The great worship grab

It’s been happening for a while now. Slowly but surely, in churches around Australia and presumably the world. The meaning of “worship” has been changing. From “the stuff you do in church”* to “singing”.

You hear it everywhere:

• “She’s our worship leader” [translation - She leads the singing]
• “We had a great time of worship” [We had lots of singing]
• And one I got walloped with recently: “If you don’t focus on worship, you can’t call it a church service” [Fair enough under the traditional meaning of worship, but not, in my opinion, if worship = singing]

And it’s not just any singing we’re talking about. It means singing the kinds of songs made popular world-wide by Sydney mega-church Hillsong. Many of these song are good – contemporary in style and language, varied in genre (although generally sticking to ballads/pop). They’re also suited to playing by ensembles, giving a larger number of people – especially younger people – opportunities to participate and lead. Although this can be a mixed blessing…

But such songs are notoriously difficult to sing. Many popular contemporary “worship” songs feature changes in key, tempo and time signature. They frequently have long intros and bridges, unexpected pauses, syncopated rhythms and unpredictable structures. Old hymns may err on the side of dull, and use language that makes the King James Version sound modern, but at least they were designed for congregational participation. If you didn’t know it, you could always pick it up by the second verse. New “worship” songs tend to require more numerous (and often more talented) personnel to achieve an acceptable “performance” (if that’s the right word – and I think it is). “Great is your Faithfulness” takes a pianist and piano. “One Way” by Hillsong United involves, well, see for yourself:

(I hope the skateboarding at the beginning is optional. We have a number of over-80s in our church and the collateral damage could be quite nasty.)

So how has such singer-unfriendly music become such a part of worship for so many churchgoers as to become synonymous with worship itself? A few weeks ago, I went undercover to a nearby Hillsong-style church and I made a tremendous discovery. Maybe everyone else has known this for years, but during the worship/singing time in churches of this persuasion – which typically occupies the first 20 minutes or more of the service – you don’t actually sing. Oh, the band and bank of “worship leaders” sing, but you in the congregation don’t. You stand, clap, wave your arms, and sing the occasional chorus line or snatch of lyric, but it’s the kind of “singing along” you get at a rock concert, not in a community choir.

This of course explains why these hard-to-sing songs are so popular: in their native habitat, they’re not sung, they’re performed/listened to. Great if you’re tone deaf, but overall, I would argue, not a good thing for the church. Why? Firstly, it has the effect of disempowering the people in the pews (by minimising their input into the service) and concentrating authority up the front (by turning musicians into pop stars).

Secondly, this style of “worship” also puts your typical small-to-medium and ok-to-struggling church in a no-win situation. If they try to offer something more contemporary in the way of music, emulating the Hillsong style but without the Hillsong resources, they’re doomed to mediocrity. Embarrassed young people (should they have any) will flee to the big church up the road.

Thankfully, there are alternative ways of being bringing “contemporary” music into church without going doing down the arena-pop road. I’d encourage anyone to check out the music of my former fellow TEAR colleague Dave Andrews. Dave’s voice makes Bob Dylan sound like an angel, but the Brisbane-based “ChristiAnarchist” has written several CDs worth of songs best described (by Dave himself) as:

not Hill Songs, but Valley Songs, easy-to-sing songs about the joys and sorrows of ordinary people working quietly for love and for justice ‘in the valley of the shadow of death’… These songs [are] not written for performance, but for participation. These songs are for people to sit with, to walk around with and to sing along with.

Even more radically, you could question the hegemony of the music = worship equation. For example, why concentrate on one form of artistic expression? Why only sing to God, when there’s no reason we couldn’t spice things up a bit by painting, collage, clay sculpture, performance poetry, theatre sports or any other style of art we can think of. (I have deliberately excluded liturgical dance here. If you need to know why, click here.) I worshipped at a church for many years where this model was explored very effectively with people of all ages.

And why not return to the broader perspective that sees all that we do in church as worship ? The origin of the word “wor” is “worth”, so in worship we give God “God’s worth”. Surely we can do this through prayer, silence, discussion, ritual and more – things that don’t involve a cast of dozens or a budget of thousands. Heaven forbid, we could even count as worship the things we do outside church and in our Monday to Saturday lives…

*I’m not saying this meaning is the right one, but it certainly was the received wisdom.

Advertisement