Saturday, March 26, 2005
Who Do We Really Worship?
View From The Basement has a couple of posts about the me-centeredness of a lot of praise music these days. Here is the first and here is the second. Old friend Transforming Sermons, plainly seconds the motion.
They bemoan one praise song in particular, from Basement
I have problem with so-called "contemporary" worship, period. In our efforts to be accessible, we fail to call people forward to a deeper understanding of and relationship with God. Even contemporary music that is not so theologically wrong is so theological shallow as to be almost useless. Try quoting a praise chorus in a blog post or a sermon, there is not enough meat there to find any real nutrition -- It's like beef stock when you want a steak.
I really believe that the modern movements in the church today are "church-lite" and not really church. Many churches value head-counts over soul-counts. Music choice is but one symptom of that.
They bemoan one praise song in particular, from Basement
On Sunday just past we sang a song - nice tune, ok words for the most part, but there was a bit that spoke of Jesus dying on the cross and then had the line, "he took the fall, and thought of me, above all else".I agree, that is a particularly heinous bit of lyric, but why stop with that one song. I heard one during Maundy Thursday services that made my skin crawl. It was all about how much the singer loved God -- not that God gave the singer that love, not that the singer was incapable of genuine love apart from God, just that he loved God. Pretty much in the same sense that he loves watching wrestling on TV. If I deigned to open the songbook, I could probably find a whole lot more examples.
I have problem with so-called "contemporary" worship, period. In our efforts to be accessible, we fail to call people forward to a deeper understanding of and relationship with God. Even contemporary music that is not so theologically wrong is so theological shallow as to be almost useless. Try quoting a praise chorus in a blog post or a sermon, there is not enough meat there to find any real nutrition -- It's like beef stock when you want a steak.
I really believe that the modern movements in the church today are "church-lite" and not really church. Many churches value head-counts over soul-counts. Music choice is but one symptom of that.
