Music in Worship

What kind of music pleases God? Some would advocate traditional hymns and others would advocate contemporary music. In my experience, however, an argument for either is more an appeal to personal preference even though it is often veiled in Biblical reasons. After all, traditional hymns were once contemporary. Does that mean they were inappropriate at one time? Advocates for traditional hymns find more against contemporary music than they do for traditional hymns. To them, contemporary music smells of the corrupt culture in which we find ourselves and so we should reject it. That assumes, however, that the culture from which traditional hymns came was less corrupt than ours today. How can this be? In Acts, Peter calls his own generation “corrupt” (Acts 2:40). Finding a secular culture at any period of time that was not marked by corruption is not possible. On the other hand, advocates of contemporary music argue against traditional hymns because they are outdated and don’t communicate to the people of our day. How long before the contemporary music selected becomes “outdated?” To reject traditional hymns outright is to reject music and lyrics that have stood the test of time theologically. It also rejects the notion that we have any connection to the church of an earlier time.

Keys to Music as Worship

• Be willing to set aside personal preferences. The key to selecting music is first to remember that we are worshiping corporately and not individually. The idea of worship is to find an appropriate way to express our affections to God as a body. This means we need to set personal preferences aside. We need to rejoice alongside our brothers and sisters when they are moved more by traditional music and we need to rejoice alongside our brothers and sisters when they are moved more by contemporary music. We must remember the corporate aspect – with those in the immediate congregation and those from earlier generations.
• Remember who you are worshiping – Make it God-focused, Christ-centered, Grace-oriented. Music needs to be lifting up Christ rather than ourselves. There is a lot of “Christian” music out there that sounds good on the surface but when you boil it all down, ends up really being about me and what I’m doing for God rather than what God has done for me.
• Music should be incarnational. When Jesus left his heavenly home and entered ours, he came to a specific tribe of people within a specific culture. He spoke in the common language (Aramaic, rather than Hebrew), used agricultural illustrations because he was in an agricultural community, and taught in styles contemporary to the day. We live centuries after Christ’s earthly ministry and continents apart and yet are still tempted to make Christianity a cultural thing. One thing the New Testament writers make clear is that Christianity is cross-cultural. They battled the Jews of the first century over this point. Just as Christ communicated his teaching in the culture of his day, so should we. Music is key to this. If we offer music of a style that is heard nowhere else but inside the church, we are in danger of adding offense to the gospel. The gospel has offense enough in the eyes of an unbelieving world. We should not be adding to it. Music gives us a great way to model the incarnation by communicating the gospel in a contemporary cultural style.