Where music, culture and worship meet.

This blog examines, reviews and discusses how worship is being lived out in culture and in the church. We tackle everything from songwriting techniques in corporate worship, to interviewing worship leaders and pastors, to reviewing the last big rock concert.

January 23 2008

Alan Roxburgh interviews Sally Morgenthaler

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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.

Alan Roxburgh interviews Sally Morgenthaler

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.”

New worship leader uniformUmmmm, 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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October 10 2007

Worship Evangelism and why it isn’t working

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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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