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I’ve been really challenging myself in my congregational worship songwriting to bring the same level, hopefully higher, of lyrical creativity that I would when I’d write “secular” songs. I find it quite shameful that we as a church have stopped using that part of our brains in our worship and particularly in our songwriting. I can’t imagine that the psalmist sat down and in just a moment of clarity and streaming consciousness wrote, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God” (Psalms 42:1Psalms 42:1
English: American Standard Version (1901) - ASV
42 ¹ As the hart panteth after the water brooks, So panteth my soul after thee, O God.  

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English: American Standard Version (1901) - ASV
42 ¹ As the hart panteth after the water brooks, So panteth my soul after thee, O God.  

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). I believe that took devotion and an intense searching of his heart to find the words that captured best what was happening in his spirit at the time. So often we as congregational worship leaders and songwriters, will use an attitude of, “I just want a simple song to praise Jesus” as a musical crutch. But I really think it’s even more than that. I think it’s cheapened our sacrifice in that all we offer is simple phrases which unsurprisingly tends to exercise only the surface areas of our heart, emotions, mind and body. We want total engagement of spirit, heart, strength, mind right?

Don’t get me wrong, I know God is pleased with a simple “I love you Jesus”. That can be very powerful and as long as it is uttered and offered up as truth and not reflex I know God is moved and honored by that. But are we writing “I love you Jesus”, or “You alone or worthy” out of reflex? We’ve sang it so many times, heard it so many times, are we just emulating what we know fits the church and is proven to work?

Shouldn’t we sit in the presence of God, pen in hand, hear what is spoken, then challenge ourselves, how is this best communicated for my church body. We shouldn’t approach it as, how has this best been communicated in the past. Human creativity didn’t stop at Psalms. God is still speaking, moving, and we better learn to capture it and express it with our best in every area. I refuse to settle with any of my lyrics, I have in the past, even very recently. But this has really been driven deep in my heart. No more wasted words, no more reflexively offering up a cheap praise, that’s my religion showing up. I want every part of me engaged in worship of the King of Kings, my creative self has been on vacation and it’s time to return.

It’s been a real struggle these last few weeks of songwriting. This is hard, it goes against every religious bone in my body. To find the balance between creativity, practicality, singability, it’s no easy task. I’ve gotten it wrong in the past and I’m sure I’ll get it wrong again, but one things for certain. All of me will be showing up to write for my God, and in that I know he’s pleased, what else could I desire.

I wanted to include some lyrics from one of today’s lyrical masters Nina Persson of the Cardigans as an example. English isn’t even her first language and she writes some of the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard. I encourage you to buy Long Gone Before Daylight, this was the first album she wrote all the lyrics for, it’s unbelievable. Here’s just a couple examples of her genius:

 

“I never really knew how to move you,

so I tried to intrude through the little holes in your veins and I saw You.

But that’s not an invitation that’s all I get, if this is communication, I disconnect.

I’ve seen you I know you but I don’t know how to connect, so I disconnect.”

The following is possibly one of the greatest lyrical intros to a song I’ve ever heard. These are the first few lines of Please Sister:

“With a sampled heartbeat and a stolen sole.

I sung my songs to have my fortunes told.

And it said you should know that love will never die

But see how it kills you in the blink of an eye”

Lyrics like that grab you, take you inside the purpose of the song, and creatively express the passion that is so obviously felt here.

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Our last poll finished with a whopping 100% saying yes solos are a good thing. I started it off easy, that was a bunny slope poll question. This one is a bit tougher. In this question when I say secular I mean songs obviously not written for corporate worship, not written to glorify God, the writers intention and heart may even be antithetical to the will and heart of God. Can those songs be redeemed, and used in worship to glorify God?

I don’t want to skew the results by giving my opinion at this point so I’ll wait until after the poll is done. The poll can be found in the sidebar or below.

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Radiohead released their latest album In Rainbows last week. You can set your own price and download it from their website. I pre-ordered my download and it all went very seamlessly. I don’t like to give an opinion of an album until after I’ve had the opportunity to listen to it multiple times through. So I’ve been listening to it the last week and my overall impression is positive. I’m a HUGE fan of The Bends and OK Computer, 2 of the best albums ever released. But once they went down the more experimental avenue I started to get less excited about their stuff. I could cherry pick songs I liked from each of their latest cd’s, but I thought they weren’t end to end solid records. But In Rainbows is a terrific blend of their more experimental rhythms and melodies with straight up guitar driven rock.

Now for the guts….First off Jonny Greenwood again shows why he is one of the greatest guitar players of all time. His ear is just incredible, he is able to hear the most incredibly unique guitar parts that just elevate the song to an entirely different level. I’ve never heard him overplay, I’ve never heard him play some cookie cutter lead…he’s incredible. He makes a comeback on this album and creates some beautiful, complex, deep progressions. Ed Obrien(second guitarist) is no slouch either BTW. Let’s take a look song by song:

Read the rest of this entry »

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This is an older video but definitely worth the watch. There Will Be a Light is one of the best cd’s in the last coule years. Ben has always been one of the best live shows around, I think I’ve seen him live 4 or 5 times and each time was memorable. This performance is awesome, I love how this song ends, God went ahead and landed in the middle of the Late Show. Also as a bonus, Marc Ford is playing guitar, former player for Black Crowes, with Ben Harper and from what I’ve heard Marc Ford is now saved. (Teaser: we should hear more about that in the coming Chris Lizotte interview since Chris played with Marc Ford). One more thing, bass players take note, Juan Nelson is one of the baddest players in the biz!

 

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Sally Morgenthaler literally wrote the book on Worship Evangelism, she also co-wrote Emerging Worship along with David Crowder and others. So she is somewhat of a worship authority in the church. I have heard of her and read a few articles on her, but I’ve not read either of those books, for sake of full disclosure. I did recently read an article Sally wrote explaining how she shut down her worship resource site and is now trying to fix the unintended consequences of what her book help create. As an aside I don’t personally hold her responsible for anything, especially since nothing I’ve done in worship has been because of any direction from her.

I have become more interested in her books now because of the pragmatic approach she has now taken. She never meant for worship evangelism to become a Christian subculture outreach where it only witnesses to the churched. It amounted to merely better stage designs, safer contemporary music, and an all tenor choir. She says this in her article about the state of the contemporary worship service:

“No sad songs. No angry songs. Songs about desperation, but none about despair. Worship for the perfect. The already arrived. The good-looking, inoffensive, and nice. No wonder the unchurched aren’t interested.“

I couldn’t agree more with her assessment. It raises an important issue, one we take very seriously at Life Connection Church. Who are we here for and how are we reaching them? Our life is worship, so I believe all evangelism is worship evangelism. So we’re either doing a good job worshiping God or we’ve twisted our worship and our outreach suffers. When we seek to contextualize our worship it’s for the lost, not for the church drifters or church shoppers. I’ll be honest, I look at mega-church worship services and I get a little ill. It’s the cheesiest, most manicured, safe, clean, polished music you can ever witness. That’s not life, it’s not what the lost are experiencing, it’s not even what the saved are experiencing.

I heard a pastor say that after 9/11 the church had no songs to sing. I remember the sunday service after 9/11 and feeling the exact same way. What on earth are we going to play? We’ve sanitized our worship and left a huge slice of human emotion and human experience out of our worship. That certainly isn’t how Psalms was written. We should capture all of life and seek to glorify God through it all. That is currently my focus in my songwriting. Many in our church are struggling with disease, pain, death in the family…how can God see glory in that, how can our music creatively capture that and raise it to God’s ears, his heart. It won’t be pretty and clean, it won’t sell on TBN, but will God be lifted and will the lost feel like God is relevant in their pain? That’s my prayer. One of the greatest sicknesses of the church is avoiding the questions that the lost are asking, I refuse to let that be the case in our worship.

I encourage you to read Sally’s article. I admire how she’s basically put the brakes on what she feels partially responsible for creating in the church, a holy huddle in worship. That isn’t our heart at Life Connection Church, again I’ll use the words of Keith Green,

“I repent of ever having recorded one single song, and ever having performed one concert, if my music, and more importantly, my life has not provoked you into Godly jealousy or to sell out more completely to Jesus!”

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I love this blog by the way, I have been reading so many great articles and it has been a fascinating journey into the minds of a lot of men and women that I really admire. One of which is Mark Driscoll. He is provocative, authentic, truthful and full of sass who is constantly turning out great quotes that get you thinking. In reading through an article he wrote about the dangers and shortcomings of the “megachurch” one quote really stood out to me.

“The major blind spot of megachurches is that they tend to be very effeminate with aesthetics, music, and preaching perfectly tailored for moms. Manly men are repelled by this, and many of the men who find it appealing are the types to sing prom songs to Jesus and learn about their feelings while sitting in a seafoam green chair drinking herbal tea—the spiritual equivalent of Richard Simmons. A friend of mine calls them “evangellyfish” with no spiritual vertebrae.”

Article from Christianity Today called “Men are from Mars Hill” posted 7/04/2006

Wow, that certainly sums up a few churches that I have been to and explains the lack of true masculinity and the over abundance of estrogen found there. I’m happy to say that I think our church strikes an incredible balance in appealing to both men and women from the ambiance, to the worship to the preaching and has found a way to be sensitive but not wimpy, passionate but not flaky and masculine but not chauvinistic. When I read the line about singing prom songs to Jesus it gave me such an image of what I don’t want the worship songs I write to evoke. I don’t ever want my worship to be a big cheesefest with ewwy gooey lyrics that don’t translate into any actual life experience and I think communicating our love to God and His love towards others deserves a bit of forethought and integrity in the delivery. Again, I don’t think that we are in danger of singing worship songs that would appeal to the spiritual equivalent of Richard Simmons, certainly not with Kyle & Aaron at the helm, but it was more of a heart and mind check for me when writing lyrics. Do they sound like they could be playing in the background of some tacky 80’s teen flick or do they sound like a passionate lover pouring out the deep cry of her heart to her true love? Even as I’m writing this I want to tell myself that if I did say something lame and hooky to God, He sees my heart and would know the true source of the words but since scripture says “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks” I better check my heart to see if its producing shallow and juvenile puppy love songs or deep expressions of a life lived in true intimacy with Jesus.

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My previous post was about a worship conference at Mars Hill church and I eluded to how much I appreciated Mark Driscoll’s strategy and theology. Recently Christianity Today interviewed Mark Driscoll and there’s certainly no shortage of controversy in the article. I love it! One great quote from Driscoll in the interview:

“My first core group was single indie and punk rockers committed to anarchy,” he says. “Needless to say, they didn’t naturally organize themselves or give generously. If I would have said, ‘Everybody tithe,’ it would have been in cigarettes.”

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A small group of us recently went to the Continuous Worship conference at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. I’ve read much of Mark Driscoll, subscribed to his podcast and I love what he’s doing so I was really excited about this conference. I knew very little of their worship music theology or style. I think I had heard one or 2 tracks that I thought were very strange but couldn’t quite remember why I thought so. I would be reminded why shortly.

They opened up the conference with their style of worship and it was such an interesting dichotomy of current, cutting edge music set to hymnals. I found myself loving the music, and really they play exactly the style of music that I love to write and love to play, but being lost in the words. Despite being raised in the church, I didn’t know hyms because I was raised in the Vineyard and we didn’t sing hymns. So I didn’t know really any of the lyrics and the things about hymns is there are 5 verses and none of them repeat. So I found it very tough to sing although I really wanted to. From the looks of it a lot of people were in the same position as I. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what they played at all, they are powerful songs, I just didn’t know them. I’ve never attended a regular Sunday morning service at Mars Hill but I’d imagine the congregation doesn’t have trouble since they’ve heard the songs numerous times. For us non-hymn knowing visitors it was a challenge.

Since then I’ve downloaded a ton of their songs from their music RSS feed and the songs have really grown on me. I admire their creativity, their maturity in arrangement and how much they value theologically sound worship music. My taste doesn’t line up exactly by any means, it’s hit and miss for me, but that’s not unique at all. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone that I like every tune from(not even Jeff Buckley). One of my favorites is the arrangement of Come Thou Fount by E-Pop. The leader of E-Pop, by the way, is in a band called Barcelona who’s recent album is amazing. Checkout Come Thou Fount below:

E-Pop: Come Thou Fount

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I just got finished watching a documentary on the life of Keith Green. This, my friends, is an insane story. What impacted me most as I sit and try to process the depth of Keith’s short life is the passion He maintained for the lost. He carried such an intense burden to see people brought into a relationship with Christ and raised to maturity. At one point in his life he owned 2 houses on his street and rented out five others in his neighborhood, each holding 10 to 15 people, in order to house some of the people he won to Christ. He burned with the compassion of Christ. Much of his story resounds with the sentiments of the rising disciple generation. Keith was either way ahead of his time or the church had just strayed so far from the true message of Christ that he appeared to be a revolutionary. Truly living out the message of Christ is revolutionary. This documentary is a 7 part video on youtube (How fitting that the inter video is posted for free with no copy write infringement). Watch IT… It will change your life!

“The world is sleeping in the dark that the church just can’t fight, cause it’s asleep in the light. How can you be so dead when you’ve been so well fed?

-Keith Green, Asleep in the Light

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