Should We Critique Worship Music?

Here is a job description I recently found for a "director of worship and creative arts" position at a local church.

Purpose of Position: This position focuses upon creating a musical sound and style that is excellent in execution, attracts people, a style consistent with our demographic, and a spirit that enables people to encounter God, and enhance the Gathering. This position is also responsible for developing teams for all technical (sound, lighting, audio) functions in a Gathering as well as working towards creative elements within Gatherings which would include but not be limited to video pieces, music, stage décor, drama, etc.

Skill and Experience
1. BA Degree Required
2. Has been a worship leader and involved with creative elements on a church team where the average Sunday attendance has been 700 or more
3. Licensed Minister or in process towards licensure from an approved organization
4. Competent in basic MS office, Finale or equivalent music program, can work with and meet budget, can set budget

Unfortunately nowhere does the description say that the worship leader needs any biblical or theological training, any wisdom or discernment. Nowhere does it suggest that the work of a worship pastor is fundamentally discerning which sounds, which tunes, which arrangements, which texts, which artistic tools will best serve to form followers of Christ. #3 vaguely alludes to a requirement for at least being in the "process towards licensure from an approved organization," but I'm not sure what that means.
 
If I had the courage and time I would like to write a book that might be called something like More Than The Hipster: Worship Music and 'The Cool.' I have pondered other possibilities: More Than Charismatic or  More Than Winsome. The former evokes the pentecostal/charismatic section of Christianity and isn't my point while the latter just sounds stuffy. My concern is that in our attempts to help the church keep up with the times, to be relevant and voice its worship in a contemporary sound, we have lost a careful, informed discernment of what we are doing. We naively practice various production techniques and values; we appropriate 'the Cool' and have little understanding of how it is confusing our worship capacities. We recruit talented and likeable leaders who have good intentions but little formation. And this happens during a time when many Christian leaders are beginning to realize that the arts--especially worship music--is having as significant of a role, if not a more significant role than the sermon in the shaping of our understanding of what Christianity is essentially.

This lack of oversight is a relatively new phenomenon. The church historically has had a much more active role in holding worship composition accountable to singing true words with proper discretion. I am glad I don't live in the time of the Genevan community in the 16th century for example. Louis Bourgeois, one of three main contributors to the Genevan Psalter, was arrested for making musical changes to some songs he presumably had written himself. There was an outcry from many who did not want to learn any new tunes. John Calvin's primary concern was that congregational singing would be restricted to singing only the Psalms and that the music not pervert or sensualize the biblical text. No harmony or any "secular" tunes were used in worship. The purpose of restricting the Genevan Psalter to the 126 tunes was to clearly delineate proper, safe and worthy Christian music. Calvin would later personally intervene and have Bourgeois released from prison but due to the restrictions of Geneva Bourgeois eventually left for Paris and later had his daughter baptized a Catholic.

In contrast the worship music tradition that has arisen from Martin Luther is comparatively libertine. Luther embraced harmony (polyphony) as well as monastic chant, folk tunes and highly ornate orchestration. In short, the Lutheran tradition did not restrict singing to the Psalms but instead allowed for what my be considered Christian, or theological poetry. 

[I highly recommend both Jeremy Begbie's The Resounding Truth and Paul Westermeyer's Te Deum for substantial examinations of the history of music in the church.]

While this is a gross simplification, we might generally say that our worship today is influenced by both Lutheran and Reformed traditions. We want Biblically sound yet creatively rich worship music. We want music that focuses on God, yet we also want freedom to express this worship however we'd like. 

It is my experience that most of us take the former for granted. We assume that each of us wants good, strong Christo-centric worship. This explains why the job description above doesn't explicitly require any formal biblical or theological training. Yet we assume too much about our respective intentions and are terribly afraid of offending someone else's worship sensibilities. It seems rude doesn't it? To critique worship? Shouldn't each of us be able to sing what we want to God if we mean well? If our hearts are in the right place? If we are being authentic and sincere? 

We don't have to be as heavy handed as the Genevan experiment in order to properly steward and discern worship music. There is a long history of hymn composers who have edited, revised, re-written, added verses and eliminated verses from hymns. Charles Wesley's great hymn, "O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing My Great Redeemer's Praise," originally contained 18 stanzas. What we now sing as the first stanza was originally stanza seven. Wesley's text originally read "...my dear redeemer's praise." Now we sing it commonly as "...my great redeemer's praise." I'm sure there are many other edits.

"Come Thou Fount" originally read, "Praise the mount--I'm fixed upon it,/ Mount of God's unchanging love!" Most contemporary uses of the hymn read, "Praise his name, I'm fixed upon it,/ Name of God's redeeming love." There is also that difficult stanza:

Here I raise mine Ebenezer,
Hither by thy help I'm come;
And I hope, by thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home;
Jesus sought me, when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed his precious blood.

What does Ebenezer mean? What does interposed mean? Most of us don't know and so we accept the newer contemporized re-write:


Hither to Thy love has blest me,
Thou hast bro’t me to this place.
And I know Thy hand will bring me
safely home by Thy good grace.
Jesus sought me when a stranger 
wandering from the fold of God
He to rescue me from danger, 
bought me with His precious blood.

This is just a very small glimpse into how the church has edited, revised, critiqued and discerned worship music for decades and centuries. The words we use to describe God are powerful and weighty. They need to be handled with care, and proper discernment or critique of worship music needs to also treat people with care, gently and lovingly. Unfortunately, sometimes the decisions a worship pastor might make can result in pain and confusion.

I have had a handful of students approach me about my previous post regarding Jon Foreman's "Your Love Is Strong." I knew the decision to eliminate the second verse and that my writing about it would be frustrating for some. I'm incredibly grateful to the students who took the time to come talk to me. Unfortunately in the context of a campus ministry I am not always as accessible that I'd like to be. I want to be available to learn with you. These blog entries are one of the venues I use to extend myself, my thoughts, the things I've learned, the questions I still have...to bring myself closer to you.

So, please feel free to email or stop by. My door is open.

And I am going to get to writing out some thoughts on a the John Mark MacMilan, "How He Loves Us." So if you are interested in these things, stay tuned.

The Posture of Criticism - Discernment Vis a Vis Judgement

I got the cold/flu about five days ago so these posts are coming out more slowly than I'd hoped. I'll pick up on the critique of "How He Loves" soon. I know that taking a step back to cover a few topics like what follows below might not be as exciting of a read as if I were to keep chipping away, critiquing some more songs. I know this post may seem tedious in comparison, a kind of disclaimer, but I'm more concerned about how and why I'm being critical of contemporary worship music than just coming off as your dime a dozen cynic. I've spent years repenting of the sin of cynicism.

Life Lesson #101: Scoffing at what is wrong is easy. Loving the church and contending for it is hard.

With 100 some hits on the previous post (Critique of "Your Love Is Strong") in less than two days--for this little blog--I must have hit a nerve, especially at Hope College. I remember my freshman year at Wheaton was full of many late night debates in the dorm. I tried to avoid them or I mostly listened, but a few times I dove right in. We had disagreements about everything from the classic Protestant conundrum of the 'free will' versus 'predestination,' the naive dichotomy of  'secular music' versus Christian; we questioned whether speaking in tongues is for Christians today, and which was right independent or denominational churches? Baptists or Reformed? Dispensationalism versus covenant theology? It was a nerve wracking translation of ourselves from our safe, parochial home churches and youth groups to a comparatively more ecumenical academic community. Some conversations would go on for hours with new voices adding into a conversation throughout the night. So many strong, intelligent opinions and experiences held with Christian vigor. Freshman year could be painful and awkward at times.

My assumption is that there are more reading who disagree with me, and I want to encourage such disagreement. There is nothing wrong with having differences of opinion. After all, our differences will not matter too much if we actively remember how much more we have in agreement. Disagreement, doubt and questions are fine, good and healthy even. The greater concern is not so much about the convictions we arrive at, but the charitable, Christ-like way we engage one another in conversation. I'm not saying that our ultimate conclusions are not important or relative but that our convictions are shaped by the journey we make to identify and confirm those convictions. Our ideas and beliefs are for better or worse shaped by our context.

A disagreement can cut deep into the ego and threaten what each of us believe is real and true. To do theology, to be a part of the church, to be committed to the growth of our shared understanding of God and his purposes, we have to wear these things carefully with humility. I admit that I can be weak in the wrong moment. I know the temptation to strive to be right and to have control. A large obstacle is that we often approach God like we might math. We tend to believe that if each of us could just become objective and get outside the question at hand, then surely we could all come to perfect agreement. But our ideas are not so much shaped by our rational minds in a kind of objective, abstract bubble. A conviction is held in the heart as much if not more so than the mind. A conviction is shaped by our character, by our affections, insecurities and fears. It is a wonder God has revealed himself to us at all.

St. Augustine has been my favorite model of how I might posture myself when daring to use words to explain or understand the things of God:

The Confessions Book XI, Chapter I.  O Lord, since eternity is Yours, are You ignorant of the things which I say unto You? Or see Thou at the time that which comes to pass in time? Why, therefore, do I place before You so many relations of things? Not surely that You might know them through me, but that I may awaken my own love and that of my readers towards You, that we may all say, Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised. I have already said, and shall say, for the love of Your love do I this. For we also pray, and yet Truth says, Your Father knows what things you have need of before you ask Him. Matthew 6:8 Therefore do we make known unto You our love, in confessing unto You our own miseries and Your mercies upon us, that You may free us altogether, since You have begun, that we may cease to be wretched in ourselves, and that we may be blessed in You; since You have called us, that we may be poor in spirit, and meek, and mourners, and hungering and thirsty after righteousness, and merciful, and pure in heart, and peacemakers. Matthew 5:3-9 Behold, I have told unto You many things, which I could and which I would, for You first would have me confess unto You, the Lord my God, for You are good, since Your mercy endures for ever. 

Everything that Augustine 'confessed' (a double meaning of confession, both of his sin and his faith) was in accordance with the ordo amoris, the order of love. To paraphrase him, let all that this wretched person has to say about God lead to loving God and each other more abundantly. Our 'theologizing' should lead to doxology. Our talk about God should itself be a kind of worship. 

So while I am practicing critique, I do not believe that the primary role of the Church or a theologian or a pastor is to act as a watchdog. A Christian's primary posture is not critical but doxological. If we are to be critical, it is for the sake of discernment rather than judgement. Jesus' teaching as accounted in Matthew 7:16 and Luke 6:44 is often misquoted as "judge a tree by the fruit that it bears." The English translation is instead most commonly "know" or "recognize" not "judge." In fact, it is interesting that chapter seven opens with "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get." "Judge" here is closer to "condemn." It means to separate and divide in the way a court judge pronounces a sentence. To "know" a tree is to be close, to become acquainted with it, to discern its value.

Romans 12:2 contains a very helpful use of "discernment,"

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

This passage is often used to pit Christianity against so-called "worldliness." Such interpretations can lead to a sectarian or isolationist posture to encourage wary watchdogs, alert and on the ready to spot and root out sin. The fruit of such a critical posture is strife and  bitterness. Our hearts become constrained more by condemnation/judgement rather than discernment/judgement. This Romans 12 use of "discern" calls us to practice redemption. To discern is primarily about identifying what is right and good and true rather than pouncing on what is wrong. We discern for the sake of pleasing God and worshiping God. We go into the world, into the fray of confusion with love to dust off and prize the beautiful rather than obsess, control and despise what is broken. We are better as lovers--at least a concerned parent or the biblical caring shepherd rather than the police, the Inquisition or the Gestapo or the acidic talking head politico.

So let me be clear, when I identify what concerns me about the state of the church today, when I ask questions about contemporary worship music, when I write a film, TV or CD review or critique a worship song, I do these things because I want a better love life, I want to worship more freely. If anything, even if you don't agree with me, I pray my teaching, leadership and writings might stir up good conversation and prayer, as Augustine says, "that I may awaken my own love and that of my readers towards You...."

May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing to you oh, God. Would you burn away any empty word or thought in the consuming fire of your love. If we have anything worth saying to each other, the those words be yours, eternal, unmovable and filled with your mercy.

Thanks for reading.

Upcoming Posts & A Critique of "Your Love Is Strong"

There are a handful of things I’d like to write about in the next week or so. I’m going to try and push out a few blog posts in the next few days. Thanks to those who read and keep me thinking of better ways to communicate ideas that matter greatly to me, and many thanks to my students for keeping me on my toes too.

Here are the topics I want to get at:

1.     I’d like to follow up on the comment I made in my last post about making too much of art but that rather we should instead focus on being better humans (which implies engagement of the arts). There is much to discuss here. I’m glad to get emails from people who appreciate this concern. Because it seems to others to be a poignant nuance of my way of prioritizing the arts, I’d like to flesh the idea out some more.

2.     Another friend asked me to recall for her some teaching I offered in the past on the distinction between capital “A” Artists and the rest of us who are all created as artists. The idea is that we are all artistic. To be human is to be creative. The question is which of us are called to practice a discipline of art making at more advanced levels with years of training for the sake of vocational, bi-vocational or a-vocational art making. Further thoughts on this will connect to what I want to write about for topic 1 above. Perhaps I can answer both of those in the same post. We’ll see.

*Topics 1 and 2 will need to wait a bit because I want to cover a few topics for my students. These are thoughts that have been growing in response to their questions and our discussions.  This is teaching at its best: when I feel stumped in class and need to step back and rediscover how to communicate what is most important.

3.     I need to more explicitly and unapologetically explain my concerns about some contemporary worship texts. Two songs came up in class this week, “Your Love is Strong” by Switchfoot’s Jon Foreman and “How He Loves Us,” by John Mark McMillan.

4.     Then in another post I need to do a better job of connecting the overarching creedal portions of our class to specific cultural examples—to demonstrate why an inquiry into the ontological framework of the sacrament and Trinity matter to regular worship leading.

CRITICAL THOUGHTS ON “Your Love Is Strong”

First, let me emphatically encourage readers to see this not so much of a bashing of Jon Foreman and more of a case study. I don’t own any Switchfoot records, but I’m a fan. I like “Your Love Is Strong.” I believe that Foreman’s four seasonal EP recordings are fantastic examples of good, thoughtful creativity. However, there is just so much worship music out there, so many great songs that I can afford to be picky.

Second, I don’t expect most readers to initially appreciate the kind of discernment I am modeling here. That is why I teach this class. We generally don’t critique our songs very well if at all. What I’m offering here could make me seem like a crotchety old man, harrumphing around with arms folded and a frown. I’d like to disagree, that loving worship, loving the church and even loving Jon Foreman requires us to be discerning. I wouldn’t go to such great lengths to think through this song if I didn’t like it.

Third, I’ll point out that this is only the second lyric that I have adjusted for pastoral concerns in the almost six years of my ministry at Hope College. I’d never messed with the lyrics in the roughly ten years of worship ministry previous either. The point is that I don’t have a heavy hand. Actually, I do in terms of picking songs in the first place, but that is a whole other discussion.

So, I did a poor job in class of explaining why we have decided to ditch the second verse of this song:

I look out the window.
The birds are composing.
Not a note is out of tune
Or out of place.
I look at the meadow
And stare at the flowers.
Better dressed than any girl
On her wedding day. 

First of all a confession: I can personally appreciate and worship with these words. I can navigate around the strengths and weaknesses of this verse and find meaning. I especially like the first half of the verse and am sad to say goodbye to it. However, the question is not what I personally can worship to. The question is what best serves the spiritual formation of the 1000 give or take a few hundred who join us for worship four times per week.

I think I overemphasized that our decision to nix the verse is squarely because of a response to some women who are frustrated with it. The initial concern begins with whether or not we would like to think that feminine beauty should be reduced to a woman on her wedding day. Is a woman in a wedding dress the definitive aesthetic achievement of a woman?

Arguments for keeping the Foreman lyric:

Argument one: we should not ditch worship songs or portions of a worship text because of a person’s personal quandaries. The worship text isn’t about an individual.  A worship text is about God and so we should all work to focus on the best in a song and not get hung up on a particular word choice, phrase or even a whole worship text.

Argument two: Further, there is no such thing as a perfect worship song, perfect worship service or worship leader. Coming to worship requires us to readily forgive each other when our worship words, leadership, expression and participation do not live up to our personal expectations.

In class I overemphasized that the concern was how this worship passage might elicit personal confusion from young women who join us in fellowship. Yes, it is true; each of us bring our own personal baggage into worship. Our own experience can skew our ability to interpret and appreciate various worship expressions. Yes we must be charitable and forgiving when we run into worship passages that confuse or distract us.

However, in choosing to nix this part of Foreman’s song I am acknowledging that there are certain lines for the sake of a corporate a worship service that I need to guard and watch with discernment.

Arguments for not using the Foreman lyric:

Argument one: I don’t believe that a woman on her wedding day is the proper defining moment of feminine beauty that can properly ‘contextualize’ or contemporize the original Biblical passage the Foreman worship verse is responding to:

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

The trouble is that we don’t have royal splendor in North America and so Foreman turns to a wedding to attempt to evoke the same kind of meaning. Wedding day takes the place of King Solomon’s glory. This might seem acceptable especially when we consider that the New Testament uses marriage substantially to illustrate God’s relationship with the church, the bride of Christ.  However, the focus here is not on how the bride of Christ is beautiful now, but more about how the church is being made beautiful. The bride of Christ is making herself ready (Rev 19:7). So it turns out that using the concept of the bride of Christ to defend this lyric is somewhat of a hermeneutical leap.

The trouble is that we have nothing in our culture that can properly help us understand Jesus’ reference to Solomon’s glory. I would personally prefer that worship songwriters had the courage to make specific Biblical references instead of always trying to contemporize. Let’s dare to become biblically literate.

Argument two: Even if we can appreciate the artistic license of Foreman’s lyric and can understand the spirit of what he is trying to convey, consider the lyrics artistic integrity. Here is where subjective enters the discussion. So this is admittedly my weakest point. This lyric is largely sentimental. Read these words together: window, birds, composing, note, tune, meadow, dressed, girl, wedding day. These are the words of a hallmark card. Now this is my subjective reading of the lyrics, and I even think that the great hymn “For the Beauty of the Earth” is prone to such sentimentalism as well. However, I am more willing to sing the hymn because of the gravity of the years and generations who have sung it.

Remember the definition of sentimentalism: emotion for emotions sake. Personally, when I have sung the line I find that images of brides in wedding gowns take greater space in my head than the initial point of the lyric which is the splendor of God’s creation.

Argument three: This argument is contextual to our campus ministry and is my most important. The lyric can idealize marriage and wedding dresses. I am pulling the lyric not so much because of the girls who already are frustrated with it, but for those young ladies who aren’t frustrated with it. I’m pulling the lyric for the many young men who might also have romantic idealizations about a wedding day. I’m pulling the lyric because I know how powerful worship words are to form a persons imagination. I don’t want to pedestalize marriage or brides. As a pastor I don’t want to reinforce the notion that girls are mostly highly valued, most beautiful when they get married. No, a woman in a wedding dress is not the definitive aesthetic achievement of a woman.

Perhaps I wouldn’t be picky about this if I weren’t serving a campus ministry where there is so much pressure on relationships, the temptation to obsess in the search of the one, true love. I spend considerable amount of time and energy trying to help college students learn how to see the opposite sex as a human being first and a potential spouse much, much later.  We have so many layers of confusion that push and pull on our sexuality, it seems easier to avoid language in worship that might perpetuate that confusion. If the rest of this particular lyric had enough weight/value and wasn’t prone to sentimentalism, then perhaps I’d fight for it.

A Good Day: Seeing The Dogs is Like Living Well

Living a day well is akin to paying attention to our dogs. Little Ike and Coen, the last two of a litter of puppies left at the shelter when my wife rescued them. They were so helpless and loveable she couldn’t just pick one. She had to bring home two to surprise me for a Valentine’s Day present four year ago this next February. We figure Ike was picked over because he was the runt with a definitively oversized portion of the “little man syndrome,” meaning that if he isn’t being coddled he can be quite the grump. Coen was picked over because even though he is quite handsome and well proportioned, he is skittish and afraid of silly things like smooth floor tile, heat vents and gutters. We loved these two little fur balls for two years and then somehow in the third year we got distracted. Then we had a baby and now they are always here, ready and eager for our attention if only we had the patience and clarity of heart and mind to give it them. Now living a day well doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve given love to dogs, but it means that we are in a better posture to.

Prayer must certainly be like this and art and love too. How many gorgeous things surround me that I cannot attend to because I’m busy, self consumed, self important, blind dumb and numb? Again, Annie Dillard. I believe it’s chapter two of Pilgrim At a Tinker Creek. She begins, “I’ve been thinking about seeing.” She tells the story of hiding pennies in crevices and crooks of old trees and along sidewalks as a little girl. She drew arrows on the sidewalk with the words, “treasure this way!” Her point is that there are hidden pennies everywhere in life and creation with arrows and maps pointing the way to treasures but sadly, as she says in her essay “Total Eclipse” in Teaching Stones to Talk, “we are born and bored in a stroke.”

Somehow I got caught up in all this talk about the arts. Lets champion the artist, the misunderstood, the marginalized and fringe, the bohemian, the crafty creative person because (again Dillard) ours is a God who loves pizazz. Sure I love the arts. I just spent an hour reading Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna to my wife until she fell asleep. We’ve been into the latest season of the TV series Damages with Glenn Close and Rose Byrne. It is exciting and somewhat redeemable, a titillating expose of white-collar crime and it’s no small feat to make white collar crime mysterious and riveting. Yet as Susanna began to yawn and apologize for having to ask me to stop reading we had a brief discussion about how much nicer it is to finish the evening with a book rather than a TV show. Definitely. We love the arts. We love Kingsolver’s prose. She makes me want to travel south of the border again soon for pollo frito fresh squeezed juice and la playa. Yet is this really all that much about art itself or it is about being a better human and living a day well?

I say its time we stop talking so much about the arts and begin talking about talking about how to live a day well, how to live better, how to be better humans, and yes this will require the arts but not art as an end in itself but as a means, a kind of training in how to see better. 

Kingsolver makes me want to travel south of the border for a proper margarita and carnitas and she makes me want to pay attention to my dogs more. How did they become so boring to me? If my dogs can become boring, then is it possible for me to let my work, my art, my marriage and even my beautiful son become boring too? Yes. Please God forgive us all our boredom. Oh ennui, the noonday demon.

Kate Kooyman gave a beautiful message tonight at the Gathering on sin and forgiveness. In the first third of her message, she unpacked the difference between sin and immorality and how we confuse the latter for the former. Being a sinner isn’t just about specific acts but about an overall dispassion of being turned inward toward self-worship. I’ll add that sin is fundamentally being cut off from the life of God. It is living without the right redemptive perspective of forgiveness and hope, of love and light. Sinfulness is living in the gutter of the darkness of the self.

So art plus redemption can lead us to seeing better? Yep. True, however art by itself will shape and change us but it cannot save us. Art by itself becomes its own idolatrous end; its own party; its own scene that alienates and separates those who get it and those who don’t. The in and the out. But redemptive human creativity is essential to becoming a Christian. My dogs are beautiful little guys. People stop me and remark when I’m with them on a walk. Wow, what beautiful or amazing or cute little dogs! And inside I’m hoping just to get them to poop so we can get back to the house and on to more important things, to my things, to my agenda. I’m a sinner self-consumed. I’m ignoring the blazing colors of the Fall leaves, the ones remaining on the branch and those scattered on the ground. I’m blind to the subtle changes in wind and temperature, the joy of pulling my scarf tighter. I don’t reflect on the month past, the summer past, the winter ahead. I walk a straight boring line from point A to point B to get the job done, to go back inside and be boring again.

This is not all true. I’m being a good Midwestern boy with a guilt complex. I can see. Yesterday I cut our the burning bushes that line the front of our house back so far that they are little bitty stumps of potentiality—that is if I didn’t kill them (they were getting so huge and everything I could find on the mighty internet said burning bushes are resilient). Behind the bushes was a large planters box eight feet long sitting underneath the front windows. Until yesterday you couldn’t see that its paint was peeling away or that the box itself was almost rotted out, a liability I could have left of the spring? The two hour job turned into six. I was forced outside a bit longer. The dogs tied to the railing on our front steps and wow was Ike grumpy with the cats and dogs and children running freely and flagrantly in front of his tied up self. I cut back the bushes. I raked leaves. I removed the flower box. I scraped the flaking paint behind it. I repainted the shake shingles. I raked some more and the sun set. It got colder. We went inside and made French toast with bananas and honey. Then I pet my dogs with Casper. He chased them around the kitchen island a bit. I could see it.

Oh please God, help me see tomorrow.

                                                                                      

A Good Day: Seeing The Dogs is Like Living Well

Living a day well is akin to paying attention to our dogs. Little Ike and Coen, the last two of a litter of puppies left at the shelter when my wife rescued them. They were so helpless and loveable she couldn’t just pick one. She had to bring home two to surprise me for a Valentine’s Day present four year ago this next February. We figure Ike was picked over because he was the runt with a definitively oversized portion of the “little man syndrome,” meaning that if he isn’t being coddled he can be quite the grump. Coen was picked over because even though he is quite handsome and well proportioned, he is skittish and afraid of silly things like smooth floor tile, heat vents and gutters. We loved these two little fur balls for two years and then somehow in the third year we got distracted. Then we had a baby and now they are always here, ready and eager for our attention if only we had the patience and clarity of heart and mind to give it them. Now living a day well doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve given love to dogs, but it means that we are in a better posture to.

Prayer must certainly be like this and art and love too. How many gorgeous things surround me that I cannot attend to because I’m busy, self consumed, self important, blind dumb and numb? Again, Annie Dillard. I believe it’s chapter two of Pilgrim At a Tinker Creek. She begins, “I’ve been thinking about seeing.” She tells the story of hiding pennies in crevices and crooks of old trees and along sidewalks as a little girl. She drew arrows on the sidewalk with the words, “treasure this way!” Her point is that there are hidden pennies everywhere in life and creation with arrows and maps pointing the way to treasures but sadly, as she says in her essay “Total Eclipse” in Teaching Stones to Talk, “we are born and bored in a stroke.”

Somehow I got caught up in all this talk about the arts. Lets champion the artist, the misunderstood, the marginalized and fringe, the bohemian, the crafty creative person because (again Dillard) ours is a God who loves pizazz. Sure I love the arts. I just spent an hour reading Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna to my wife until she fell asleep. We’ve been into the latest season of the TV series Damages with Glenn Close and Rose Byrne. It is exciting and somewhat redeemable, a titillating expose of white-collar crime and it’s no small feat to make white collar crime mysterious and riveting. Yet as Susanna began to yawn and apologize for having to ask me to stop reading we had a brief discussion about how much nicer it is to finish the evening with a book rather than a TV show. Definitely. We love the arts. We love Kingsolver’s prose. She makes me want to travel south of the border again soon for pollo frito fresh squeezed juice and la playa. Yet is this really all that much about art itself or it is about being a better human and living a day well?

I say its time we stop talking so much about the arts and begin talking about talking about how to live a day well, how to live better, how to be better humans, and yes this will require the arts but not art as an end in itself but as a means, a kind of training in how to see better.

Kingsolver makes me want to travel south of the border for a proper margarita and carnitas and she makes me want to pay attention to my dogs more. How did they become so boring to me? If my dogs can become boring, then is it possible for me to let my work, my art, my marriage and even my beautiful son become boring too? Yes. Please God forgive us all our boredom. Oh ennui, the noonday demon.

Kate Kooyman gave a beautiful message tonight at the Gathering on sin and forgiveness. In the first third of her message, she unpacked the difference between sin and immorality and how we confuse the latter for the former. Being a sinner isn’t just about specific acts but about an overall dispassion of being turned inward toward self-worship. I’ll add that sin is fundamentally being cut off from the life of God. It is living without the right redemptive perspective of forgiveness and hope, of love and light. Sinfulness is living in the gutter of the darkness of the self.

So art plus redemption can lead us to seeing better? Yep. True, however art by itself will shape and change us but it cannot save us. Art by itself becomes its own idolatrous end; its own party; its own scene that alienates and separates those who get it and those who don’t. The in and the out. But redemptive human creativity is essential to becoming a Christian. My dogs are beautiful little guys. People stop me and remark when I’m with them on a walk. Wow, what beautiful or amazing or cute little dogs! And inside I’m hoping just to get them to poop so we can get back to the house and on to more important things, to my things, to my agenda. I’m a sinner self-consumed. I’m ignoring the blazing colors of the Fall leaves, the ones remaining on the branch and those scattered on the ground. I’m blind to the subtle changes in wind and temperature, the joy of pulling my scarf tighter. I don’t reflect on the month past, the summer past, the winter ahead. I walk a straight boring line from point A to point B to get the job done, to go back inside and be boring again.

This is not all true. I’m being a good Midwestern boy with a guilt complex. I can see. Yesterday I cut our the burning bushes that line the front of our house back so far that they are little bitty stumps of potentiality—that is if I didn’t kill them (they were getting so huge and everything I could find on the mighty internet said burning bushes are resilient). Behind the bushes was a large planters box eight feet long sitting underneath the front windows. Until yesterday you couldn’t see that its paint was peeling away or that the box itself was almost rotted out, a liability I could have left of the spring? The two hour job turned into six. I was forced outside a bit longer. The dogs tied to the railing on our front steps and wow was Ike grumpy with the cats and dogs and children running freely and flagrantly in front of his tied up self. I cut back the bushes. I raked leaves. I removed the flower box. I scraped the flaking paint behind it. I repainted the shake shingles. I raked some more and the sun set. It got colder. We went inside and made French toast with bananas and honey. Then I pet my dogs with Casper. He chased them around the kitchen island a bit. I could see it.

Oh please God, help me see tomorrow.

                                                                                      

Guest Post on eighthdayfarm.com Worm Poop Doesn't Compute

I serve on the board for Eighth Day Farm and wrote this guest blog post for them a few weeks ago:

GUEST BLOGGER WEDNESDAY: WORM POOP DOESN’T COMPUTE

Update: Naming It Well

So much is going well. I wish I had the time and the words. I wish I had the gumption too. Everything I want to say and could be said about family, marriage, fatherhood, music, campus ministry, teaching, friendship…trying to speak well about such things feels silly and awkward to name, or at least to name too quickly.

Have you ever had an experience that was so raw and good that you were left reeling dumb and stupid? I asked a poet once if he walked around experiencing his waking life thinking, “now that experience…there is a poem in that.” He said that no, we must first warm our hands around the fire of existence and then later work to find what will emerge in the art.

This is the question of taking our cameras with us on vacation. Walker Percy asks if we spend all our time behind the lens, do we end up missing the experience itself? The loss of creature? Is life merely a photo album we flip through page by page later afterwards? In the context of our contemporary media: is our life the sum total of what we catalogue of ourselves on our blogs and facebook pages?

Yet we do name our experiences. We have to. We need ways to share ourselves. This is what Annie Dillard is working through in her essay, “Total Eclipse.” She says we bluster around the world with a “shovel and a pail, a grammar and a lexicon” working to save our very lives because those things that we do not have words for are lost to us. So the challenge is to use the right words, the best words, to have patience and not name the experience too quickly and perhaps turn to the best of artists and writers and learn from their vocabularies how to better name our remembrances worth remembering.

Yesterday I splurged and purchased a 16 GB memory card for our camera. It’s a point and shoot that was a previous splurge just before Casper was born. It cost a third of our Nikon SDL, but we use it so much more often because it fits in a pocket and because it takes HD videos and has a stereo microphone. We captured Casper’s birth with it. It has captured many important moments. The trouble is of course with hard disk space. We have none left. HD videos are huge. Yesterday, I decided I didn’t care. We need to keep filming Casper. I’ll buy another external hard drive.

So this morning I filmed the ritual of walking up the stairs to get him out of his crib. I filmed a bit of him looking and pointing out the window. I filmed him shoving his face into his blanket and sucking his thumb. I set the camera on a shelf and filmed us reading books before bed. He thinks he is talking now. He opens a book, points at pictures and makes sounds in a cadence that resembles something that could sound like reading. Tonight he went to our bookcase and dragged Maugham’s Of Human Bondage over to Susanna and sat down on her lap for her to read only to find there were no pictures.

I’ll never be a good enough poet or songwriter to capture these moments. Susanna’s second book, Entering the House of Awe, arrived a few weeks ago (and is for sale…you can buy it on Amazon, but if you buy it directly from us…we’ll pocket more money…and that is helpful…email me if you are interested). As a new mom, she hasn’t written more than a few poems in the last year. When the book arrived, I read several poems aloud at the dinner table weeping and made her promise to keep writing if only for me. Perhaps some day after warming her hands on the fire of our beautiful, little boy she will write about him and about us and perhaps she will find the correct, appropriate words to help us remember—not just remember, but to fully experience it.

But in the mean time, I’m using HD video to keep track of these things. Children suddenly speed up time. A baby changes into a toddler too quickly. A year is no longer just a year. It is the difference between an immobile, sleeping sack of eating and pooping flesh and a babbling, temperamental, wide-awake to the world, bonafide human being who can almost run, who you swear is about to utter a sentence demanding more cheese.

My gift and my curse is that I feel everything so deeply. Some people might call it sensitivity or sentimentality or emotionalism. Perhaps it is all three. I think it is a matter of exhaustion. I barely know how to process all that I absorb in a day.

Susanna is out for the evening. I just put Casper to bed a few hours ago and I’m still absorbing the goodness of holding him in the nursery lit only by the glowing mobile I made for him. C.S. Lewis writes in his famous sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” that if we really could behold each other we would see every one of us as princes and princesses. The sheer magnitude of each other’s full being would be almost too much to bear. I believe this is the gift of babies: in their tender state, we get to hold them and gather them up into ourselves in a way that we cannot with any other grown, sophisticated being. Babies are present and available to watch and admire. Teenagers, adults? They are hidden behind layers. We don’t have the right words for them. No words to unlock their mysteries. But babies are plain and raw and available. They are revealed in such plain sight that even the most random of strangers feels the freedom to come up and give them a pinch (which of course bothers the heck out of me when it happens to Casper).

This is what Jesus said about the children, that we must become like one of them to inherit the kingdom. Throw off sophistication. Discard posturing. Repent of pretension. Stop hiding. Risk being known. Forgive others when they misunderstand you. Let yourself be simply present and alive. Rejoice.

Adam and Kristin's Wedding Homily

Published with permission from the good couple. Written out of love for them. Inspired by the need for us to all live more deeply into our marriages and hopefully to help frame marriage properly for some of you who hope to be married some day.

It is good to be single too. I enjoyed being single for 29 years!
......................................

Read July 22, 2011

“He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Colossians 1:17

Kristin and Adam, friends and family, Father God, your Son and Holy Spirit,

Let me start by saying that I am extremely glad to be included in this ceremony for at least two good reasons. First, because I love these two people greatly. As our dean of the chapel says frequently about campus ministry, we fall in love often and we have to say goodbye often. I do fall in love with college students regularly. It is difficult to see them leave. So any chance to be involved in the lives of Adam and Kristin post graduation is a soul-warming blessing. My wife and I have had the privilege of offering them some marriage counseling these past few months. And the cliché is true, when you teach you really do receive more than you give.

The second reason why I’m thankful to be a part of this ceremony is because I believe in marriage so fiercely. It is no mistake that the Scriptures use marriage and family as a lens through which we can understand our relationship with God and our participation in the church. So as I share a few thoughts here about marriage I’m speaking first to Adam and Kristin, but I’m also speaking to my own soul, to my own marriage and to the rest of us who have much to learn about our love for God through the context of our love for each other.

We are all gathered here today to participate in one of the gladdest of occasions we can know this side of heaven. There is a delight we experience in witnessing the union of two people that little else compares with.

As I’ve imagined this day for several months, the picture I’ve held in my mind’s eye is of Adam’s grin spread from ear to ear with his face turned that bright red that many of us know well. For those of you who haven’t seen this, any time Adam has become the center of attention these past three/four years that I’ve known him, the fair skin of his face becomes instantly flushed with red. I’ve imagined Kristin’s face no less filled with light, and life and hope.

Yes, here you both are standing in front of all these people who have come from far and near. And we are all here because of you, because of the story of your falling in love, how your love has matured and how you have made the decision to commit your lives to each other and spend the rest of your days together. So I say, let your faces beam red and beautiful. This is most definitely your day.

One of the disciplines of marriage we talked about is choosing to be near and draw close to our spouses. Even though this homily is brief, we shouldn’t rush. Hold each other tight. Take a deep breath. Let’s linger here for a bit. [look around you, gather in this moment, treasure this day, absorb this place, these people, be near each other]

As performing artists the three of us know that it is possible to perform a dance or play a song without really being inside the dance or the song. We rehearse. We know our parts and we simply let muscle memory take over and suddenly the performance is finished and we have not found are way into the moment. We haven’t been present.

A wedding ceremony can be like this as surely as an entire marriage. Will your marriage be a lifelong journey of growing deeper in love? Of discovering more of yourself in the love and life of the other? As the years go by will you discover the particular love language each of you speak? Will you get better at listening and learning with each other?

Or will you let the busyness of life swallow you. Will marriage become a convenient arrangement of two good friends who happen to live in the same house and share a few children? 

The bad news is that there seem to be more reasons today not to get married than to make this commitment. We are surrounded by examples of broken marriages, suffering families, exhausted parents, bitter spouses and indifferent spouses.

Yet, the Good News is always bad news before it is Good. We need to understand what we are being saved from before we can conceive of how much help we need to live our lives.

The Good News is that your marriage has great promise. My wife and I have gotten to know you. We’ve heard you talk about what you love most in each other. We can clearly see that you are in love. The Good News, however, is greater than your own love. The Good News is that marriage has less to do with being in love with each other as it does with being in love with God.

Yes, today is your day. Today you are both on display, but the best News is that it is truly the person and love of Jesus Christ that is on display through you. The Psalmist declares, “look to him and be radiant so your faces will not be ashamed. (Psalm 34:5)” If you are smiling today, if any of us are excited and glad for you it is because we believe that the Author and Perfector of our faith is here. He has brought your stories together. And so we are looking to him. We are gazing at Christ through the beauty of the two you. Adam, you are God’s gift to Kristin. Kristin, it is God’s good pleasure to give you as a gift to Adam. Together, you are a gift to the rest of us and so we join into your joy.

The only way you can be alive to each other in this marriage for several years to come, the only way to grow deeper in love with each other and to be present in each other’s lives is if you maintain the discipline of being present to Christ, looking to him, taking him into your hearts and minds and living through Him.

The Apostle John calls this, “abiding.” “If you abide in me and I abide in you, you will bear much fruit but apart from me, you can do nothing” Jesus says to us in chapter 15 of the Gospel of John.

Jesus tells us earlier in chapter six of the Gospel that we must eat his body and drink his blood. When the disciples heard this, they agreed this was a hard teaching. Indeed, what did Jesus mean? The Lord’s Supper, eating the bread and drinking the wine is the most significant practice where we as Christians regularly set aside the busyness of our lives. We bring our anxious selves to the table and eat, we imbibe, we clothe ourselves, we draw close, we remain and dwell inside of, and we abide in the very person, the very being of God.

In the Lord’s Supper, Jesus is the person who is most brightly put on display. Yet the Lord’s Supper is not just a weekly or monthly practice. This is also our daily sacramental invitation, to sit at his table to eat of him and to abide in Him.

Here is the key of what I want to say to you today: we can abide in each other only if we first abide in Him.

When the Scriptures speak about a man leaving his father and mother and cleaving to his wife so that they become one flesh, we are not assuming that you will dissolve into each other. By becoming one in Christ you do not lose what makes each of you unique. That is adolescent infatuation. We’ve all witnessed relationships where the two people disappear into each other, where neediness grabs onto neediness, loneliness onto loneliness.

Instead, in Christ each of you come to this marriage with a fountain-of-living water-and-life flowing through you. Christ is alive in each of you and here is the Mystery of being one in Christ:

Kristin, I’ve heard Adam describe what he loves about you. You are the trusting friend; the patient one. The friend who believes the best of others. The friend who is kind and easy to be with. We all know you as a hard working artist, a dancer and a dance teacher, but the only way for you to discover more about your particular uniqueness is if you abide in Christ and if you abide in Adam through Christ.

Adam, Kristen has also described what she loves about you.  You posses an integrity and a concern about what is right. You care deeply about important ideas. We know you as the musician and the growing church leader. Yet, the only way for you to discover more about your particular uniqueness is if you abide in Christ and if abide in Kristin through Christ.

I am very close to the Roman Catholic view of marriage. Catholic’s believe that like the Lord’s Supper, marriage is one of the sacraments. And what is sacrament? A sacrament is that which edifies, that which appropriates the life of Christ into our own lives. Through the Sacraments we become more like Christ. The mystery is that through the joyful, fiery furnace of marriage Adam, you will become more you, the fuller and more true Kenneth Adam Nelson as you fall more in love with Kristin. And Kristin, you will become the fuller and more true Kristin Benner Nelson as you fall more in love with Adam.

Of course I am talking about genuine marriage, the real sacrifice of love that no film or radio song can capture. I heard a man from India once say, “In America, you shop for wives. In India we marry and learn the discipline of love.”

You’ll have the opportunity to get to know the worst about each other. You’ll see the darkness and you’ll be tempted to judge each other, to hold grudges, to doubt, to grow apart and let indifference define your days. We charge you today: do not let any numbness or deception, indifference or bitterness take foothold in your home. The discipline of marital love requires the grace of our persistence in loving and especially the love that comes through forgiveness.

This is another glimpse at the mystery of Biblical marriage: while the rest of our society participates in marriage contractually, while many agree to remain in a marriage as long as it lives up to their expectations—as long as it meets their perceived personal needs—the Christian marriage, instead, is empowered by something that no other religion or philosophy offers: you have access to the radical power of forgiveness. You are able to make the covenant till death can part you not on your own strength, not from the resources of your own kindness, or generosity. Christian marriage is radically counter-cultural in the sense that you are both called upon to forgive each other daily. As you abide in Christ, as you fall deeper in love with each other, you posture your lives toward each other through the discipline and indeed the joy of daily forgiveness. You must forgive Jesus says seventy times seven. The fountain of love and life flowing through you is this fountain of forgiveness.

Our confession is that all things were made by Christ. All things were made through him. All things are held together in him. We believe that if Christ were not seated on the throne, all of the cosmos would fall apart. Likewise, your marriage will be held together when the Christ of radical forgiveness remains on the throne of your hearts.

I close with this prayer from Colossians 1:9,10

“For this reason we will not cease praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God.”

Let it be so Lord Jesus. Amen.

New List of TOPICS - Blog Edit

I really try not to take blogging too seriously. This blog has been mostly a clearinghouse for whatever is rumbling inside. Earlier this summer, I wrote a post on Super-Pop Worship and had lots of readers. And every writer/artist loves and audience. Any who say they don't are lying or confused. Of course it makes sense that anything on corporate worship would draw more interest since that is my main work. Of course it would take me five years to realize that I should focus more on this topic.

So, in the spirit of making this blog more accessible to readers who are more interested in corporate worship, I've simplified my Index and turned it into a list of TOPICS. I simplified the topics to help someone move beyond the less interesting ephemera of my life (ie. Updates) and the political drivel (ie. Banter).

Here is a brief description of each TOPIC.

'Urban' Life
Urban farming, vermicomposting, home craft/design...anything I'm doing in the home or neighborhood to avoid living a life of "quiet desperation." Urban is used loosely.

Art
I'm a worship leader and a college professor, but I'm mostly a pastor of artists. I care mostly about creativity, creative people, creative living, creative thinking. Art.

Banter
A catch-all for anything that doesn't fit the other TOPICS. Earlier in 2008 I was writing lots about politics, but I've grown cynical and tired of that.

Books
Recommendations and the occasional review.

Corporate Worship
Anything to do with liturgy, worship music and corporate worship music.

Film
If I could do it over, I might have done a degree in film studies. A few reviews.

Good Quotes
Explains itself

Ministry
Catchall for such related topics.

Music
Mostly about independent music. Some on recording. Some reviews.

Ordinary Neighbors
My 'band," well my musical project with my wife.

Television
We've gotten addicted to a few cable TV series. Recommendations and the occasional review.

Updates
Catchall for my life. I'm not going to get into tweeting ever. This is for those friends/family who want more detail than facebook can provide.

What Food Feeds Your Soul?
Because I'm always looking for ways to subvert gnostic practices. This one goes with 'Urban' Life.

What Music Feeds Your Soul?
A series that had pretty solid readers. I don't know why I stopped writing it. Some of the recent posts on corporate worship would fit. 

Writings
A few real publications and a few self-published. This will contain sermons and other public addresses.

As always, I love the interaction. Dialogue keeps me thinking and growing. If you don't want to post public comments, you can email me a bannerj AT hope.edu

Eighth Day Farm Benefit Dinner - PLEASE COME!

I've mentioned before that I'm on the advisory board for Jeff Roesing's Eighth Day Farm. We are putting together a benefit dinner to raise money for the farm. You can see the invitation below. I would love it if any of you were interested in joining us on Friday, August 26th at the urban plot on the corner of 30th & Pine (The old Zion Lutheran Preschool). I'm close to confirming that some Hope students will be playing some bluegrass/folk music. We almost have secured the chef to cook the meal and are still looking for a few restaurants to offer some appetizers. Most of the produce will be provided by Eighth Day, but I believe some will come from other local CSAs like Groundswell and Eater's Guild. We'll have meat provided by Earl's Meats and it looks like we also have a deal with some local breweries and wineries for beverages.

There will be a silent auction with artwork that has been donated by a few area artists (Andy Krio, Emily Christensen, Billy Mayer). Susanna will be offering her two books and an hour of poetry writing lessons for children and/or adults. I'm putting up a complete worm compost bin with worms and personal guidance of getting started. I believe there will also be a really nice and easy to use composter. Jeff and Andy will also be auctioning two people/families personal planing and counsel for their home vegetable gardens. We are looking for more things to auction. If you have anything to donate, we can offer you a tax deduction.

We are especially interested in hosting anyone interested in food issues and community development. If you have suggestions of who I can make personal invitations to, please let me know (bannerj at hope.edu).

Jeff has put countless hours into this farm/community development project over the past two years without collecting a salary. We hope and pray for the community support to help Eighth Day move into its third year and for Jeff to start being compensated. Please consider joining us for this important event. To RSVP for the event (by August 16th), either send us an email through the contact for on our site or, contact Josh Hauch at 616-510-0606.

Comments? Writing = Exact Thoughts

Apologies to Nick or any others who might not have expected me to reply to their comments in a full blog post. I realized that I might have breached some trust in this "online classroom" I am trying to develop here. I'm just overeager to have interaction. It is like having a student raise her hand in class. Get the discussion going!

From now on if you've got something that you'd like to interact about and don't necessarily want to go 'public' please feel free to email me bannerj@hope.edu.

If I am anything, I am a teacher. Five years in secondary ed. Five years teaching a few college courses. That is why it makes sense for me to be a worship leader at a college. I've got a huge classroom here. Mostly I hope this blog helps me interact with Hope College students more intentionally and thoughtfully. 

I spent three days earlier this summer reading with a student going into the 8th grade. I used to teach grade 6 language arts. I picked Touching Spirit Bear a book I used to teach and know well. He is a great kid. Very bright. A great reader with attention to details, but we talk about how hard it is for him to share his thoughts in discussion.

Here is my soapbox yet once again: we largely lack skills of conversation in our society. We are good consumers, but the only way for us to own ideas is to know how to take the thoughts bouncing around in our heads and put them into sentences. If it is helpful to say things out loud, it is even more helpful to write the thoughts out.

Sir Francis Bacon: "Writing maketh and exact [person]."

W.H. Auden/ E.M. Forster/ Saul Bellow: "How do I know what I know until I see what I say?"

Another comment on Super-Pop...'Ecumenical Taste'

Again, my response was getting long. So I'll just keep making these new posts rather than hiding them in the comment section. 

I dig it Nick. Great thoughts. Helpful feedback. And your words are kind. Don't worry about adding more expectation. I've known those expectations in many many forms for five years now. If I couldn't handle it, I would have already looked for other work! I'm always excited about a good discussion. The interaction is what helps me learn most...not just the writing. So, thanks.

I'm mindful here of the language Paul uses in Corinthians about all things being lawful but not necessarily profitable. I somewhat agree and disagree with you about my role in making the worship event 'happen.' Yes, there is a sense that certain leaders have a kind of gifting, what some call an anointing. I hope I have that anointing and want eagerly to grow in it. Yet, I'm leery of putting any leader on a spiritual pedestal. I don't like how high our stage is Dimnent. I don't like over lighting the stage or video projections of the worship leader's face. I believe we should be focusing on the corporate experience of singing and praying together.  I know too many worship leaders who seemed to be 'with it' spiritually, yet whose lives are a wreck...broken families, homes, sexual sin, deceit, greed.  This is typical of our celebrity cult and must be subverted. The people on stage cannot be seen as more spiritual and in tune with God. Much of what I want to do is be strong enough of a leader to frame the worship event and then get out of the way. There is of course much more to talk about just in this one section of the worship leader's role. I'll move on.

The greater role of a worship leader isn't necessarily his/her presence and leadership in the event as it is his/her stewardship of identifying what is truly 'profitable.' Songs at 130 bpm might be helpful for you. It may be very good for me to learn by stretching myself into this style, yet is a steady diet of only uptempo songs spiritually healthy? I don't think so. That is why I don't call the music we do "praise music," nor are the bands "praise teams." There are many other arenas of worship that God has called us to other than Thanksgiving and Celebration (I laid out some of the main themes of worship HERE). I just happen to be on a journey of joyfully rediscovering how to lead a congregation to "rejoice always...and again I say rejoice." That is why I'm thinking about super-pop worship, listening to it and trying to discern it.

A large purpose in my writing and teaching is to instigate a larger conversation about the kind of discernment a worship leader must wield when picking songs, arranging songs, putting a service together in order to best form the congregation of worshipers and then leading the service. There are black and white areas when we engage such discernment, but must avoid being prescriptive. This means that what might work at Hope College for our campus ministry might not be the best for the church down the street or across the country. I cannot prescribe what is best for every other ministry. Instead, a biblical and theologically informed conversation and discernment will help each of us work out questions of song selection, arrangement, public presence in our respective ministries...in fear and trembling. 

My particular journey right now while I learn with Hope College students is how to get better at more uptempo songs. There are some super-pop songs that I will not lead and I'm bold enough to argue shouldn't be bothered with anywhere. BUT I'm discovering some uptempo songs that are delightful and nourishing. However, while I want to be teachable and stretch in doing more uptempo songs, I try to also work harder at introducing more hymns and am always looking for contemplative songs and especially songs written outside of North America. I like what you said about the need of diversity of sounds. Frank Burch Brown calls this "ecumenical taste." Harold Best claims that often when we say that we won't sing that song, what we really mean is that we don't want to sing with those people. Often what is profitable is something of a diverse diet of various worship themes and worship sounds.

This final topic which I won't elaborate on here in this post is that while I want to grow in ecumenical taste, a diversity of worship themes, sounds, tempos, pop rock, folk, bluegrass, global, choirs etc., we cannot be too worried about trying to cram all this diversity into a single worship service. We have in campus ministry two semesters to try many, many things. That is what makes my work both hard and exciting. I hope people can hear a bit of 'ecumenical taste' on this year's worship recording, Morning & Evening.  It is also available on iTunes now I believe.

Thanks again for your thoughts. Blogging would be boring if nobody offered their thoughts. PEACE

Comments on Super-Pop Worship Music

WOW! Comments! FUN!  I've tried not to take this blog too seriously and to allow it to be a place for me to dump whatever I'm thinking or living. BUT, of course considering my ministry and teaching it makes sense that the corporate worship posts garner the most reactions. I started to write this in the comment section of the last post but it was getting long.

Ryan/Kevin, thanks for the particular band references. I was into DCT up to Jesus Freak and stopped there. I think that was my senior year of high school or freshman year of college? They just got too pop for me.

Kevin, I don't know if I'd recognize a Reliant K song if I heard it. I'll do some youtubing.

OKC Big D, your personal accounts are invaluable. I'd love to hear more next time we are together. Were you saying that the 'eschewing' of CCM artists is good or bad?

Wen, ironically my brief time with JMM made me want listen to his record. Such a stink about "sloppy wet kiss." It took me some time to get past that too but there is so much in his record. He is about as earthy as I've met in the contemp worship scene. Yeah, the vids will probably bewilder me though. I wonder how much control he has over such things. He is a fascinating example of what is happening with Christians worship and art. I asked him if being on Integrity was a good fit. I think they used to distribute all the old Vineyard cassette tapes I listened to.

Regarding what we might think about JMM in 50 years: I'm seriously getting to a point where I don't know if it is possible to use the litmus test-of-time to judge much of anything in worship or music for that matter. It is a standard in my gut that I want, but I'm struggling to apply it when honestly considering what is happening now with worship music and the internet and music distribution. As a historian, you have to acknowledge that the 'canon' of hymns, is really a farce when you look cross denominationally. There are thousands and thousands of hymns and that was when we had such limitations in terms of publishing. On one hand a good song should somehow become classic and stand the test of time. On the other hand, isn't it good that many many of God's people are responding to him creatively? Yes stand the test of time, but time for which people group? Music and art is not denominational any more, it is tribal in its many independent manifestations. Lots more to think about on this question though. Thanks for your response.

Super-Pop Worship?

I don’t know how I remembered: Linkin Park? There was a whole wave of pop rock bands that got big shortly after I graduated from college in 1997. In the five years that followed, I was securely snug into Bridgeway Church in Oklahoma City.  Many of us were writing our own worship tunes. And we didn’t listen to the radio, so we missed Linkin Park.*

When I took the position at Hope College in 2006, a year had passed since (according to wikipeida) Linkin Park had reached international fame. Yesterday I pulled up a few of their videos on youtube and now so much of the super-pop worship music makes much more sense to me.

And another: Newsboys. Again, we weren’t listening this band in my church either. Their worship hits began hitting CCM radio in 05-06.

I made a definite effort last summer to find a few songs that were over 112 bpm…maybe even 115. Halfway through the school year one student asked me why I didn’t lead any uptem-po music. I mentioned the few songs that we’d added, and he responded, “no…I mean really fast…like over 130 bpm.”

Shew.

He ended up emailing me a link to five songs ranging from 130-144 bpm. I confess it is only till just this past week that I looked up the songs on youtube.

My first obstacle is watching people worship. I don’t understand the need to video the arena worship rock event. The lights and the rest of the visual production don’t draw my attention to God. My attention is fixed on a spectacle.

My second obstacle is the lyrics. Lyrics that fit such fast tempo tend to be overly simple. Of course, there is nothing wrong with simplicity. Some of the simplest things can be the most profound. There is nothing wrong with rehearsing the core truths of the faith. Merton said we will always be beginners—all of us.

The question is if the simplicity serves a consumable good or a transcendent reality. This is where the subjective responses to the songs is apparent. Who I am and how I’m made as a musical creature makes it hard to listen to these super-pop worship songs on the internet and discern if or how they could ever serve my campus ministry. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt though. I remember “Trading My Sorrows” from a long time ago. When did I become too cool to sing and dance to that song? In the right context at the right time, perhaps that song could still be very helpful for my spirit and worship. Likewise, with the right leadership and the right context perhaps any of these super-pop worship songs could move us closer to the presence and likeness of Christ. Perhaps!

The great fear is sentimentality. Milan Kundera’s definition of the kitsch is synonymous with sentimentality: "Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch."

Sentimentality, then, is an emotion about having an emotion. Thus my concern about the spectacle of the video performance: is our emotion a reaction to God, his truth and revelation or to the A/V production? But you say, so much good music and film is made with vast amounts of production. Surely Bach’s cantata’s were an enormous production? Again, the question between manipulation and formation is whether the production draws us into the revelation of God, or if we become distracted by the gadgetry of our technology.

The jury is still out for me on the matter of super-pop worship. I confess cynicism and elitism. I want to be a leader who loves his people. My realization is that much of the difference between what the aforementioned student and me is age. If he is 20 years old, that means he was born in 1991. When I was 16 I was listening to Rich Mullins and REM. When he was 16 (only four years ago), he was maybe listening to Linkin Park and the Newsboys’ worship records or some derivations. It is hard to believe that I am a veritable dinosaur…just when I was starting to love playing the electric guitar.

Here is the next layer of the issue at hand: Kundera’s other famous quote about Kitsch: “Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists.” Many of my counterparts, leaders my age, have moved beyond anything above 90 bpm in order to avoid kitsch and sentimentality altogether. Yet the Psalms call upon us to shout to the Lord and even to dance and clap our hands. How does their music lead their worshipers into this biblical worship expression? Yes, pop music can be awkward, a prickly pear of an issue. However, we are called to redeem our culture and that means wading into the proverbial shite. At least I know that is what I am called on in the love and service of God and these college students.

U2 is on tour this summer. I'm not a huge fan myself, but another way of getting at my musings above is by asking how many of my college students would even want to go? I know of at least two who did. Another student a few years ago really hit me between the eyes when he referred to U2 as "dad-rock." I'm not a huge fan, but still...I feel old.

*I admit that I may have missed the other, real bands that have affected the sound of super-pop worship. Anybody have suggestions?