Conviction

Limiting Choices

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As worship leaders, we make many decisions when it comes to choosing songs - what songs we will introduce, what songs will be a part of our set list, what songs will make it to our master song list, and what songs will roll out of rotation and frequency.

The church I serve belongs to a network of churches that has very clear convictions around the kind of songs - but more specifically, the kind of writers - whose songs many of the network churches are willing to use. As I understand it, the concern is essentially that using a song from a particular church or movement is viewed as an endorsement of its theology. Don’t get me wrong, songs matter, and so does theology. Songs often function as portable theology for our congregations. And so therefore we should be discerning about what we put in the minds, mouths, and hearts of our people. But our primary responsibility is not to be gatekeepers of songs, but disciple-makers. We need to teach, lead, and serve in such a way that our people become increasingly discerning of the diet of songs they listen to and love.

As I have developed my own philosophy of worship, and frankly, as worship songs have become an industry saturating our choices as local church worship leaders, it has become harder for me to listen to an album and want to introduce every song to my congregation. Because I am often considering the holes in my master song list, I become less convinced that just because this is an artist I love, and with whom I am theologically aligned, does not mean that every song they send into the world is one I will receive.

Let your convictions guide your choices. If you feel convinced that songs from churches you would not attend will be more harmful than helpful for your congregation, then do not use those songs. My conviction is that we need songs that are deep theologically, and emotive responsively - seldom do those two factors exist in a single song. So that shapes the songs I choose to introduce and the way I construct my set lists.

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30 July: Tuesday Refocus

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“Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don't simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.” - Eugene Peterson

God has spoken and is speaking. He spoke all things into existence and sustains the universe by the word of His power (Genesis 1:3, Hebrews 1:3). His voice brings forth life, and melts the earth (Psalm 29:9, Psalm 46:6). His Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:15). His word is ‘living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of heart.’ Hebrews 4:12

The Word of God, the voice of God is not an accessory to a decent, moral, Christian life, but the reshaping reality of all life for followers of Jesus. ‘But he answered, “It is written, “‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”’ Matthew 4:4

God, You alone have the words of eternal life, may we be nurtured and mobilized by Your Word, for Your glory and for our good, amen.

Amen,

AB

Worship As Pastoral Care

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I once heard Bob Kauflin comment that if worship leaders were to do any kind of continued education, he would encourage them to study Biblical Counseling. Isn’t that interesting? Not necessarily theology, or music theory, not necessarily Greek, Hebrew, or composition, conducting, or sight-reading. No, Biblical Counseling. The longer I lead worship the more I am convinced that leading worship is primarily a pastoral function before it is a musical one. It is pastoral because we are dealing with real human souls. Souls in all of their brokenness and joy, souls in all of their immaturity and experience, souls in all of their comfort and distress, and we are seeking to guide, instruct, teach, and care for them through liturgy, song, Scripture, prayer, and preparation.

Worship As Pastoral Care by William H. Willimon, was one of the books that helped me continue to put language to the pastoral aspect of leading worship. Willimon says,

The history of pastoral care shows two dimensions of the care of our souls: (1) the preservation of spiritual health through preventive or protective care as well as daily guiding and sustaining care and (2) the restoration of spiritual and emotional health if and when dysfunction occurs…

Liturgy is education.  The question before us… is not whether our people will learn when they worship.  The question is, what will they learn when we lead them in worship?  We sometimes forget that we are engaged in education every time we lead the congregation in prayer or in the Lord’s Supper or in any other occasion of public worship.  Unfortunately, people often learn things when they worship that we may not have intended - but they still learn.

Public worship is always an invitation to the individual to risk communion, to move out from oneself into the larger body…

We are not simply choosing songs, we are forming people. Conviction and comfort is the work of the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit will often work through the people of God to voice that conviction or comfort. We must be attentive to the voice of the Spirit in our preparation as well as in our leading. We must choose songs that enable…

The line between work and worship, between the everyday, pedestrian details of the workaday world and the world within the liturgy should be a thin and frequently broken line.

When we see the liturgy and gathering as the people of God as more than something we do once a week, but something we inhabit - something which inhabits us - we are beginning to invite the conviction and comfort of the Holy Spirit more fully into the rhythms of our lives.

Karl Barth says: ‘It is not only in worship that the community is edified and edifies itself.  But it is here first that this continuously takes place.  And if it does not take place here, it does not take place anywhere.’ If the community does not worship, it is not a Christian community.  If worship does not upbuild and sustain the community, it is not Christian worship.

The liturgy is ‘the work of the people,’ it is the action, the yearning, the heartbreak, and the outstretched hands of those who are gathered around the Table and the action, the yearning, the heartbreak, and outstretched hands of the God who deems to meet them in the flesh.