastic side boots who used to sing out of tune, but now who sings more like how God himself sings.

Douglas Bond is author of Grace Works! (And Ways We Think It Doesn't) and twenty-seven other books of historical fiction, biography, devotion, and practical theology. He is lyricist for New Reformation Hymns, directs the Oxford Creative Writing Master Class, speaks at churches and conferences, and leads Church history tours in Europe. His book God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To), from which this post is an excerpt, is available at bondbooks.net; order today and receive a free Rise and Worship cd.

Solitary Conceit: CS Lewis Sticking His Nose Up at Hymns

A

 generation ago, most mature Christians knew the power of singing psalms and psalm-like hymns in worship, in the home, and around the family table. Experienced Christians knew more of life and of the reality of death; they had knelt at the deathbed of loved ones and friends, and made the connection. A disciplined life of joyful singing was one of the very important ways we prepared ourselves for singing in the hour of death, blessing and encouraging the dying—and ourselves, the bereaved living.

"Solitary conceit," Lewis later called this dislike

Enter one of the great tragic problems for the new generation of Christians who have spent their lives singing happy-clappy songs, with little or nothing about death and dying in those songs, and singing them in a venue that requires the full array of entertainment instruments and soloists to lead us, a venue that is wholly inaccessible at the deathbed. There’ll be no band, no lead vocalist, nor will there be an organ at your loved one’s deathbed—or at yours.

Thoughtful Christians, ones who look down the road, will want to sing in the home and in their churches in ways that can be portable, can be carried on in the hospice bed. Christian, rediscover how to sing, before it’s too late.

The stories are legion of the elderly unable to remember anything and anyone, but able to sing hymns they had learned in their childhood. My father-in-law, suffering with Alzheimer’s, unable to remember his own wife and children, and unable to read the words in front him, sang Christmas carols with us a few short months before his death, all by memory—which he had of nothing else. Ten minutes before my father died, he sang Psalm 23 with us; I believe he was even harmonizing on the bass line, as he had taught me to do in corporate singing as a young man.

But it’s not just the elderly. There’s the 2014 account of eighteen-year-old Lexi Hansen who was pronounced brain dead and on life support after being struck by a car while riding her longboard. The doctors were grim; they said the unresponsive teen had a 5% likelihood of survival. Lexi’s mother gave the account of the family joining hands around her hospital bed, expecting her to die. Then, one of them began singing hymns. The rest of the family joined in. In moments, Lexi’s eyes opened, and she squeezed her family’s hands as they sang.

I remember seeing my aunt who had turned away from her Christian upbringing, now in her eighties, weeping as we stood around the piano singing hymns from her childhood, hymns whose content she no longer claimed to believe. Tears, nevertheless. 

In his Confessions, Augustine credits overhearing Christians singing with preparing his heart for the gospel. “How greatly did I weep in thy hymns and canticles, deeply moved by the voices of thy Church so sweetly singing.”

It would be impossible to overstate the role of corporate singing in the Reformation. John Calvin, cautious about music, nevertheless, knew its power over human hearts. “Music has a secret and almost incredible power to move hearts.” And Luther ranked music, and singing hymns together in worship, next only to the Word of God and theology.

SOLITARY CONCEIT

Though C. S. Lewis did not get everything right, one of the things that compels many of us back to his writing, is that in the things he did get right he wrote and spoke about those things better than just about anyone. But when it comes to singing in corporate worship, Lewis seems unable to break free of some of his early prejudices against corporate singing. Put bluntly, Lewis did not agree with Augustine, Calvin, and Luther about hymns and the power of singing them in worship, at least not initially.

Picture Lewis as a new convert in 1931, knotting his tie and walking from his home The Kilns to attend corporate worship at Holy Trinity parish church for the very first time as a true believer in Christ, in working-class Headington Quarry, only three miles from the exalted spires of his sophisticated life at the oldest university in England, but an intellectual and aesthetic cosmos apart from his life in blue-color Headington Quarry.

In his collection of essays, God in the Dock, Lewis describes his initial impression of his neighbors’ singing, their untrained voices, their unrefined musical tastes.

I disliked very much their hymns, which I

considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate

music. But as I went on, I saw the great merit of it. I

came up against different people of quite different

outlooks and different education, and then gradually

my conceit just began peeling off. I realized that the

hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were,

nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit

by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite

pew, and then you realize that you aren’t fit to clean

those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit.

It is not for me to lay down laws, as I am only a

layman, and I don’t know much.

Notice the development of his opinion about their singing, “the great merit of it.” Whatever his claims about not knowing much, Lewis had finely tuned, refined musical and literary tastes. Literature was his life’s work. He was one of the best-read scholars of his century, and much of that reading was poetry. Yet, he was operating under the cloud of postmodern changes in poetry, the Imagists of the early 20^th century, the fragments of vers libre poets, and the general revolt against conventional poetry, the kind Lewis appreciated, understood, and loved. This may have had an influence on his early rejection of their “fifth-rate hymns.” The literary elites of the 20^th century insisted that poetry with specific theological content was lesser poetry, perhaps not even worthy of being included as poetry. Lewis could not be entirely unaffected by his culture’s secular prejudice.

But observe Lewis’s change, his confession that it was his pride, his “solitary conceit” that led to his early dislike of corporate singing at Holy Trinity.

HYMN TO EVOLUTION

More of a spoof than a true hymn of praise to God, Lewis did set his pen to write a hymn, a tongue-in-cheek lyric to evolution.

Lead us, Evolution, lead us

Up the future’s endless stair;

Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.

For stagnation is despair:

Groping, guessing, yet progressing,

Lead us nobody knows where.

Having fun at evolution’s expense, Lewis continues his playfully derisive verse through several more stanzas. We can’t help applauding his mocking lyric. But Lewis, of course, would not rank this as a proper hymn to be sung in the praise of God in corporate worship.

CORRUPT TEXTS

Nevertheless, hymns and singing not infrequently appear in Lewis’s writing... [excerpt from God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To), available at bondbooks.net]

Douglas Bond is author of Grace Works! (And Ways We Think It Doesn't) and twenty-seven other books of historical fiction, biography, devotion, and practical theology. He is lyricist for New Reformation Hymns, directs the Oxford Creative Writing Master Class, speaks at churches and conferences, and leads Church history tours in Europe. His book God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To), from which this post is an excerpt, is available at bondbooks.net; order today and receive a free Rise and Worship cd.

Music as the Opiate of the Masses: Communicating the Eternal With the Transitory

"...addictive but transitory... numbing, anesthetic, escapist."

[excerpt from God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To)
...many worship songs... were first composed for a solo voice, usually the lead vocalist in a band. In the church service, the worship leader becomes the lead vocalist, usually attempting to make his voice sound like the pop entertainer’s voice who first popularized the new song. This can be difficult, even entirely inaccessible, for untrained voices of the congregation to imitate. Allow me to switch from popular to higher-culture singing to illustrate the point.

Imagine trying to sing like Luciano Pavarotti, the “king of the high C’s” as he was known. Imagine him leading worship. Imagine trying to follow his booming tenor. Though he was one of the greatest tenors of all time, and could do astounding things with his highly trained instrument, his voice, almost nobody in the congregation has the capability to follow his leading. We would be inclined not to sing. We would want to listen, not mess up his performance. What is more, we would be wholly embarrassed to attempt to sing like an opera singer. Our neighbors would think we were putting on an affected manner of singing. They would be correct. Whether we appreciate opera or not, even those of us who do, do not think it would be appropriate to try to make our congregational singing sound like Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites.

But that brings up the question: Why is it that we have wholly embraced the popular entertainer’s voice and ethos but not an opera singer’s ethos? Why would it be inappropriate and unworkable to pattern our corporate worship singing after the music in Handel’s Messiah, or Mendelsohn’s Elijah?

Though pop entertainers are aiming at an entirely different vocal objective, it is, nevertheless, one that is highly specialized, requires a stage full of props, has its required conventions, though these are transient and based on the latest new bands and ever-evolving popular genres. But popular entertainment singing is not singing in the normal human fashion. We must be conditioned by popular entertainers to sing or attempt to sing the way they do. 

CHILDREN SINGING

One of my granddaughters as a two-year-old heard opera and thereafter for months she attempted to use her version of vibrato whenever she sang anything—which was often. It was hilarious. None of us could keep a straight face when she did it.

Children don’t naturally use vibrato or croon and cavort when they sing unless they have been conditioned to do so by loads of screen time watching entertainers do that kind of performance singing. Without the entertainment conditioning, however, children just sing: clear, joyful, unaffected singing. It whelms up from within them as image bearers of God. Their singing often can be full-voice, uninhibited, unaffected singing, like God sings, rejoicing over his children with loud singing (Zephaniah 3:17).

While God’s singing would make Pavarotti sound like a novice, hearing God singing would make us want to sing with him and like him. Far from intimidating us into silence, God, who exults over us with loud singing, made us for singing, calls us to sing back to him, to sing with him, to make a joyful noise unto him with our instrument, our voice.

The overwhelming evidence suggests that the typical worship leader, however well-intentioned, is not even striving to awaken the congregation’s instrument. Keith Getty urges worship leaders to self-assess after worship: “How well did our congregation sing? Our role is simply to be an accompaniment to them as they sing.”

Accompanying the human voice ought to be the principle thing any worship leader is doing. Whatever instruments are used to accompany the singing (not all instruments are as well suited to this role as others), it ought to be the objective of musicians to create an environment whereby the congregation’s voice will be heard above all other sounds in the room. God-honoring worship leaders will be like C. S. Lewis’s London cabby: “Stop your noise,” they will say to any sounds that compete with the voice of the congregation as it teaches and admonitions one another in corporate sung worship.  

But it is not like that in the average contemporary worship service. It is far more the reverse. It sometimes seems as if the band is saying to the congregation, “Stop your noise,” listen to my guitar, this cool riff, this clever bridge, my drums, my keyboard. Murmur along if you’d like to, but what’s most important here, is us and our instrumental music.

Music in many churches has become yet another concert, the gathering of God’s people on the Lord’s Day merely another venue for that concert. The band has been practicing for the concert all week, and hopes you enjoy it. As at many concerts, you may even join in on some of your favorites, but don’t mess up the performance.

Subverted by the entertainment ethos, the chancel becomes a stage on which a performance occurs for the pleasure or amusement of the audience—who are welcome to applaud after we’re done. Whatever other context where this kind of performance might be appropriate, it’s awkwardly conjoined, at best, with the vertical nature of Christian worship.  

FOLK MUSIC FOR FOLKS

If solo entertainment music, pop or classical, are difficult for the congregation to emulate, what genre remains?

Perhaps it’s music composed by folks for folks to sing. Folk music from many different traditions is far more accessible to the normal singing experience of untrained musicians and singers. Perhaps this is why so many of the most enduring hymn tunes have come from German, Scandinavian, English, Welsh, African-American Spiritual, and Irish folk music traditions.

One of the great strengths of Stuart Townend’s 2001 hymn lyric “In Christ Alone” is that it was set to a melody composed by Irishman Keith Getty. “Being brought up [in Ireland],” said Getty, “gave me a sense of melody that is very attuned to congregational singing.”

Whatever our ethnic upbringing, something resonates in the human soul with the ancient Irish folk tune Slane when we sing “Be Thou My Vision.” It needs no tampering. The timeless melody perfectly supports the rich lyric. The music compels us—not merely to clap, sway, and listen—but to sing, really sing, with full heart and voice, and minds wholly engaged.

Not all musical styles can do that. Many were never intended to do so. Is it even possible to begin with pop performance music that was produced for a multi-billion-dollar industry and then expect it to work for congregational singing?

Appetites for music change over time, and the changes are usually driven by philosophical and moral agendas. The musical style that takes center stage in most churches today was produced in the last fifty years as both outgrowth and catalyst to the sexual revolution of what Paul Johnson called “the decadent decade,” the 1960s. I state that not as opinion but as manifest fact. The sexual revolution did not produce polka music; it produced rock and roll, and its derivations, including middle-of-the-road pop music, as employed in most churches.

Though not a fan of T. S. Eliot’s poetry, I find his cultural prognostications uniquely perceptive. As a publicist he was constantly observing cultural changes and had this to say about the shift to what was popular in his day, a world on the cusp of the “decadent decade.”

Pop entertainment is a purely commercial

enterprise, an imitation and perversion of folk

culture. It is addictive but transitory, appealing to

an appetite for novelty and distraction. Pop

entertainment is truly the opiate of the masses in

a leveling society: numbing, anesthetic, escapist.

If Eliot is at all correct, we are forced to ask ourselves: How can the eternal, unchangeable truths of the gospel be communicated in a transitory medium that appeals to listeners’ love of novelty, escapism, and distraction, that numbs them and anesthetizes them? Eliot proceeds to contrast pop entertainment as a perversion of folk culture which “is enduring, noncommercial, and anonymous, and it is perpetuated by families, schools, and clubs. It unifies the members of a local community, living, dead, and not yet born, a source of collective memory.”

He should have added, “and churches.” If Eliot is at all right, which one is most suited to congregational singing in Christian worship? Which one unifies, perpetuates, endures, encourages us collectively to remember? If “Pop entertainment is a purely commercial enterprise,” as Eliot insists, and as a cursory glance at the CCM industry discloses, it becomes ingenuous in the extreme to sing:

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,

Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:

Thou and thou only, first in my heart,

High King of Heaven, my Treasure thou art.

Pre-order today bondbooks.net

Singing these words surrounded by an ethos scripted by the multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry—the stage arrayed with glitz and glitter, high-tech volume pulsing throughout the worship center—may prove to be far more than merely a “perversion of folk culture.”

Douglas Bond is author of Grace Works! (And Ways We Think It Doesn't) and twenty-seven other books of historical fiction, biography, devotion, and practical theology. He is lyricist for New Reformation Hymns, directs the Oxford Creative Writing Master Class, speaks at churches and conferences, and leads Church history tours in Europe. Watch for his forthcoming book God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To), from which this post is an excerpt; pre-order a signed copy of God Sings! at bondbooks.net and receive a free Rise & Worship cd.