Whatever sung worship is, it is not just a matter of taste. I’ve heard a lot of metaphors for what worship may be. Here are five major paradigms:
1. Family dinner. Why do we do things a certain way? Because always have and always will. Traditions remind us that we’re not alone, but part of great family spanning space and time. I become a Franicevich by eating my great-grandma’s chocolate rum pudding. I become a Christian by singing my family’s old hymns and letting their prayers teach me to pray my own prayers.
2. Shepherding. The form that worship takes depends on the congregation and is up to the shepherds to discern in their wisdom. Fighting over the music is as inane as fighting over the sermon material. Whoever preaches preaches not just his favorite bits, but the Word of God for his particular congregation. Same with the sung worship.
3. Inside-out. What’s the point of our worship? Biblical texts, and even some worship songs themselves, call worship “more than a song.” More concerned with our labors of love than our private faith expressions, God took worship on his own shoulders in Christ. In the place of all our feasts, he centers our gathered worship in self-givingness of Christ celebrated in the Lord’s Supper. Rather than finding God in worship, we celebrate the fact that he has found us. Christ gives himself for us so that we could give ourselves for the life of the world.
4. Seeker-sensitive. All that we do in church is seeker-sensitive. It just depends to which seekers we are being sensitive. Being sensitive to people who like rock music and informal speech is insensitive to those who like beautiful music and reverent liturgy. So I think the general paradigm of “seeker-sensitivity” doesn’t make sense. It provides no direction without an antecedent target group.
5. Objective beauty. Some Christians don’t believe in the objectivity of Beauty like they do Beauty’s sisters, Goodness and Truth. When Beauty is subjective, we have license to bicker over personal taste: “Why do we play that music? I prefer it my way.” But Beauty itself forms and sanctifies us. Worship leaders should play beautiful music with beautiful orchestration that sets beautifully-articulated truths
6. Catechesis. We tend to believe what we sing. Rebekah Curtis argues that one of the significances of the structure of hymns is their straightforward meter and meter and memorable rhymes. While some songs are too confusing to understand, and others are too simplistic to teach, yet others make depth of thought accessible, teaching profound truths in simple ways. “Digestible proteins.”
Of the five paradigms above, I find (4) seeker-sensitivity as a general paradigm to be unhelpful. I think that the goal of our gathered, sung worship is to form men and women into who they are in Christ. This takes the wisdom of a (2) shepherd, whose guidance ought to be trusted. I think that the form our gathered, sung worship ought to be (5) beautifully set truths that form a (1) corporate identity and (3 & 6) moral imagination. I’ll attempt to describe this in a parable:
A young woman grows up eating dinner with her warm, loving family every night. When she leaves for college, though, she transitions to eating cafeteria dinners alone. Some nights, she’ll order pizza in with her roommates. But whenever she visits home, her parents put on a gourmet dinner, because they love her. The young woman graduates and marries, and between her and her husband’s two incomes, they are able to dine out frequently and spend long evenings together cooking gorgeous meals like the ones they grew up eating. Then she gets pregnant, and they have twins. All of a sudden, they’re back to eating macaroni and cheese with hot dogs. But whenever they can host a dinner party, they do. And while the kids get macaroni and hot dogs, the adults eat butterflied roast lamb with a rosemary rub, scalloped potatoes, and grilled teriyaki asparagus. (And they have a gluten-free crust on their dairy-free lemon-meringue tart.) As they eat, they all long for the day their kids are mature enough to appreciate real good food.
So here’s the point. Although different families have different resources and different needs, we acknowledge that lamb is just better than hot dogs. A good shepherd will give her family the highest quality she can reasonably afford and the best they can palate. She knows she needs to push her kids to try things for which they might not have a taste, but nevertheless would be good for them. Again, she accommodates allergies (maybe re-writing lines that depend on various theories of election), but that doesn’t stop her from serving up great stuff.
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