Choosing Appropriate Praise Songs and Hymns for Corporate Worship

"The church possesses two books to aid in worship: the Word of God and the hymnal. The Scriptures stand as the perfect and unwavering revelation of God throughout the ages. It is our rule, and the only infallible word on all matters of our faith and practice. The hymnal exists in submission to the authority of Scripture and assists the people of God in singing truth. Its songs are an ever-flowing stream, sung by people responding to God in worship.

Choosing hymns for the local church is a sacred task. Even when the hymnal used is electronic and lacks binding and pages, the practice of Christian singing remains vital. As Colossians 3:16 says, Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

In this text, Paul teaches the Colossians the importance of singing in the local church. The hymns and praise songs we sing are not to be chosen clumsily, but with intentionality and with care. Hymns have the ability to teach us, to admonish us, and to provoke our hearts to worship our Savior with thankfulness.

CHOOSE HYMNS THAT TEACH

The hymns of the church ought to be built on, shaped by, and saturated with the Word of God. While the New Testament is silent on many of the specifics of corporate worship, Scripture is clear that the Word of Christ must be central. When the hymns we sing are aligned with the Word of God, our souls are nourished by its truth. Singing is a unique way to “let the word of Christ dwell richly” in us. One reason our songs should be closely tied to the Word of God is their didactic effects. Singing for the Christian is formative and responsive, and therefore must be informed by Scripture. We learn what we sing.

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.

Music and Worship Are Not Synonyms: Why I Am Not a Worship Leader

We are blessed to have like-minded, faithful, and gifted believers serving and leading our music and worship ministry at LCBC.  The following article by minister of music Dan Kreider provides a lot of food for thought.  "I lead the music ministry at my church. My role as a musician has several facets. I plan—and arrange, if needed—the music we use. I lead weekly rehearsals for the singers and instrumentalists. Under the guidance of the elders, I set the ideological and philosophical direction of the music ministry as a whole and share that vision with everyone who serves with me. And on Sunday, our weekly preparation culminates in two morning services and one evening service. I lead the music itself, either from the piano or directing from the podium, usually with my voice, and (hopefully) always by modeling the visible exertion of hearty participation. And I lead the congregation through the flow of the planned musical elements, making brief comments or reading Scripture passages that build them up in their faith.

But I’m not a worship leader. Why? Because that’s the wrong title for my role, for two reasons.

1. Music and worship aren’t synonyms.
Worship is a misunderstood term in our contemporary context. At one level, a word means what the collective culture decides it will mean, and definitions can certainly change over time. But it’s a relatively recent trend to refer to music as “worship.” And though the new definition seems fairly universal at this point, its evolution has created a conflict with its previous meaning from Scripture.

What is worship? To answer merely with a simplistic definition such as “ascribing worth” would be an etymological cop-out. One might as well be asked to describe a rainbow in a single word. Here’s a brief distillation of several thoughts that, taken together, should provide enough clarity to address the original statement.

William Temple defines worship this way: “Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of the conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose” (from Readings in St. John’s Gospel). This is poetic and certainly true, but David Petersen’s definition is even more expressly rooted in Scripture itself: “Worship of the living and true God is essentially an engagement with Him on the terms that He proposes and in the way that He alone makes possible” (from Engaging with God).