Enchanted by Music in Worship . . . to What?
Thinking through musical choices in worship
Music has the power to enchant us into its world. Therefore, the theology of the church, I'm convinced, is determined by the songs she sings, as much as anything else, including the preaching.
You can trace this throughout the last 150 years, especially with the Jesus people movement. As the church's songs became thinner and thinner, so did the church's beliefs.
Now, at Grace we don't want to have thick theology in our songs just because we geek out over theology. We don't. Our goal is to be enchanted by the mind of God, and then reshaped into His image. We want *all* that God is for us in ALL of Christ, to reshape *all* of our lives.
And all of that God is for us in all of Christ is a lot. In fact, at the end of time, it will take the worshipful songs of every tongue, tribe and nation to properly communicate it.
Therefore, because we're mining the vast treasures of the whole Christ, not just the parts of Jesus that feel good and don't disrupt our lives, we have set ourselves to be informed by the Bible in everything we do in our worship.
This means that we sometimes choose songs that are really "attractional" - and sometimes not.
For instance, sometimes we will sound really traditional. That's not because we didn't know a snappier song. It's that we want to be in touch with the timeless truths that saints have savored throughout the centuries. We don't want to arrogantly assume we were the first to discover the glories of grace.
Sometimes we will resemble Elijah on Mt. Carmel, drenching HIS sacrifice with water. We will choose songs that, if you come here to be entertained, seem to DARE you to not come back. But the reason is that, with Elijah's holy swagger, we want to prepare a sacrifice that God would be pleased to visit with fire.
That doesn't mean there's no place for 7-11 songs - where we sing seven words eleven times. But it does require us to understand what we're here for. It's not to worship a God of our own fashioning that agrees with our preexisting values, but to worship and be remade into the image of the transcendent, preexisting God, Who has come close to us in Christ.