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Here are some of the things I really hate in a worship song.
1. Too simplistic, banal, lacking in depth, shallow, doctrineless: Consider that one that just talks about unity among brothers that only mentions God in passing at the very end.
2. It’s so repetitive. I mean, come on, how many times can you repeat “His steadfast love endures forever” before you start thinking the song is going to go on forever? Examples: here and here
3. For some songs, the focus is too much on instruments, and the sheer volume leads to its seeming more like a performance than worship and prevents quiet contemplation.
4. There might be too much emphasis on too intimate a relationship with God, using first-person singular pronouns like “me” and “I” or second-person pronouns like “you” instead of words like “we” and “God”. This fosters a spirit of individualism, and it generates an atmosphere of religious euphoria rather than actual worship of God. Worship should be about God, not about us. Or what about the ones that use physical language to describe God and our relationship with him? Can you really stomach the idea of tasting God?
5. Some songs have way too many words for anyone to learn.
6. It patterns its worship on experiences that not everyone in the congregation will be able to identify with. If you’re not in the frame of mind or don’t have the emotional state in question (e.g. a desperate longing for God. Then what are you doing lying and singing it? Worship leaders who encourage that sort of thing are making their congregations sing falsehoods.
7. Then there’s that song with the line asking God not to take the Holy Spirit away, as if God would ever do that to a genuine believer.
8. Then there’s that song that basically says nothing except expressing negative emotions.
At this point I’m so outraged that people would pass this sort of thing off as worship that I’m almost inclined to give in to the people who think we shouldn’t sing anything but the psalms. Oh, wait…
[cross-posted at Parableman]
Thank you SOOO much! I was beginning to feel like Elijah – all alone and destined to be the only nay-sayer in the place.
By the way – I do understand that this is “tongue-in-cheek”. The context is muy importante, no?
A lot of the tongue-in-cheek criticisms on this list are ones I’ve considered at one time or another, and though I still feel some of them really do bear weight, this is a good reality check.
On #7, however, I would tentatively disagree. The Holy Spirit dwells in a Christian in a way in which it did not dwell in David, at least if I understand correctly. The Spirit in the Old Testament would come on people as a wind, moving them by God’s power, but it did not dwell in them. For David to pray asking God not to take the Spirit away is one thing, then; for a Christian, it’s something else.
Moryam, for a Christian, it’s simply to ask God to honor His promises, for which there’s plenty of biblical precedent. It’s a common fallacy for Christians to think that if God promises to do or not to do something, the performance of that promise is never an appropriate request.
Hooray for the Psalms!
Great posting. Too often I hear people criticize worship songs that are taken directly from the Bible, and I wonder if the critics are aware they are criticizing worship modeled in the Bible.
[...] Pierce explains some of the things he really hates in a worship [...]
1. My implicit argument here is on the methodology of argumentation. A lot of legitimate criticisms of worship music are in the neighborhood of some of these, but the point is that we need to be very careful that we’re not making an argument against the inspired worship songs included in the scriptures, because a lot of arguments are framed in a way that they apply to certain psalms.
I think this post should show that certain features can be fine in public worship that are often criticized in contemporary worship music. It does not show that it’s all right for those features to become so dominant in our public worship as to remove the variety we find in the psalter. For example, if we never had any doctrine in our songs I think that would be outright sin, and it would be unfortunate if we only had it half the time even. But one song in the psalter (at least) has very little that could be even stretched to count as doctrine, so we shouldn’t object to one song without much doctrine unless we want to be giving an implicit criticism of the Bible itself. The same goes for most of these features.
2. I’ve actually given many of these arguments at points in the past. Some of them seem bad arguments to me now, even I thought they were good arguments at the time. Others seem all right when properly qualified as being about the dominance of certain features that shouldn’t be dominant. But argument 7 has a different feature altogether. It’s a particular argument against a particular contemporary worship song. As I’m envisioning it in the literary context of the post, it’s being presented by a naive person who doesn’t have a clue that Keith Green simply lifted Create in Me a Clean Heart from the pages of scripture. There is the more nuanced argument of Moryam (although I’m not comfortable calling the Holy Spirit “it”), and it’s one I’ve sometimes thought good, but I’ve come to conclude that it isn’t. How I presented it in this post is bad if it doesn’t acknowledge that it does at least come from scripture and that there’s a difference between NT experience of the Holy Spirit and OT experience of the Holy Spirit. So it does, I think, belong here, even on the view that it’s inappropriate for a Christian to ask for something that God has promised.
My thought on this at this point is that it’s simply not inappropriate to ask for something that God has promised, something that God has even promised to all believers. Look at the prayers of Paul, for example. God has promised that, as we work out our salvation, it is God who works in us. He’s promised that he’ll see us through to the end, providing for our needs, giving us everything we need for life and godliness. But Jesus commanded us to bring our concerns before the Father, even concerns involving our subjective uncertainty about the objective promises of God.
So that’s one factor. The other is the correct approach, in my view, about assurance of salvation, which I think Thomas Schreiner and D.A. Carson have both captured correctly in various writings. My extended reflections on this are here, but the short of it is that every genuine believer is objectively secure while there’s never 100% subjective certainty in the way of absolute proof, and thus I don’t know 100% (even if I have enough certainty to count as knowledge) that I have the Holy Spirit, because there’s the chance that I might be not genuine, which would be demonstrated by my not maintaining the faith. So I might be experiencing the benefits of the Holy Spirit because of his presence in believers around me, and common grace is operating to give what Hebrews might describe as tasting some of the effect of the Holy Spirit’s presence, but if I turn out to fall away then I was never really indwelt. Because of this possibility, I can pray that I not turn out to be such a person, even if I am a genuine believer (and even if it’s a secure enough understanding to count as knowledge that I’m a genuine believer).
But people with different theological convictions will, of course, disagree on these things, and someone with different views on the various issues here might well retain the argument that I’m no longer convinced is faithful to scripture.
Excellent post!
However (here comes the but monkey) I’m not sure about #6. It is impossible for every word of any worship song to be truthfully expressed by every person in the congregation. Part of the value of a worship song is to model proper attitudes and expressions about God. Singing about an attitude you don’t currently have is not necessarily a lie, because it could serve the purpose of leading you to the correct attitude.
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