I have a few thoughts and questions about music and worship that coalesced tonight during the Rock’s leaders meeting. (It was an amazing meeting, by the way…those of you that missed it really missed out…more on this meeting later…maybe…hopefully). Anyhow, the following also stems from some conversations that Tony and I have had lately.
I would like to specifically invite the comments and ideas from people actually involved in music ministry and/or are actual musicians. If I am not seeing this rightly, please let me know.
Music is such a great tool that God has given us to worship Him and connect with him. Pop culutre and the church alike seem to mainly focus on the “performer and audience” paradigm of experiencing music. In the mainstream music world, people buy (or download) their music of choice, listen to it and sing along, and maybe go to a few concerts and sing along. A few people might learn how to play guitar and jam out a little themselves, but this is a minority (I would guess).
In the world of the church and ‘worship music,’ a few peopel who have a great degree of talent and skill have the opportunity to play or sign in front of a group of people (or record a CD) and the rest of us sing along. Sure, we are trying to think about what we are singing, to really mean it and offer it as a praise or other type of statement to God. Most of the time I think most of us are just singing, enjoying the music, and doing very little thinking about it. I am guilty of this myself. I would suppose that God is honored anyway by a congregation giving praises to him.
A couple of verses came to mind tonight during the meeting:
“What then shall we say, brothers? When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church.” — 1 Corinthians 14:26
“Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord.” — Ephesians 5:19
” Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.” — Colossians 3:16
And this one I found when I did a quick search:
“Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise.” — James 5:13
It seems that making music and sharing it with others was very much an every day part of the culture of the church duing those early years. Not just for a few performers or especially skilled people, but for average and ordinary people. Maybe some of it was cultural. I have read and heard a number of times that before the invention of recording devices, radios and the like, that music performance was a prime form of entertainment and something that a great many people did to fill the time. A lot of people today still play an instrument, but for the majority it is a childhood or youth pursuit (like piano lessons in grade school or marching band in high school), but it isn’t something they do often as an adult. It is a practice very separated from the popular music culture, anyway.
Here is where a little bit of speculation on my part comes in. I don’t play an instrument appropriate for the current culturally accepted style of music for venues like Stonebrook and the Rock (I did, however, play the flute for 10 years). I know I don’t sing well enough to have anyone like hearing me amplified. I have no first hand experience of what goes into making music for the benefit of a congregation or event.
I wonder, though, if people who do have some amount of interest of talent in those areas get easily discouraged if they are not good enough or don’t have the time required to be in a church/Rock band but yet might have something worth sharing with others in some venue. I wonder if some of us who don’t have musical skills typically found to be culturally acceptable or who maybe even have only a very small amount of musical skill and gifting don’t have something to offer in the way that the above verses describe.
Don’t get me wrong — I am not advocating putting bad musicians on stage or replacing the Lone Strangers with performances from the classically trained musicians in our midst. I am just wondering if in our drive to have awesome Sunday morning and Friday night productions we are missing (or at least down playing) a completely different aspect of worship in music/song that is talked about in the verses above.
I know that team meetings could always be benefited by small group worship, but we haven’t encouraged this as a culture within the Rock, at least from my obversation. We don’t really talk about those opportunities or encourage people to learn to do this. Some people that would never be that great on stage would be great in that venue. What if we encouraged a larger number of people in the Rock to learn to play guitar not so they could play on stage but so they could better edify other brothers and sisters and apply the verses above? (It seems like a good thing for church plants, too).
We also don’t encourage the “less musically talented” among us to find ways of applying the above verses, even if it means singing an off key song to your Lifegroup because it is meaningful to you, or finding ways to use other forms of making music to the Glory of God. Or maybe even just reading lyrics of a meaningful song (Thanks, Taran for doing that during Counter Culture team dinner) or playing a CD of a song and explaing what it meant to you. I think those things apply the above verses too.
So, those are my thoughts. Please help me refine them if you see something that is off track. I am not sure where I am personally going to go from here with them, but I definitely want to seek the Lord more about this area.
So, the hard drive has been coming up with some errors and corrupted files over the last couple days. I just assumed it was probably due to writing and deleting such a large amount of data all the time. (The program uses one format, I export into another, and then end with a third and fourth format for final storage — the first two, larger files get deleted each time). I hadn’t done any defragging or error checking since starting the project and it probably needs it badly. And it sure didn’t help that on Thursday Madeline turned off the computer in the middle of me exporting a file.
