Feature Article

The Silly War
by Kyle Matthews

About the author:
Kyle Matthews is a Christian songwriter and recording artist although these titles hardly do him justice. His best known song is a the Dove Award winning "We Fall Down" recorded by both Donnie McClurkin and Bob Carlisle among others. As an artist he has released 4 albums, the latest entitled "Sing Down." For more about Kyle visit www.kyematthews.com

There is a quiet, costly battle being fought today in Christian churches and worshipping bodies of every shape, size and stripe. Ask the warriors themselves what they're fighting about and you'll get many different answers, all very noble sounding: "reaching the lost," "protecting the integrity of worship," "honoring our heritage," "attracting seekers and young people," "singing to God instead of just about God," "saving a dying church." Powerful and emotional battle cries to be sure. But in reality, the battlefield is far less auspicious: these people are merely fighting over the style of music they want to use in worship. What a shame!

It's a shame because while style may be the conflict, it is not the real crisis. The real crisis is that followers of Jesus Christ have allowed something as ephemeral, and superficial as style to threaten our identity, divide us, and distract us from our core beliefs about worship.

If you think the battle I'm referring to is only a metaphor, consider the casualties: all around the country, churches are splitting-- not only over contemporary versus traditional musical styles-- but over which "brand" of music to utilize. Ministers of music who have worked and sacrificed to earn seminary degrees are being replaced by "praise and worship" leaders who often have no training in either music or ministry, much less church music history. Traditional churches are dying and contemporary churches are struggling to move their many visitors from being mere consumers of entertainment to anything resembling true discipleship and an authentic Christian community. Hymnals, the rich and varied denominational canons of church music, are being left unused, replaced by Powerpoint presentations that offer nothing in the way of musical content, little in the way of lyrical content, and often with no accountability to the copyright holder. Pastors of churches with long histories and unique identities are rushing off to church-growth conferences and coming home to throw everything out the window -including members of the staff-- in order to emulate a church in Chicago or California.

When I was growing up, this issue was considered to be just one of many symptoms of "the generation gap," but it is that no longer. It now more closely resembles a market demographic, a taste preference that runs across all the old categories. In most of the contemporary churches I visit, the members of the band are-surprise-- all grey-headed! Then I go to formal, liturgical churches that are seeing real growth among 20-something young couples who want to experience "something old for a reason." In the church I now attend, the folks who most strongly disagree over music are often from the same generation, whether they're in their 60s or their 20s. Some of our members threaten to leave us for a church with more contemporary music, but I have also had a church member tell me that if we ever get rid of the pipe organ, he'd be the first to go, saying, "I feel like we're getting away from the heart of worship."

Of course, there was a time not long ago when the newfangled pipe organ was called "offensive." In their own times, both Frances of Assisi and Martin Luther were said to have done more damage with their music than they ever did with their theology. But we can now see those changes in the past as linear progressions affecting the church culture as a whole. Today's conflict is not a linear change, but a splintering: a shift from the corporate culture of "church-member" to the individual church-goer as "customer." The criteria for what binds a people together as "church" will soon be reduced from "shared belief system" to "enjoys the same style of music" unless Christians begin to grapple more seriously with the question: what is the heart of worship?

I'm a strange breed. I was raised in a thoroughly liturgical, high-church style of Protestant worship and attended two "ivory tower" music schools. Yet, these days I work the other side of the tracks: I have been a staff songwriter for BMG Publishing for ten years, writing mostly pop Christian music in Twang-Town USA . Almost every weekend I'm in a different church environment trying to do music that is fresh, but appropriate for the setting and the occasion. I'm no expert, but I am about as familiar with these two worlds as anybody I know.

I must agree with those who say that the works of say, Bach, are musically superior to just about anything written since, that the texts of writers like John Wesley stand head and shoulders above most new texts, and that the object of our worship deserves our best. But even people who concede that still resist a steady diet of this music. Why not? Because it doesn't " speak to them." Why doesn't it? Because they haven't been taught the language; they simply do not possess the tools for understanding it. Classical music may be superior in its construction, but it cannot speak to and for this culture without considerable re-education, without translation.

In this respect, even the proponents of traditional worship-and certainly liturgical worship-- must concede that they have been unable to effectively reinterpret and reinvigorate their musical canon for the past two generations. Once they abdicated the playing field of commercial music to the evangelicals in the 1970's, which they did for good reason, they were no longer able to compete with the millions of dollars reinvested every year in funding, producing and marketing more and more commercial music. They have been less able to demonstrate an excellence that was both pervasive and persuasive, speaking to and for more people over time. Even when they have composed great music, they have been less capable of marketing it in the now crowded marketplace. Traditional church music, once rooted in culture (often setting melodies from popular songs to texts of rich poetry), has slowly become spiritually and emotionally disconnected from the culture.

Once while visiting the progressive state of California , I was told that the average age of a church choir member in that state was 56. But, wait, that was ten years ago! New bridges to the culture were not built, and the bridges we once had were not well maintained, so that most church goers today no longer feel that traditional styles are the medium through which they can express themselves to God and hear God to speak to them in worship. (For their part in this debate, proponents of traditional worship need to understand that many of the churches moving to "praise and worship" music are doing so as much out of a sense of desperation as out of an affinity to the style.) Were tradition and musical sophistication the only concerns, churches could simply agree to become musical preservation societies and reduce their mission and vision to serving only that purpose. But clearly, that alone is not the heart of worship.

On the other extreme, and as one working within the contemporary Christian music industry, I can assure you that while the "praise and worship" genre may draw a crowd, and while the church may find some pop material useful-- even inspiring-- we cannot trust a commercial industry to tell the church what it needs. It will not educate our children about church music history or classic Christian art. It will not educate them about the Bible or our many multi-faceted beliefs and traditions, much less our subtler theological distinctions. It will not teach them to read music nor to sing in parts nor require them to learn to play more than three chords on their instruments. It will not promote congregational singing above solo material. Rare will be the piece that challenges them musically or spiritually. Textually, it will hardly ever call them to walk the difficult, unpopular or sacrificial path of discipleship, to die to self. (For their part, the proponents of contemporary worship need to understand that the traditionalists perceive all of these cherished tenets to be at stake in this debate, not just their favorite old hymns.)

The only real criterion for "what is appropriate" in a commercial industry is "whatever people want. " The marketers of contemporary music do not saddle themselves with the responsibility of being caretakers of tradition, educators of church music or church music history, and certainly not the theological filter for what is appropriate and best for each denomination, each occasion. One reason for this is that the Christian music industry is too insecure, too distracted by its own crisis. Due to internet piracy, short-sighted industry decision-making, and other trends, CD sales are down 25% across the board, most Christian labels have sold themselves to secular corporations, and most of the people who work in the industry are primarily preoccupied with just keeping their jobs. Companies trying to stay alive do not have the luxury of questioning what is popular, nor do they question how to give the marketplace what it needs rather than merely what it wants. Rather than marketing music based upon its spiritual merit, musical creativity or theological insight, the opposite is more common: they gauge the spiritual merit of a song by its popularity.

The new worship music we are being offered, called "praise and worship" music, stopped being a trend in the 1980s. Once the musical material of youth camp chorus books, it has now become institutionalized: entire radio formats are committing themselves to vertical-praise-chorus-only playlists, and entire record labels are forsaking pop artistry to devote themselves to the business of creating "worship stars," marketing the CDs of performers whose specialty is traveling to churches to lead chorus-singing, as if the local talent isn't up to the task.

But the move to an entirely "praise and worship" style is becoming the norm for churches of every denomination, stripe and culture. So, it is important to acknowledge that the use of popular idioms does facilitate a popular response. Whenever I'm consulting churches in this conflict, I'm careful to say that if producing a crowd is the primary goal, this is the ultimate short cut. Like all products of pop culture, this music and its celebrity packaging are designed for the commercial bottom line. It is virtually guaranteed to produce "numbers:" numbers of people to attend and numbers of dollars in their wake.

The questions the church must ask itself are whether that is really the ultimate goal, whether the ends justify the means, whether it is prepared to eventually lead people to something more substantial, and whether something important may lost in the bargain. I will venture to say that the commercial marketplace may offer many things, but it will never lead us to the heart of worship.

This puts the modern church in a classic dilemma. George Barna, the foremost statistician for religious life in America , has pointed out that the pace of social change has sped up to the point that our culture reinvents itself every three to five years. So, once a congregation "contemporizes" it has only begun the exhausting, expensive, and never-ending race to stay relevant, leaving in its wake all those people less-inclined to change every three years. Add to that the explosion of multi- cultural influences and the bombardment of assorted entertainment models and two things become very clear: a) we cannot expect traditional church music to ever again have the influence it once had and b) we are foolish to expend our energies and the church's limited resources trying to ape the latest trends of popular culture.

So, churches are being forced to re-examine their way of doing worship. But to those who find the heart of worship best expressed by a style-- any one style-- I ask them only to consider the crises now facing churches that have made their style a chief concern. Churches married to traditional music struggle to grow, and some can no longer support themselves. Churches moving to contemporary music may draw a crowd, but they usually do so at the cost of a church split or the loss of a rich musical heritage and a theological breadth and depth that the "praise and worship" catalogue simply cannot replace. Churches trying to do both (you know, the 8:30 and 11:00 services?) invariably end up with two congregations who usually do not respect one another and do not share theological or cultural similarities, yet are forced to share a facility and a staff and a budget (whoa!). Churches committed to "blended worship," finally, have to place all other priorities in worship behind the unattainable goal of forever trying to please everyone all the time. They must replace their worship leadership every two years due to sheer exhaustion.

So, you can see why this is a silly war: if either side wins, we all lose. If we merely compromise to pacify the consumer urge, the church loses. I cannot advocate the kind of traditional music that has become meaningless to the culture, but nor can I support contemporary music simply because it is culturally relevant: if that were the sole litmus test for worship music, Brittany Spears would serve as our Bach.

The critical question for those in leadership is this: with all that's at stake, why pay such dear homage to fashion? Why involve ourselves in the endless, un-winnable war, sacrificing so much to the unworthy god of style instead of expending our efforts to raise the level of discourse to that of substance, which would generate an entirely new set of issues and results? Why demote ourselves from "the people of the word" to being "the people of a particular style."

The more I travel, the more I am astonished how far we have fallen from our high calling as "people of the word." On more than one occasion when I've been asked to preach, my host has said: "we're going to have a time of praise and worship, then you can do your talk." There was a time when the proclamation of the gospel was considered the central event in worship, not to mention the other elements intended to walk the worshipper through a transformative experience. When did we stop talking about that and start debating style? Style is an unworthy god to have to so much power in the church. Let it reign elsewhere, but not among the people of the Word, people of the message, people for whom content is supposed to mean everything and superficiality is supposed to mean nothing.

Consider what a sad commentary it is that I've been in the middle of this debate all of my life, visiting a different church each Sunday for 15 years, at one point traveling half the days of the year, and yet I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard people debate the content of a song rather than its style. In fact, even when I find people who agree with me about the relative importance of content, the conversation invariably devolves into a discussion of "blended" worship, which is just another way of making our choices at the level of style rather than substance, trying to keep everyone happy rather than leading them through a transformative experience. If there is anything about church music worth getting angry about, surely the temple we are building to Style is the one Jesus would have us clean first.

I realize that realigning our priorities along these lines will not come quickly or easily, but I'm not entirely sarcastic when I say that broad and easy is the way that leads to destruction and narrow is the way that leads to life! Only a discussion of substance will reveal to people on every side of the issue that we all have golden calves we need to burn. Jesus warned us about looking upon the outward appearance, pointed us to consider the kind of fruit produced by our various loyalties, and commanded us to be discerning. On the subject of worship, that means being primarily concerned with what the music says and what role it plays in our development, always mindful of the fact that all style kingdoms, no matter how fashionable, really will pass away. Given what prostitutes churches have become in their pursuit of numerical "success," I would rather go down with a remnant of people seeking to be faithful to the content of our faith than go celebrating my way to oblivion with the "in crowd," whoever they are.

Toward that end, let me offer some suggestions for reframing the worship debate in your church around some foundational components that are signs of spiritual maturity throughout the Bible. The particular musical choices you make in response to these criteria will vary according to your own beliefs, priorities and church culture; I have no delusions that this is a formula for universal agreement. It is, however, a formula for expressing your church's identity in worship on the basis of its beliefs and its needs rather than some irrelevant tradition or some passing popular trend.

In my experience, church-goers are less needy for control than for education and guidance, and therefore it is possible win them over when the vision presented is coherent and compelling. The goal is to get people so excited about making the best of musical choices for the best of reasons that they begin to impose their own criteria and their own highest standards upon themselves. I have seen it work over and over again!

You must establish your purpose and allow nothing to precede it. Without knowing why you're there you have no foundation or motivation for your ministry.

---Rick Warren

Worship should seek to be.transformative

"I'm coming back to the heart of worship, and it's all about you, Jesus!" So says the million-selling song, and it's true that Jesus should be the focus of Christian worship.

But notice what Jesus taught about worship. He said that it was not we that were made to serve the Sabbath day, as if by showing up at church we'd "appease the gods" and keep the crops from failing or keep the marriage together or keep our enemies at bay. God may delight in our worship, God may even "inhabit the praises of his people", but God doesn't subsist on our worship: it is not God who needs it.

No, Jesus taught, it was, in fact, the Sabbath day that that was made to serve us . We need it. We need to be transformed by it. We need it to remind us who and whose we are: to inform, to remind, to confront, to convict, to challenge, to bless. us.

Early liturgists understood this, and so created a multi-faceted service of worship designed to speak to all the aspects of the personality within an hour of worship. It called us in, prepared us to be receptive, brought us to confession, led us to meditation and silence, taught us Biblically and ecclesiastically, called us to bring praise, to bring offerings, helped us through prayers of petition and of gratitude, offered us the opportunity for commitment, and sent us out to act upon our convictions and our experience. It sought to speak to mind, heart, and soul: all the parts of us that need to be transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit.

At its best, worship put us in a frame of mind and spirit to be influenced-even transformed-by God. Can praise do that? Certainly! But so can confession, meditation, silence (perish the thought!), biblical education, proclamation and interpretation, the testimony of others, rituals and rites of passage, and prayer. When you consider the scope of influence we offer God by making all these elements part of our worship, both our inexplicable traditions and our praise-only musical diets are revealed to be terribly small and unworthy offerings by comparison. We only cheat ourselves.

When liturgical worship has failed to be relevant, it has not been because they sought to be multi-faceted, but because they stopped re-interpreting, re-explaining, and reinvigorating those elements. When contemporary worship has failed to be transformative, it is has not been because it wasn't relevant, but because it was shallow and one-dimensional. At Willow Creek, the flagship model for contemporary worship, they once adopted a rule that would stagger most traditional churches: if no life has been changed in the course of a year by the program or practice in question, they do away with it. Most traditional churches never ask that question of anything they do! Somewhere in the balance is a discussion about how serious we are about the gospel's power to transform our character, and that discussion will change our entire approach to worship.

I understand that there is, in fact, little use in taking the high road if nobody comes. To insure that people do show up, many churches are taking their philosophy from McDonalds: give people what they want. My children were begging and crying to go to McDonalds long before they ever tasted the food. What is popular is not necessarily nourishing.

The other approach, however, is to reach people the way healthcare does. Sooner or later, the same number of people show up, brought by needs (weddings, funerals, children, counseling, etc.) that no other institution can effectively meet. When their needs are met they stay, and when they stay, they discover the fulfillment that comes from meeting the needs of others.

This is the way church membership becomes a transformative experience, and worship is the platform from which this approach is expressed, taught, guided, and presented, both to ourselves and to God. Do all old hymns speak to that? No, but some do. Does all contemporary music do that? No, but some does. The test is not the style, but the understanding that one of the functions of worship is to help us avail ourselves to the transformative power of the Holy Spirit.

Worship should seek to be.inclusive and intergenerational

Several years ago, I got a call from one of my favorite people, a friend in ministry calling to invite me to consider joining him and two of my most creative colleagues in forming the pastoral staff of a large church in a large city. They were moving en masse to this church to offer a series of worship services, each one designed for a specific demographic or style preference: traditional, boomer, buster, Gen-Xer, etc... They offered me a salary with benefits, the chance to keep many of my concert bookings, and the rare chance to work with a creative team of old friends, raising our families together in the same church. This is the very definition of temptation to an itinerant songwriter! We don't get a salary, much less benefits. We work mostly alone and it gets lonely. We don't get to see lives changed on a weekly basis. We are away from our families and worry about how they are being formed by their community. But I knew that such a move would close many of the doors I had worked so long to open in the music business, so I declined.

In a few short months, he called back. Their menu of worship options was a huge success! They were drawing large crowds, baptizing lots of unchurched adults, and generating lots of excitement. Would I reconsider? I had just signed a new contract and bought a home! Heavy-hearted, I declined again.

Within three years, each of my friends was sending his resume all over the country, trying to get out of that church. Why? They had created an impossible situation for doing effective church ministry; they had created four-plus congregations who had no sense of community nor respect for one another, who had to share a facility a staff and a budget, and who each had little room for the others in their spiritual "houses." Worse, once my friends were gone, what were the chances that a new staff could to come into that situation and hope to please them all?

Churches that cater to one demographic are usually successful initially, if by success you mean "drawing a crowd." But they also risk the possibility that they will cease to be the church in the process.

As our society becomes completely engulfed by a marketplace in which everything, every aspect of life, represents an opportunity for exploitation, isolation is the inevitable result. Demographic marketing techniques are now used to sell us everything from peanut butter to Presidential candidates, and in the process, to separate us into our respective categories: age, social class, race, region, education, income, and a thousand taste preferences, and interest groups.

In such a climate, the church has the opportunity to offer one human necessity that no one else offers. We offer community. We have a mandate, in fact, to be the last un-segregated social experience in our culture. Given the positive impact of intergenerational, inter-social, inter-racial interaction, we should protect this inclusiveness, let it inform all we do, and proudly promote it to the lonely, isolated population all around us. Our brochures should say, "Do your teenagers have any friends who are senior citizens? Maybe something valuable is missing in their lives."

A few years ago, I sat one evening with my dad on the patio of his home in Orlando under a full moon. Somehow I mentioned the "man in the moon" and he said, "You know, I've never been able to see the Man in the Moon, I've only ever seen the Rabbit in the Moon." I said, "What rabbit?" Here he was, 60 years old, the man I always thought had been the one to show me the Man in the Moon in the first place, and he'd never seen it. I was 35 and had never even heard of the "rabbit in the moon." So, there we sat, two adults, him trying to show me the rabbit, me trying to show him the man. It was the same old moon, you see. But because of our different perspectives on it, we each had something valuable to offer the other. Neither of us ever saw the moon the same way again after that night.

Ironically, worshipping together as different people is one of the things that make worship transformational. We bring insights and experiences with each of us that inform the experience for all of us, teaches our young, invigorates our old, and enables God to speak to all of us thru one of us. The musical implications of this are quite clear to me. No other medium-save perhaps direct conversation and prayer-- provides us with such an opportunity to share our heartfelt perspectives with one another before God. When we hear one another's music, we hear something valuable from one another.

There are theological reasons for this criterion as well: "Whenever a church, consciously or unconsciously, caters to one class, it loses the spiritual power of the "Whosoever will come, let him come" doctrine, and is in danger of becoming little more than a social club with a thin veneer of religiosity."--MLK

Worship should seek to be. identity-revealing

In Old Testament times, God-worshippers often had no place of worship, and when they were taken into exile their faith, their entire cultural identity, endured threats from within and without continually. So, God had to be mobile: they used tents and they made God's seat of power mobile. Worship become, consequently, a time of repeating and remembering. Children had to be equipped to be "God's chosen people" in a foreign land full of foreign gods and intense new cultural pressures and temptations. Generations later, the persecutions of the early church produced a similar result: worship was a time set apart to remember who and whose we were, to model and practice all the practical implications of what that meant, even if we had to do it in secret.

A strong argument could be made for this one quality of worship being the most urgent for today's rapidly-changing culture. Ironically, Christian identity is not to be discovered as a mere rejection of secular culture, but thru the study of our history with God and our life today with the Spirit of God. It is not enough to simply stand against something, we long to be for something. Sociologists tell us that inner-city gangs are just one example of how the hunger in us for identifying rituals and rites of passage is so powerful that, in the absence of churches, schools, familial and cultural structures, we simply create our own out of whatever we have. Gangs are, in fact, highly organized, with generals and lieutenants, territorial boundaries, uniforms, symbols, colors, songs, and elaborate rites of passage. The need to belong is wired into our genes. We will either be baptized as a sign that we have become full-fledged members of a community, or we will rob a liquor store.

The Christian response to this need is distinct and unique, yet the efforts of the church have too often been to parrot the culture, to be as much like the culture as possible for the sake of money and security. But trendy secular methodologies will never reveal our spiritual identity to us! Christ is counter-cultural, and following him requires unique forms, symbols, songs, and rites of passage that set us apart. We can choose music that does this by its text, by its musical construction, and by its tone or attitude. Such music can not only express our corporate identity when we are together, it can also be the song that goes out with us in our heads and our hearts to remind us-- in all circumstances-who and whose we are. What use does the church have for music that doesn't meet this criterion?

"The highest moral imperative of the church is to be the church." --Will Campbell. This means many things. But at the very least it means that preserving our unique identity is vitally important. Earnest Campbell once said in my hearing that one of the jobs of the church is to be a repository, holding on to some tenets of the faith until we're ready to hear them. At each stage of our lives, we need our community to remind us who and whose we are, where we came from, and who can direct our future.

Worship should be.missional (Isaiah 58: 6-7, Acts 2& 4)

Can you think of one character in scripture who had an experience of worship that did not ultimately focus them outward to some new or deepened sense of calling? Obviously, service is not the sole purpose of worship, but isn't service a sign that we've been participants in authentic worship?

We need time with God for its own sake, for our own sakes. But when I'm at a worship service that doesn't send me out with some kind of application to make, some kind of fresh call to action, I have to question if something wasn't missing from my worship, my offering to God. Like you, I've been a part of both traditional and contemporary services that led me to nothing.

Service is not always the result or by-product of worship. Sometimes it is the doorway, the invitation.

After leading the congregational music for three days for a large convention of the "NC Baptist Men," I was approached at the piano by a stranger who said, "So, you're a pilot!"

"No sir," I said, utterly confused. "I'm a musician. Did I say something that made you think I was pilot?"

"Well, I thought you did," he said.

My mind reeled through the long seconds of the silence between us. Then I remembered a video they had shown at the conference about a new ministry they had developed with the bright idea of approaching the weekend fliers at the Raleigh airport-the non-professionals with a pilot's license and a small plane but with no real agenda but to log flight time or just enjoy themselves-and ask them to be part of disaster relief missions or make "Angel Flight" trips, carrying sick children to specialists in hospitals far from their homes or shuttle donated organs to places where they might save a life. Many of the pilots they approached found their lives changed by their involvement in such meaningful missions.

"Are. are YOU a pilot?" I asked, finally.

The man overflowed. He began talking so fast and so excitedly that, in an instant, it became clear to me what had happened. He was just a rich guy with a pilot's license, used to using his plane to kill time making lazy circles in the air. He wasn't a church-goer, wasn't interested in religion. But somehow, he got talked into using his gift and his resources and lives were being saved and changed. Grateful parents were giving him tearful hugs, children were sending him "thank-you" artwork, he had saved someone's life! He had found meaning and purpose in the most unexpected place. God was in it, he didn't know how or why, but he was sure of that. Now, seeing it all come together at the conference, he was about to bust. He had to talk about it! He was so full of his experience, so desperate to talk about it that he was projecting "pilot" on everyone around him, looking for an excuse to tell his story.

What a mistake it would have been to have first approached that man about coming to some church for worship! What a mistake it would have been if they had first offered him something he wasn't looking for or interested in. For many people, for most people, the connection to meaning has to precede the connection to God, to worship. Where did we get the notion that every life must follow the same pattern: bring them to worship, send them to serve? Jesus didn't do that way; he called them to action first, theology and & worship second. Sometimes service is the very thing that brings us into communion with God.

One of the warning signs is that we are participating in worship that is self-indulgent and pointless is that it never leads us to anything beyond our private relationship with God. If there are any praise choruses that even broach the subject of how our worship of God affects our interpersonal relationships I'm not aware of them, and of the very few hymns that do, many of the best ones are new ones! Biblical worship either sends us out to serve or is itself a response to some encounter with God experienced in service. So, the call to Christian service is not an end in itself, but an integral part of the life cycle of a disciple, a sign that our worship is authentic.

Finally, worship planning should be. content-driven

Above all, we are people of the Word. This is largely denied by the "praise and worship" sub-culture, in which praise is paramount and even the larger context of "worship" is listed-- even in its name-- as secondary to praise. There is little place in that model for the "Word" or content of our beliefs except perhaps for the lyrical presentation of scraps of scripture, and even then, they are usually select passages about "praise" or how God is "worthy of praise." While praise is an important component of worship, it falls short of representing the whole of the gospel or of speaking to all the aspects of discipleship as scripture does and as Jesus-Word become flesh-does.

To avoid such a trap, we must be intentional about what we do in worship. This does not mean scripting out all spontaneity or quenching the Holy Spirit. But it will require us to learn to define and defend what we are doing in answer to the questions, "why?" and "what for?" The reason for our choices should be expressed in what is spoken and sung and it should be explained or strongly implied in the structure of the service itself.

In worship planning, the key to resolving the style conflict we are experiencing today is deciding first what our message is: putting content ahead of style . Figuring out what the message for the day is will be a catalytic-if not traumatic-- process for many churches. It will likely reveal new differences between us and may even stir up heated theological debates. But if so, we will have at least raised the level of the discourse to something more substantial than musical taste, and for that reason alone it is worth the struggle. At best, however, we will have embarked on the great adventure of rediscovering what worship is all about, what the church is all about. Putting the message first, agreeing upon the scripture for the day (perhaps utilizing the liturgical church calendar to supply scriptures when we are stuck), establishing the point, the theme of every service, will not only give us a framework for which to make our choices, it will supply us with a place to find agreement, and it will realign us with the substance of our faith.

Yes, it is harder. Yes, it requires that we think about what we are doing, sift thru our values, beliefs, and traditions, determine what makes our church unique, and be more creative than we have been in years. But why would we want to be part of anything less? The motto of the Royal School of Church Music, Addington Palace , England is: "I will sing with the Spirit and I will sing with the understanding also." That is a worthy motto for worship music.

Here's the best news: content-driven worship planning will end the style debate-not by demeaning it or ignoring it-- but by absorbing it. Once we have established our direction for a worship service, we discover that virtually all styles of music can be incorporated, so long as they speak to the theme, or illuminate some aspect-positively or negatively-of our human struggle to receive what God offers us. It is not a way of circumventing the style issue, but by enveloping it in a larger context. No one need feel excluded, no style need be rejected out of hand, but each person will be asked to put their personal agendas aside and kneel first at the altar of the word and subject their preferences to the its authority. That reverence alone is an act of worship.

Another great benefit to this approach is that all our hard decisions about the "form" of worship can flow out of the content and theme. The order of service, the choice of elements, the decision to use hymns, choruses, choral anthem lit., instrumentals, children's choirs, old music, new music, sacred or popular music, drama, dance, silence, what have you, is determined by the role these elements would play in serving the message. Even the arrangement of the furniture, the lighting, the type of arrangement on the altar can be used to express, enhance or serve the message.

One summer I served as the camp pastor for 10 weeks of youth conferences. Worship amounted to a typical, high-energy contemporary celebration, based upon the assumption that what the youth most needed was volume, energy and enthusiasm. Of course, once we got them energized, it was a struggle to settle them down to a place where they could contemplate their spirituality before the hour was up. But, that was the kind of tradition we were married to, a contemporary one at that, without ever questioning it.

As the staff of 20 debriefed our experiences counseling with teenagers one or one, we discovered that the chief obstacle to faith for many of them was some experience of tragedy, some experience with the problem of evil, some experience of the felt absence of God that had been poorly addressed or completely unaddressed by the Christians in their lives. We decided to devote one service at the mid-point of the week to the question of "Where God is when tragedy happens?

We settled upon John 11 for our guiding scripture and almost immediately we recognized that because Jesus made three primary responses to Lazarus' death, we would need a three-part service. It dawned upon us that starting this service with the typical praise celebration would be inappropriate. That was how we hoped to end our service, but it was not where things should begin. So, we began in silence and in darkness. We shrouded the platform and all the instruments in black cloth.

The students entered the room in stunned silence. If one hooted or made jokes about the drastic change in the room, he was shushed by. one of the other teenagers. They were instinctively reverent. This happened each week for eight weeks with a different crowd of 600 teenagers from different parts of the country.

As we moved through the service, we had to un-shroud an instrument to play a song-even a sad song-and light a candle to have enough light to read the scripture. Slowly we brought other people onto the platform to present a monologue by Mary, Martha, then Lazarus. The sermon was broken into three parts so we could hear, experience, contemplate, and apply what the scripture was telling us about Jesus' response to our pain. Structure, style, song-choice, symbols and props, even decisions about lighting all flowed out of the theme, the point, the scripture. Somewhere along the way, lights began to come on, the black cloths disappeared, the tempo, the light, the energy returned, and we ended the service with the kind of celebration that the hope of new life calls for.

As you've probably guessed, this experimental service was the most effective worship experience we had each week all summer, and many people still describe it to me as the most important and formative worship service they ever had. Those of us in leadership did not fully understand what we were doing, but we were following our instincts and listening to the text. It was not a major production by any means; it was the simplest service we did all summer, requiring the least amount of technical production. All the hard work went into the thoughtful arrangement of the elements.

It will probably come as no surprise to you to hear that there was never any debate about the style of the music in that service. All other concerns, all the selfish agendas, were swallowed by the overarching commitment to the theme, the scripture, the needs of the worshippers, and the worship team's commitment to finding most appropriate flow of elements to create an environment that would enable us to listen to what the spirit of God wanted to say to us. It is worth mentioning that the experience was transformative for the staff as well, as all shared creative endeavors can be. We came away with a far clearer sense of inclusion, of who we were, and of what we were about.

Individual churches will take different approaches, deciding to include or limit certain types of expression according to what they believe constitutes reverence before God, obedience to scripture and sensitivity to the Holy Spirit. So long as the church agrees about these things together and can express their rationale clearly, they are entitled to establish their own traditions. But where there is debate, and there will always be, the values of transformation, inclusion, identity, mission and content can instrumental in elevating the discourse passed the lesser goods of fashion and personal taste to the higher goods of substance and purpose.

A good test for worship experiences:

How does this service of worship speak to some aspect of my personality, habits or thought-life that needs to be transformed by the gospel?

Is this service catering to only what we want or is it challenging me to accept what we most need?

Who does this service reveal us to be and what does it say about our image of God?

What is this service of worship a response to? What does it call us to do in response to what God has already done?

What does this service teach my children about reverence, tradition, inclusion, ritual, the community of faith and the importance of all the elements of worship: praise, confession, meditation, teaching scripture, offering, prayer, etc... for their spiritual development?

What is the message, the point, the focus of all these expressions and how does it transcend all the superficial concerns of my life and challenge me or encourage my spiritual development?

When a church finally develops the kind of leadership that dares to educate and help sort out its identity and purpose, I believe the fractured, bickering church will respond. When it comes to worship I don't really believe most people really know what they want, except that they want it to be a) well-done, b) thoughtfully designed to be relevant to them, and c) passionate. Personally, I believe these are the essentials that mainstream Protestants have always had at their disposal but have largely neglected, causing them to lose members and support. The average person on the street may not fully grasp the difference in content initially, but they will recognize the difference in focus, passion and professionalism until such time as their sensitivities are raised, along with their standards, and they recognize their role as custodians of ancient ideals that are too important to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency.

Finally, we must remember, in all humility, that it is only after including people, establishing trust, and exposing them to the best we have to offer that we will earn the right to have this discussion in the first place. Yes, we want to reach as many people as possible. But l arge numbers are important only to the degree that individual persons are important: we must always put our concern for individuals over our concerns about style. And ultimately, if the content of our worship is not more important than even whether we successfully draw people to church, we will have nothing to offer "whomsoever shall come" when we finally get the chance.

--Kyle Matthews