Christian Enough?
A friend of mine from church recently posted
a blog specifically about secular music used in church. I thought he had some really good thoughts, and I wanted to use what he said as a bit of a jumping off point for some of my own.
Ever since first finding out that there was some push-back from the Christian community about "Christian rock" back in the day, I've never quite understood the uneasy relationship that the Church seems to have with art in general and music specifically. As a musician (or at least as a wanna' be musician!), music has always been sort of its own entity. I certainly enjoy listening to music written specifically for the Christian audience (my Musical Monday selections should attest to that), but I've been moved by music of all kind, not simply "Christian" music. There is an aesthetic to art that, in my mind, can often transcend the more obvious or even intended meaning.
So why should one perform or not perform "secular" music in a Christian service? I think there can be a couple of reasons. The first (and probably most shallow, in my mind) is to do it because it's familiar and comfortable to a non-believer who may attend. Walking into a church can be fairly intimidating, and if you walk in and hear the band playing a Coldplay or Dave Matthews tune, it might make you feel at least a bit more at home. I certainly don't see this as an automatic negative thing. Getting butts in the seats is good -- how else can they hear your message? I'm only saying that it's not my favorite reason (in part because I don't necessarily think that a Sunday morning service is necessarily "for" the non-believer, but that's another post!).
The reason that I much prefer is that I believe art has in it an inherent ability to bring praise. Truly good art is generally able to stir a response from someone. If one chooses to direct those emotions toward the object of their desire, any song can become a worship song. When we're in love with someone, every song on the radio is about your love. When we feel sad, we tend to hear sadness in whatever is on our music player at the time. Joy, anger, sorrow, elation, love -- we tend to find those emotions in the music that we listen to, regardless of the composer or song writer's intent. Why then would our church service be exempt from that?
One of my most favorite David Crowder Band songs is
Intoxicating from Illuminate. There is no direct reference to God or Jesus in this song, yet this song stirs in me a strong love and desire to worship. It has an abandon about it that absolutely rocks my world. I can't imagine removing it as a worship song because Crowder used the pronoun "you" rather than the object's name. Two weeks ago, Scott Simons came and sang at our church. He's not a Christian artist, and his music isn't specifically Christian. One of the songs that he sang for us was
Keep On. Again, no references to God or Jesus. But in the context of our church service, what is to keep the meaning of the song from being a reference to
Hebrews 12:1? What is to stop us from thanking God for the strength to keep on when things are difficult? And really, even if your mind doesn't go directly to God, I simply don't see anything anti-God about persevering through difficulties.
Ultimately, I genuinely believe that we must each make a decision every day to worship God. No matter what we're doing, that choice is before us. I believe that when we go to a worship service, our goal should be to seek to worship. And I don't think it flies to cast blame anywhere but on ourselves when we choose not to do that.
Labels: church, music
Susan says: