How Contemporary Worship Music Is Shaping Us—for Better or Worse

I am grateful for the faithful, biblical leadership that Brad S provides as he and our gifted musicians/singers help God's people worship the Lord with songs/hymns of praise.  As one travels around the world and worships you quickly realize that timeless biblical principles govern our corporate worship gatherings (Heb. 10:24-25; Col. 3:16).  

Psalm 150 reminds us that God can be and should be praised with all different kinds of instruments/sounds.  If you doubt this, you really should sign up for the next short missions trip your church takes to India, Africa, or Brazil.  

With that said, the following article is well worth your time.  It is an article that will no doubt lead to much reflection and prayer.  It considers some of the positive and negative ways the contemporary worship music culture has influenced many local church ministries.  It is not a legalistic diatribe against a particular "style" of music.  Instead it is a thorough evaluation of how contemporary worship music is shaping us- for better or worse.  May we do all that we can to worship and serve the Lord "in spirit and in truth."

"It was roughly 50 years ago that young people started bringing their guitars to church. Converts from the hippie culture, known as Jesus People, strummed a chord that would echo around the world. Modern worship was born.

In the ensuing decades, the phenomenon known as “praise and worship music” or “contemporary worship music” has seen its share of developments. By no means a monolithic movement, it has nevertheless coalesced into a highly recognizable sound and ethos, as demonstrated by the numerous parodies that poke fun at its most predictable features. The dust has settled after the so-called “worship wars” of the 1980s and ’90s, and it appears that contemporary worship has emerged victorious in many spheres of evangelical life.

Now that contemporary worship music has become not only a major feature of evangelical identity in North America but also a multimillion-dollar industry, it’s worth asking an often neglected question: How does contemporary worship music shape us?

Worship Music as Sociological Phenomenon

Monique Ingalls, assistant professor of music at Baylor University, tackles this question in her book, Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. Focusing on the decade from 2007 to 2017, she examines modern praise through sociological lenses. Ingalls analyzes five gatherings in which this type of singing plays a prominent role: worship concerts (ch. 1), student conferences (ch. 2), one local congregation in Nashville, Tennessee (ch. 3), public praise parades (ch. 4), and the virtual “community” of online “worship-video” creators and consumers (ch. 5).

Though these social gatherings differ from one another in many respects, one thing unites them: the centrality of contemporary worship music. “For evangelicals, the use of contemporary worship music immediately marks an activity as ‘worship’” (22). Therefore, Ingalls reasons, the act of engaging in modern worship singing produces a sort of “congregation” out of gatherings not traditionally thought of as such. This has deep, often unnoticed, effects on how Christians understand worship and the church.

The main value of Singing the Congregation is its thorough description of the world that contemporary worship music has created.  Ingalls’s book is a work of musicology. Each chapter is full of anthropologist-style “field notes” and insights culled from interviews with worshipers and music ministers alike. As such, the main value of Singing the Congregation is its thorough description of the world that contemporary worship music has created. For that reason, even if musicology is a new field for you, I recommend this book to pastors, worship leaders, and anyone else with an interest in the modern worship movement—fans and critics alike.

To be sure, readers will need to look elsewhere for sustained analysis of the lyrical themes found in modern praise songs. Ingalls’s focus is on worship music as sociological phenomenon, so there is little here in the way of theological interaction with worship lyrics. Still, Ingalls’s in-depth account of how contemporary worship shapes evangelical life proves the axiom that “the medium is the message.” In other words, contemporary worship music not only reflects evangelical values and convictions about how to engage with God, it also profoundly influences those values and convictions.

For me, as a church elder, song leader, and hymn writer who “grew up” musically in a variety of modern worship settings, Ingalls’s book provoked me to reflect on the unintended consequences of contemporary worship music. Rather than proceed with a traditional book review, it may be more useful to my readers to share some ways in which Ingalls’s work has prompted my own thinking.

So here are four areas of reflection, which I invite you to consider with me.

Weak Christianity

Pastor Voddie Baucham's four minute sermon blurb is spot on and is worth listening to. Emotionalism, Mysticism, Sentimentalism, and Anti-Intellectualism continue to plague the contemporary church.

“I’m more offended by the fact that you confronted that sin than I am that that sin offends God. This is where we live today, especially in younger generations.”

“My faith is all about my experience. It’s all about what I feel. It’s all about what I know on the inside. We’re more like Mormons to be honest… These things are true because of my internal witness to these things. And in this mysticism or anti-intellectualism, we don’t often gauge the rightness or wrongness of things by the facts that are presented, but instead…based on the emotions that we experience…”

Pastors, "just preach what the Bible says!"

Lucado, Trump, "Evangelicals" and the 2016 Election

Photo Credit: http://www.christianitytoday.com/

An earlier post provided a brief overview  of Homespun Gospel: The Triumph of Sentimentality in Contemporary American Evangelicalism.   This new book demonstrates how Max Lucado, Rick Warren, and Joel Osteen have been leading advocates of a hyper-sentimental gospel that has been widely accepted by a large number of religious consumers.   I'll showcase more of the highlights of Homespun Gospel in future articles.

Today's post is devoted to Lucado, Trump, Evangelicals and the 2016 Election (if nothing else consider my 10 takeaways at the conclusion of this article).

What spurred me on to write today's post?  I decided to write this article after I saw how many Christians reposted a "Anti-Trump" blog article written by Pastor Max Lucado.  In the past two months I have never read more critical pieces of a Republican candidate written by conservative and/or Christian authors.  In a follow up interview "America's Pastor"said that he does not normally inject politics into his pastoral ministry.  Lucado noted that "I don’t even put a candidate’s bumper sticker on my car. People don’t attend church to hear my views on a presidential candidate."

Though I do not agree with Lucado's theology on a number of points, (or his philosophy of ministry- see Homespun Gospel), I think his default position on politics and the pulpit is wise.  The centrality of Christ, the gospel, and the core doctrines of Scripture can be unintentionally eclipsed when Christian preachers become political commentators on Sunday morning instead of 'mouthpieces' of God (to use the language of 1 Peter 4:10).   Having said that, if a cultural/political issue is addressed in the Scriptures, the man of God (2 Tim. 2:15) should faithfully communicate God's position on X, Y, or Z (Acts 20:27-35).  (Examples include: the sacredness of life (at conception), God's view of marriage, gender, and human sexuality, a theology of work in relation to welfare, the role of government, the sinfulness of racism and genuine bigotry, etc).

If a minister of the gospel decides to address a controversial, hot-topic issue from the pulpit (such as race relations and the police, the Ferguson riots, social justice, immigration, Israel, welfare and poverty, gender equality, Roe vs. Wade, SCOTUS, etc) they must be very careful to not read their personal opinions into the inspired Text.  If your pastor says, "This is heaven's perspective on such and such" you better be certain that his finger is pointing to a book, chapter, and verse AND that he is rightly interpreting the true meaning of Holy Scripture (Phil Johnson recently called out brother Thabiti Anyabwile for this very thing- see Against Mission Drift).  Over the years, many errors and half-truths have been propagated from American pulpits (often times unknowingly).

So why did "America's Pastor" post an public article that was critical of Donald Trump (the current front-runner of the Republican party)?  

The Triumph of Sentimentality in Contemporary American Evangelicalism (Lucado, Warren, Osteen)

In order to understand what is going on in the church today and in effort to critique what is often lacking (Scripturally speaking), it is quite helpful to understand the major 'players'.  Few Christian authors and pastors have yielded more influence on the church than Max Lucado, Rick Warren, and Joel Osteen.  All three of these celebrity pastors are quoted extensively in a helpful new book titled, Homespun Gospel: The Triumph of Sentimentality in Contemporary American Evangelicalism.  

In this book Todd Brenneman "shows how evangelicals use tropes of God as father, human beings as children, and nostalgia for an imagined idyllic home life to provide alternate sources of social authority, intended to help evangelicals survive a culture that is philosophically at odds with conservative Christianity."

Brenneman divides Homespun Gospel into four penetrating chapters.  The chapter titles alone give the reader some idea of what he or she is going to hear as they make their way through this helpful book.  1) God's in the Business of Giving Mulligans: Sentimentality and Therapeutic Culture.  2) You Are Special:  The Anti-Intellectualism of Sentimental Evangelicalism.  3) New York Times Best-Selling Author" Christian Media and the Marketing of Sentiment.  4) America Looks Up:  Sentimentality, Politics, and American Evangelicalism.