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.

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At Life Connection Church we very much value songs written specifically for the local congregation. That doesn’t mean that they won’t have any relevance outside of our church, but just that it was written with our body prayerfully in mind. I believe that’s not only how the best songs are written musically, but spiritually I think that’s where the greatest gift is to the kingdom, in building of the local church.

Recently I’ve been examining ways to get my church body even more involved in our songwriting process. As a worship leader and elder I’m aware of the larger spiritual issues impacting the body, and as my role as discipleship leader I’m privy to more personal issues on a smaller scale as well. But in order to bring in everyone something else had to be done.

The idea is this. We will write a song around a theme and ask everyone in the body to submit a 1 sentence response to a question around that theme. The song’s lyrics will predominantly be made up of these responses. First up we will tackle grace. The question to the body is this…

How has God’s grace changed your life specifically?

Huge question I know, so many aspects to grace so I expect a wonderful wide spectrum of answers. The goal is to answer personally(can be anonymously) and not generally. An example of a general response would be, “He took this sinner and made me clean“, a personal response would be, “He took my life of drugs and death, and gave me a life of purity and hope.”

I’ll then take these answers and shape them poetically to fit musically, rhyme etc… I’ll probably write a chorus that captures the entirety of the submissions, but if someone submits something that God puts heavy on our hearts then we may very well use it for the chorus as well. I don’t really know what to expect out of this exercise, this is new ground for me.

By God’s grace at the end we’ll have a skillfully crafted song of worship that glorifies God by demonstrating the life saving, transforming, empowering impact of God’s grace in our church body, by our church body. I’m incredibly excited to get started on this. I’ll keep everyone up to date on how well or poorly this experiment goes, should be fun.

Let me know what you guys think, am I nuts?

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I got sent a brilliant story of a visiting, wasted, couple getting it on to our friend John Mark McMillan’s “How He Loves” during service. I don’t think this is what John Mark had in mind with his crossover ability. I’m guessing things heated up substantially on the “sloppy wet kiss” line.

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My mama sent me this is an amazing video from Hillside Christian Church. Yes I cried and you will too.

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Scott over at Scotteriology posted a great article by Bob Kilpatrick on How to write a mediocre worship song. The church certainly is full of them and this article gives you sage advice on how to write your own bad, errr mediocre worship songs. My favorite tip:

Number Ten- Never; ever rewrite your song after the first draft. If you hit a lyrical block, you can use the words “really” or hallelujah” or “to the Lord” very effectively to keep the song moving. If you must rewrite, do it when you’re tired, depressed or angry. Don’t throw away the first draft, just in case the song inadvertently improves.

I hear all too often from “songwriters” in the church, “I wrote this in 10 minutes” as if that’s something to brag about.

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sim·i·le
A figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared, often in a phrase introduced by like or as, as in “How like the winter hath my absence been” or “So are you to my thoughts as food to life” (Shakespeare).

A powerful tool of writing and one not much used in modern worship is simile. Metaphor is more commonly uses in modern worship songwriting and we’ll discuss that later, but for now I want to focus on simile. Psalms is full of simile which is no surprise since much of it was originally written as music. Simile helps us associate an abstract idea or theological view with a concrete illustration which helps us define and explain the abstract. Quite simply, an effective simile helps us understand a big idea by comparing it to an idea we all are very familiar with. Simile can also be purely poetic where the object being compared doesn’t require further explanation but the writer chooses to for lyrical clarity, imagery, style and/or conformity. Ideally both should be accomplished.

Let’s summarize things a simile should accomplish and then we’ll look at some examples.

1. Bring clarity to a big idea or theological view through comparison of a concrete idea or object
2. Poetically describe a topic so a congregation can sing the same truth through different lenses
3. Provide a fresh view of an old idea or truth that helps the congregation sing in spirit and truth
4. Support song topic

Things a simile should not accomplish:

1. Create confusion through inaccurate, inappropriate, incomplete comparison
2. Create multiple avenues of interpretation due to an overly vague, or abstract comparison. We should be singing the same truth not reaching different conclusions because you chose a really vague and inaccurate way to describe something.
3. Use so many fresh views that nobody is quite sure what is being described anymore. Similes should support the song topic, not distract from it.

Let’s look at an intriguing example in Psalms 39:11Psalms 39:11
English: American Standard Version (1901) - ASV
11 When thou with rebukes dost correct man for iniquity, Thou makest his beauty to consume away like a moth: Surely every man is vanity. [Selah  

You rebuke and discipline men for their sin; you consume their wealth(beauty) like a moth– each man is but a breath(vanity). Selah

This is great usage because it paints such a vivid picture of how the wicked’s beauty and wealth are consumed. A moth eats bit by bit, leaving holes as it eats. David is a little preoccupied with his enemies not being crushed and dealt with as he’d like. So David talks a lot about this topic and this line does a lot to describe how God is working through David and helps describe an abstract idea of God consuming wealth with a concrete idea of how a moth consumes.

It was really challenging finding modern examples of good simile but I found some great ones after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Steven’s youngest daughter was killed Wednesday evening. The details are terrible but you can read those on your own. More important is the need for us to support him in prayer. Absolutely a devastating loss for his family and the church family as a whole. So stop and pray for him and his family.

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Carlos Whittaker runs the crazy popular blog RagamuffinSoul.com. He is the worship leader at a megachurch in Atlanta called Buckhead Church. Currently he’s acting as a blog reporter at a stealth Rick Warren conference where a 1,000 pastors were invited to attend and a select few invited to speak on a range of topics. Mark Driscoll is there speaking on discipleship and had some really interesting, amazing and funny things to say as usual. Mark tackles the topics of worship, multi-site churches, the fake Mark Driscoll on twitter and why he likes to pick fights. Feed folks you gotta click through to see the video.

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When playing recorded intros in Reason there’s something you don’t want to do, unless you intentionally want to screw up the song and distract the entire congregation. I of course didn’t intentionally do this yesterday, but unfortunately intentions mean jack squat in music. No there is not going to be any video going up on You Tube so you all can laugh at me. Below is a screen shot of the intro I used for Ready Now, see if you can spot the problem. Hint: this is just an “intro”.

Screen shot with the answer after the jump.

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Here’s American cheap church gimmick #135,346,234 in drawing people to service. First Baptist Church in Snellville, GA put out a sign in front of the church offering “Free Gasoline”. And just to show that the church is not above misleading marketing ploys, there is a catch. Every time you attend a church service or “event” you are entered into a raffle for a $500 gas card. This is a very interesting headline for this story:

“Church in Georgia tempts prospective worshippers with $500 gasoline raffle”

The term “prospective worshippers” is an interesting choice of phrasing, and when I say interesting I mean terrible. Nobody is a prospective worshiper, we were formed as worshipers, born in continuing worship, and now live a life of either fallen or redeemed worship. I don’t attribute this headline to the church pastor at all but it’s a telling statement and perspective of faith by the writer which is shared by a lot of the church. This belief and attitude negatively impacts our ministry and evangelism by believing that we just need to find a way to get people in corporate gatherings and to start worshiping by mere attendance or participation and our mission is accomplished. This is made further evident by this telling statement in the article.

“The church boasts a congregation of 9,000 but church officials say only about 2,500 regularly attend Sunday services.”

So we boast about a group of uncommitted, event attending, “prospective” worshipers? This certainly doesn’t sound like the description Christ gave as to who was a follower and who wasn’t. Shouldn’t we be able to say, “we have a group of committed disciples, living a life of redeemed worship in fellowship with fellow believers, being sharpened with accountability, reaching out to the lost through loving relationship and gathering together regularly to celebrate our victory in Christ and to testify of His goodness”. That’s the description I want to give of my church, that sounds like an Acts church.

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