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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There is a series of 3 videos on You Tube that is a great documentary on the christian persecution happening inside of Egypt. This isn’t meant to be the most extreme example of persecution, although it is very bad, but it really puts into perspective what people sacrifice for a life after Christ. This is nothing I have any sense of, even after watching this I feel so humbled that I most likely will never face 1/10th of what these people face every day.

I don’t want to summarize what the videos will tell you, but one of the most amazing quotes comes at the end of the 3rd video. The Zebeleen is a Christian community that lives in garbage, there’s no real other way of explaining it. But their entire community is a garbage dump, it’s in their homes, they live with rats and rubbish, it’s just terrible. So this Christian man and his family was living outside the Zebeleen and was getting tirelessly persecuted amongst the muslim population and decided to move his family into the Zebeleen garbage community. Even though he was a successful businessman in Egypt, he moved into squalor by choice. He at first thought there was no way they could survive there. But he goes on to say this:

“I didn’t even think I could survive…but it’s because of the Christians and the faith that I am here. Even if my children have diseases from the garbage I want them to live here with other Christians. The most important thing is that my children are raised in a Christian environment. It is much better to be in a place with garbage that has Jesus than to be in a place [without Jesus] even though it may be clean.”

I started crying at that point in the video. For a father with 2 beautiful little girls to say, their place in the kingdom and body of the church is more important than their health is just incredible. That it is by choice, is even more incredible. I’ll link the 3 videos below, but I wanted to tie this into worship.

I started thinking about what place persecution has in our worship songs. Of course in the English speaking countries that generate our worship(US/UK/Australia) there really is no persecution, just ridicule. So our worship stance becomes a “I’m not ashamed” anthem. An admission that we’re prepared to accept ridicule and I think that’s great. But I’d love to hear what these Coptic Christians sing, what they are prepared to accept as a sacrifice for the Kingdom. I think our disconnection to the reality of persecution foreign Christians face does us a true disservice and undermines the depth of our understanding of sacrifice and strength through Christ. I’ve never before considered persecution in any of my worship writing, but I will now.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

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Thanks for everyone’s votes on the tattoo poll. We got a lot of feedback on that one. 70% of you had a balanced approach and thought the worship leaders responsibility with his/her tattoo depended on the tattoo and the congregation. Almost 20% took the Crazy Town approach and said, flaunt those suckers. 15% of you said the leader should hide their tattoos. And the other 15% said it was a mistake to get the tattoo in the first place. That’s a pretty diverse set of responses so I’m excited.  I promised my take when we finished up so here we go.

The Levitical law (19:28) that states “do not cut your bodies or put tattoo marks on yourselves”. This is the foundation of the argument against tattoos and the belief that they desecrate the spiritual image of God, the functional image of God due to a mutilation of our body, relational image of God due to the dis-unity it may cause in the church body, and lastly the vision/purpose/being of God by glorifying the vulgar or ungodly things. Many in the church believe this, a small portion believe just the opposite that tattoos actually glorify God and his image by demonstrating our God given artistic body in a exalting way to God.

I, as you might expect, fall between the two positions. The Levitical law exists due to the nature of tattoos in that time, which were a symbol of ownership and devotion. Slaves were tattoo’d to show who they belonged to, or were tattoo’d with a name of some pagan god. Many Old Testament scholars(including rabbis) say this prohibition was to combat idolatry and worship of false gods, in fact some believe there was even an exception to this law where a tattoo was ok for a slave so he did not run away. There’s layered problems in that, but that’s another discussion.
I believe tattoos are not inherently immoral, but rather amoral with the potential to be moral or immoral. I am not bound by the Levitical law but deeper than that the spirit of God that wrote the law. As long as a tattoo is not idolatrous in nature, and that it does not cause dis-unity in the church, I believe it to be a liberty and not sin. There is a very good and in depth ethical evaluation on tattoos done by the Christian Research Institute from which many of my positions basis derive. It’s a really interesting read and if you are thinking of getting a tattoo or already have I highly recommend reading it and devoting a lot of prayer time and practical evaluation of the consequence of the tattoo relationally.

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I’ve previously posted here on Sally’s assertion that worship evangelism wasn’t working and generally agreed with her assessment. I thought she made some wonderful points and a lot of what she said is something we value very much in our church. I don’t know Sally personally but from what I’ve read and seen I believe her heart to be in the right place. That being said, there was much in this interview I found troubling, more so from Alan Roxburgh than Sally Morgenthaler. Alan is Vice President of Allelon Canada and they deal with missional church growth and strategy. I don’t really know anything about their organization beyond what their website says. Let me now link to the interview, you can watch for yourself and my comments will be below.

Let me start off with the positive. I’m fully on board with Sally’s description of “in the building” Christianity and how that’s not all we are to be. That we must move out of the building. That is the vision of our church, Life Connection Church, it’s how we are growing, it is simply doing what Jesus told us to do. Get into our culture, love them, show them Jesus, make disciples, raise them up to be leaders and to disciple others. I think her critical assessment of the church in that area is fully warranted and beneficial to the kingdom. Her worship music critique is also something I’ve agreed with in the past about us only playing “happy clapply” celebratory music. That we are missing a huge slice of humanity and the journey by ignoring what the rest of the world is experiencing and how God is relevant in it. See the previous post I linked earlier for my thoughts on that.

Now onto what bothered me. I’ll take it quote by quote, starting at 8:42 in the video Alan explains what he is experiencing in church’s:

“Here’s what I start to experience. I can now guess what’s gonna happen next in the song, like, when they’re going to slow down, when they’re going to stop, when the prayer is gonna come in and out of that when they’re going to come out loud again and go forward. You can almost script what’s going to happen…And here was my experience…I went…you know what this worship is really about, it’s about a whole bunch of people that actually have no experience of God and our desperate for it and don’t know how to get it and it’s a cry for God not a worship of God.” - Alan

Sally’s response to this:

“…we engineer these experiences which are not…they’re just engineered. It’s not the cataclysmic thing that happens when we truly meet God. Cause to meet God is to meet ourselves.”

Here’s my problem with the above. The fact that Alan has been around music to know the arrangement of songs, how they are built and disassembled in congregational worship has nothing to do with the authenticity of worship. I think his critique here is way off base, I have no problem with critique, but you have to examine your critique and see what the expected corrective response is. In this case, there is no appropriate corrective response. What should the worship band do in this case? Change the arrangement of the song everytime? Not use any dynamics at all so there is no getting louder or having softer prayer time? Never play the same song twice? All this just so he can’t script it? This will have the added benefit of confusing the congregation so they can’t follow along at all, spread dis-unity, awesome! The worship band exists to unite the body and aid in the organization of worshipping God in song.

Claiming that worship is “engineered” and not true encounters with God because you know the arrangement of a song is absolutely absurd. If a church member said they couldn’t enter into worship and thought what I was doing was “engineered” because they knew where the song was going, then I’d tell them, they need to examine their own heart because they’ve surely have missed the heart of worship and the band’s role in the church. I’m sure if the next song I played was a new song they couldn’t guess at all their complaint would be, “I couldn’t enter into worship because I didn’t know the song”. Again just as off point as the opposing complaint.

Both Sally and Alan tossed out the phrase “to meet God is to meet ourselves” without much any explanation. On face value I say I agree in one sense and disagree in another. When encountering God our sin is surely exposed and we see ourselves for the sinners we are and God for who he is. But I also believe that to encounter God is to meet Jesus Christ, how else can we approach God but by being buried in Jesus, so that God sees his son. The phrase they used was simplistic and they chose not to explain, so I’ll show grace there and say, I think I know what you meant.

The last thing I have a problem with was this confusing story told by Alan starting at about 11:25:

“I’m in Australia and I put the television on Sunday morning and it’s a huge church in Sydney…this big stage and it begins! And the curtains come back and this great big band and across the stage are the men mostly who are the band leaders. And they’re mostly in the 40’s and 50’s and kind of overweight and rolly-polly. And they got their guitars and they kind look like a 70’s rock band doing their thing and some of them are long in cheek. And then beside them are the women. What I found interesting was that all the women, there was not one over 40. Or if they were you couldn’t tell. And they all wore black turtlenecks and had mics in their hand and they began singing.

And I have to confess what struck me was this was the ackro-corinth. You know Paul goes to Corinth and on top was the Acrocorinth where the vestal virgins were. And I thought, this is about sex. Only now in a nice, clean, evangelical world it’s look but don’t touch. And the whole worship thing was this kind of anti-septic, all these happy clappy, Jesus is my boyfriend songs. And everybody is an individual in the audience watching this in an experience. And that was an American Beauty[the movie] moment. The un-reality of what was going on.”

Ummmm, about sex? what??? First off, I don’t believe the vestal virgins had anything to do with the Acrocorinth beyond their Roman heritage and geography(if my history is off please tell me, you can follow the links above to read for yourself). Secondly, comparing female singers on a worship band who are wearing black turtlenecks, to those of female priests of a Roman mythology goddess, I struggle to find the correlation. And again, the only basis of this critique is the fact that the women are below 40 and wearing black turtlenecks. I mean am I the only one laughing at this point? This was just one of the craziest trains of thought I’ve heard. God bless Sally for being nice and saying, “interesting”. I don’t know what I would have done in that position since it really made no sense at all. And again what would he have the band do, what’s the expected corrective response to this critique. Only have older women? dress more modestly than black turtlenecks, like a burka? Stand on the same side of the stage? See what I mean, it’s just ridiculous, get over it Alan. If these things are bothering Alan this much I can’t imagine there’s a worship service on earth that he’d feel was hitting the mark.

But what this really exposes is the attitude, coming up with that crazy of a critique of modern worship based on age, gender and clothing is so far removed from the heart of worship. I am extremely self-critical, I look at my attitude in worship, my expression, my songs, my playing, I look at it all continuously. But I try to remain grounded in truth and scripture in my critique, am I justified in scripture by this position, or this expression and especially, judging the kingdom effectiveness of whatever I am doing and leading.

I’m curious for all of your thoughts on this interview.

 

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I’ve always admired Bono for his take on many things. I as many in the Christian community are always interested in where Bono finds himself in the journey. I find his honesty refreshing and there is no doubt that God has used him in many powerful ways. Here is a great quote from him on his revelation of Christmas in a St. Patricks Cathedral:

“The idea that God, if there is a force of Logic and Love in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in sh*t and straw…a child… I just thought: “Wow!” Just the poetry … Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and it’s not that it hadn’t struck me before, but tears came streaming down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this.”

Originally posted on blog.worship.com.

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Just published a new poll asking What responsibility to worship leaders have with their tatoos? You can select multiple answers. I’m really interested in peoples thoughts on this. Please answer the poll and comment on this post with your thoughts and hopefully you have some scripture to back up your position. (Wondering if I should just post Leviticus 19:28Leviticus 19:28
English: American Standard Version (1901) - ASV
28 Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am Jehovah.  

here and save everyone the trouble). Nah, I’ll let each prepare themselves. I’ll wait to post my position after I get some good responses.

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Early in October we mentioned Chris Lizotte had agreed to do an interview with Our Rising Sound. Just heard back from Chris and below is the conversation we had. We tried to have a wide ranging sample of questions taken from our readers and contributors. I want to personally thank Chris for taking the time to respond, he’s a busy guy so we really appreciate the love. Please follow the link above and check out(and buy) Chris’ music if you have not already. Ok let’s get this party started, ORS = Our Rising Sound, CL = Chris Lizotte:

ORS: Who are some of your biggest music influences, regardless if they are in the church or not?

CL: I Love the new Wilco record! My Friends are a big influence on me: Ryan Delmore, Rick Kamrath, John Barnett, Marc Ford, Paul Jackson, Kevin Prosch.

ORS: Earlier in your career you wrote mostly non-congregational worship music. Now we’ve heard more of your songs being played in congregational settings. Did you find the transition of audience and purpose difficult to make in your songwriting?

CL: At first, Yes. As the years have gone by I it’s been easier. Maybe because I lead worship on a regular basis and I love to write songs that point people in the direction of honoring Jesus!

ORS: What sort of songwriting discipline do you follow? Some people write something everyday even if it’s bad just to keep the discipline, other’s only sit down and write when they feel inspired externally or internally. How do you approach songwriting practically?

CL: When I’m inspired. I try to have a guitar around always.

ORS: When you find yourself lacking inspiration to write how do you fight out of that? Or do you fight out of it?

CL: The prayer room helps with that. Just stopping everything and getting still helps a ton. Gives me a chance to listen.

ORS: What part of songwriting does you find the most challenging? What do you do to overcome those challenges?

CL: Lyrics. Refer to answer above

Read the rest of this entry »

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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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Tim Hughes recently wrote a blog post about a American newspaper article bashing cutting edge(not Delirious) music. I’ll just paste the entire blog post here since it’s pretty short:

——————-

Below is an extract from an American Newspaper objecting to new trends in church music.

“There are several reasons for opposing it. One, it’s too new. Two, it’s often worldly, even blasphemous. The new Christian music is not as pleasant as the more established style. Because there are so many new songs, you can’t learn them all. It puts too much emphasis on instrumental music rather than godly lyrics. This new music creates disturbances making people act indecently and disorderly. The preceding generation got along without it. It’s a money making scam and some of these new music upstarts are lewd and loose.”

Who were they attacking? It wasn’t Delirious? or Matt Redman. They were attacking the hymn writer Isaac Watts, famous for writing ‘When I survey,’ in 1723! The old hymns once upon a time were radical and cutting edge. Our music and our songs must also always be pushing new ground. Let’s go for it.

—————

We hear much the same throughout our culture today. Condemning anything new, anything that hasn’t been baptized by religion and tradition. I don’t understand how we as a people can grasp onto a particular cultural expression at some point in our history and say, “that is a perfected expression to God and nothing to follow can be so again”. But that’s precisely what the article above is doing. The only thing perfected is God and his word. We seek to honor, worship and praise God in every possible way, through every culture, through every style, through music, through art, through film, all creation will praise, and every angle of creativity should be meant to glorify God.

Our God is so big and so many people offer worship is so many unique ways, whether it’s drums in Africa, guitars in America, bagpipes in Scotland, or silence in China…all of it is perfected offering through Christ, and none of us can sit here and say, ‘because it doesn’t sound like an old hymn we already know, it’s ungodly’. And by the way, I don’t know a lot of old hymns, so does that make those hymns wrong? Dumb. If we have that arrogant attitude then we’ve missed the heart of God and have a truly distorted view of worship. I will always search my spirit and commune with God to see what new song he has implanted in me. I fear no man’s opinion of my sincerity in worship, only God’s rebuke of my tired, effortless, useless fire when I could have entered into God’s presence and worshipped him in spirit and truth and sung a new song, uniquely crafted to respond to his unique touch in my life.

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