Culture | Our Rising Sound

August 28 2008

Church sub-culture strikes again, release Christian Guitar Hero knockoff

Tagged Under : culture, games, Guitar Hero, Guitar Praise, music, Rick Pino

I guess there’s nothing wrong with this, it’s just really cheesy. My friends and I had joked about a christian version and we should have known it was happen sooner or later. Rocking to Chris Tomlin just isn’t going to have the same feeling as Clapton, SRV or AC/DC. Reports that ‘Guitar Praise’ comes with an acoustic pretend guitar instead of the usual axe, 5 tambourines and streamers are denied by the company. Although apparently there is a prophetic mode for the game where whatever you play, no matter how awful, is rewarded with points in heaven. There’s also rumored to be a “Inappropriate conversion of secular song to worship” mode, aka Rick Pino mode, where you take songs in Guitar Hero and attempt to redeem them by cleverly changing a couple words.

No word on what songs will be on the game. Game goes on sale next month at GuitarPraise.com. Would any of you consider getting this? I won’t make fun of you, at least not publicly…..well maybe I will.

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“Blow-up church” to meet lost where they are…at the beach

Tagged Under : church, culture, news

Beach The Catholic church in Rome are going to meet the lost where they are this summer, and that’s at the beach. They have a 98ft long blow up church that will be staffed with priests ready to take confession. One of the priests who spearheaded the operation said,

“The concept of a beach-convent is something that is appreciated by vacationers and the nuns themselves,” priest Antonio Rungi, who helped spearheaded the initiative, told Italian news agency ANSA.

My complaint on this is an obvious mis-understanding of what the church is. Guys, leave your building and goto the beach, this isn’t reaching out to the lost. It’s trying to make it more convenient for them to reach out to you, the church. Stop hiding in your inflatable building, take off the robes and put on some swim trunks, pop that building and love some people.

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Unintentional Worship: Landon Pigg - Sailed On

Tagged Under : cuture, Landon Pigg, lyrics, music, worship

This is a blog series I like do where I examine “secular” songs that if sung with a different heart, perhaps a different perspective or a changed line here or there would make for a wonderful worship song. This really is an exercise in showing how these songs could be redeemed to worship the Father. Today I bring you “Sailed On” (<-playable link) by Landon Pigg, an absolutely incredible song. I imagine these words being song over us by God as a rebuke of our religious lifestyles and failure to abide.

Please don’t do what I say
Cause if you don’t love me, its worthless anyway
Please don’t trouble yourself
You’ll only go away in the end

Please don’t follow all my commands
Cause whats the point in that
I keep hoping that all of your plans
Will fall through the roof

Chorus:
Like two ships passing in the night we’re gone
Only the moon and the stars in the sky did know
To cry for me
As I sailed on

Please don’t trouble yourself
I only want your love
You keep giving me your help
Oh please stop playing along
You know your wasting your energy
And your breaking my heart

(Chorus)

Oh I can just see it now (I can see it now)
Your recklessly in love
Your hearts boiling over
Oh I can just see it now
Your coming around

In ministry I can’t tell you how many times I could relate to the lines, “Like 2 ships passing in the night we’re gone.” Feeling like I’m moving but not sure if I actually asked God if this is where I should be heading or stop to notice if I left God behind a long time ago. Another convicting line is, “I only want your love and you keep giving me your help“, how easy it is for me to replace love for service and activity.

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1 Question Interview: What’s Next? by John Mark McMillan

Tagged Under : culture, interview, John Mark McMillan, What's Next?, worship

What’s Next?

John Mark McMillan This one question I am asking various worship leaders and pastors. The context is what’s next in corporate worship but beyond that no guidance has been given for appropriate response. For part 4 of this series I spoke with recording artist and worship leader John Mark McMillan.

John Mark is currently finishing recording on his follow-up album to “The Songs Inside the Sounds of Breaking Down” which is best known for the song “How He Loves.” John Mark has led worship across the country and for many large conferences including The Call. I spoke with him about his new album “The Medicine” and this audio portion of the interview is his response to “What’s Next?

Standard Podcast [7:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Poll: In general, how should worship music relate to culture?

Tagged Under : culture, poll, worship

If you’re new to this blog you’ll notice I like doing a poll on a certain topic before I take my thoughts to the world. The idea of how worship music should relate to culture is one I’ve wrestled with for a long time and still do now. I’m interested to see what kind of thoughts we have out there on this. Let’s make sure we have our definitions agreed upon first.

Countercultural - Purposefully exhibiting behavior in opposition to the dominant culture which it resides in.
Subcultural - Behaving as a distinctly different culture which exists within another culture and that has not been assimilated. A subculture tends to be oblivious to or unconcerned with the dominant culture in which it exists and just carries on in its own culture bubble.
Unicultural - I made this word up. What I mean by this is exhibiting the same behavior as the dominant culture in which it resides.

I’m letting you choose more than one answer because I know I would. Obviously the “every way” choices are mutually exclusive so only pick one answer if that’s your choice. I’d love to hear your explanation of your choices in the comments. I’d suspect a disconnect in many of our ideas of what should be the case and what is the case. So let’s hear those gripes as well. Let’s get this party started.

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Poll Wrap Up: Non-Christians in worship bands?

Tagged Under : band, church, missional, poll, worship

Last week we kicked off a poll asking “Is it ok for non-Christians to play in worship bands?” So far the results are very interesting, 50% say no it’s not ok, and the other 50% either say yes it’s ok, or in some cases it is ok. You know you have a good poll question when you split 50/50 in the results

This past Sunday I had a meeting with my worship team that would have been absolutely disastrous had any of my team not been a mature Christian, being discipled and united in vision. Perhaps some other time I’ll blog about that meeting, which was one of the most amazing moments I’ve ever had in ministry. For now I’ll talk about why I think it’s important that if we are leading a congregation in worship that only mature, discipled, called and gifted Christians do that.

The criteria we use for any position of leadership uses this set of criteria in order of importance:

Character
Calling
Gifting

Anytime we get those 3 things out of order we put our self in a dangerous situation. I’m not even going to discuss the practical problems and dangers though they are many, instead I’ll focus again on what’s more important and that’s the spiritual problems. I’ve played in a lot of worship bands and many of the times not all were mature, discipled, called Christians. Some of those were gifted and effective musically but none of them had a chance of being effective spiritually because we were modeling that gifting was more important than character and God’s calling. If confronted with that we surely would have said, “no no we don’t believe that“, but then why are we modeling that?

Some might say, “but we’re a missional worship band so for us it makes sense.” To that I’d say then it’s even more important for you to get this and not have non-Christians on your band. Because now the lost is looking at you, and from experience, here’s the 1 question they’ll have that you’ll never be able to answer:

How important can it be to give your life to Christ if that’s not even a requirement to lead in the worship of that same Christ?

Please re-read that question if you didn’t get it the first time. Now re-read one more time. Worship leaders, let’s model what’s right, let’s not compromise in what’s most important in the kingdom to which your worship band should be leading people to. I’m not promoting legalism, maybe there’s some confluence of circumstances that it makes sense, I’m just saying let’s examine the heart of the issue and keep an eye on what’s most important.

Thanks everyone for all your feedback, I value it greatly.

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Tim Smith interviews Lecrae - lyrical theology in hip hop

Tagged Under : culture, hip hop, interview, Lecrae, Mars Hill, rap, Tim Smith

Hearing a talented rapper talk about the need to fuse systematic theology and hip hop and train church leaders who have poor theology is just mind blowingly awesome. Lecrae discusses the difficulties in reach a hip hop culture so rooted in idolatry and sin. These are the kind of interviews that make me excited to be in the church. I posted video from Mars Hill Church a few weeks back showing Lecrae leading a song in the actual worship service which was amazing and powerful. I could tell from his lyrics he values scripture, doctrine and real hard truth and this interview is just tasty tasty icing. What a great interview, enjoy.

Pastor Tim Interviews Lecrae from Mars Hill Church on Vimeo.

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U.S. religion: even “Christians” see other ways to heaven

Tagged Under : church, culture, songwriting, theology, worship

Heaven There has been a lot of mention in various blogs about the recent survey report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. It was incredibly revealing, maybe not shocking though as many have seen the clear trends nationally and globally. But never the less, it was painful to be confronted with some of the facts. Here’s a few that caught my eye:

66% of Protestants believe there are other ways to heaven than through Christ
11% of Protestants who claim the existence of God is an absolute certainty, say it isn’t very important to their lives
27% of Protestants do not believe in hell

The survey results should be sobering for church leadership and certainly is for me. A professor from Rice University summed up the report in an article well by saying,

“The survey shows America is, indeed, 3,000 miles wide and only 3 inches deep.”

That is just a beautiful way of describing a horrific reality. It makes me examine what I’m doing as a worship leader to either contribute or combat this. Am I leading hundreds of people every week in singing a wide variety of songs that only go 3 inches deep? Do we sing songs that confront the notion that there is no hell, that there is a way to heaven besides Christ, or that Christ life, death and resurrection shouldn’t be that important to our lives? I sure hope so.

I think the important thing as a worship leader is to get prayerful and purposeful not just in our sets but in our leadership of our teams and songwriting. We focus a lot on unity, singability, melody which are all important, but what good is unity without truth? More specifically, essential truth. What the findings in this report tell me is not just that 66% believe in other ways to Christ, but that 66% feel comfortable showing up to church with that lie and aren’t confronted by truth.

I have no desire to lead such weak and sanitized worship that the flesh and lies of the enemy aren’t offended. In the coming weeks I’m going to start a series of posts on how our phrasing and word choices in worship lyrics can contribute to essential biblical truth. No ambiguous language, no vague interpretation, no confusing imagery.

If you have any examples of worship songs you feel do this I’d love to hear them in the comments.