“All
that is gold does not glitter,
Not
all those who wander are lost;
The
old that is strong does not wither,
Deep
roots are not reached by the frost.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
My husband and I find ourselves in
a season of searching for a new church home. This is not a decision we’ve come
to lightly or flippantly, but it is, we are firmly convinced, a decision that
is necessary for our spiritual health and something we’ve been struggling and
praying over for the past year and a half. I have to be honest and say I’m
feeling a little bit wandering in the desert when it comes to looking for a new
church home, though after the church we’ve visited the past two weeks I am
feeling much more hopeful than I have in a long time.
Anyway, I have something I’ve been
pondering blogging about for a while now, and this seems as good a time as any
to hash it out. Having moved as often as we have over the years, and now having
adult kids in various places of the country who are members of their own
churches, we’ve been members of and visited a lot of churches over the
years. Something I’m noticing, and this
is totally not unique to me as I have seen countless blog posts and articles
discussing it as well, is that people in many of the congregations we’ve seen
do not sing, or at least, do not sing enthusiastically. I’m wondering why that
is. I’ve said often how much I miss singing in choir, and people will sometimes
say, “Oh you could join this community group, or that women’s chorus.” But it
isn’t so much the fact of singing in choir in and of itself that I miss.
What I miss is, for example, what we had at Immanuel Bible Church in
Springfield, VA, where the choir and musicians sang and played with worshipful
excellence, AND the congregation was singing with joy and enthusiastically with
us. Seeing and hearing the gathered local body of Christ joining their voices
in singing rich doctrine and doxology together is a foretaste of Heaven. THAT
is what I mean when I say I miss singing in choir.
This is purely anecdotal based on
our experience, but from what I’m observing, the congregations that tend more
to sing out and energetically and from the heart are those whose music leaders
bring doctrinally rich songs to sing. My son’s church has been taught by their
elders that the church members sing to the Lord and also to each other, that we
teach and encourage each other by singing these songs together. I will confess
there are a few people in his church who take that “singing to each other”
exhortation a bit too literally for this introvert when they turn around and
sing right at me, but I’ll take erring on that side over not singing or only
being offered shallow, repetitive
heavy-on-emotion-but-not-nearly-heavy-enough-on-theology songs. This is not a
preference issue. It’s a why-do-we-do-this-thing issue for me.
If you’ve been in the church as
long as I have, you’ll remember the so-called worship wars of the 1980’s and
1990’s, where congregations debated traditional versus contemporary when it
came to music. Friends, in my opinion that was the wrong argument. I really,
really, really, disagree with having two different services, one for
‘traditional’ and one for ‘contemporary.’ Again, this is missing the point. The
longer I think about this and the more churches I get to visit or join, the
more I think the real issue is depth versus shallow. I am convinced that songs
that are mostly trying to gin up our emotions are, again, missing the point. I
know from my own experience that songs that have words that tell me who Jesus
is, what He has done for us, how holy God is, with biblically based and rich
doctrinal teaching within the song will bring out emotions as I ponder those
deep and rich truths MUCH more than a repetitive chorus of a few words telling everyone
I just really, really, really love Jesus. As Alistair Begg once said in a
sermon about worship and this type of thing, “Don’t ask me how I feel! Ask me
what I know!” Amen and amen.
It’s not that the shallower songs
are heretical or anything, they are fine, they are just….kind of empty. And
it’s not like there are not people writing good, rich, theologically thoughtful
songs that have tunes that are accessible to modern hearers and singers. There
are! But, friends, do you know how discouraging it is when your music director
tells you he would love it if you’d shoot some song ideas his way, but when you
do you get told, “Well, we don’t want to be known as a Getty’s church.” True
story. I can think of worse things to be called, truth be told. What I’m
finding discouraging, as someone who really does love to sing, is how many
churches we’ve visited that are pretty healthy, doctrinally sound in Biblical
teaching, but seem unaware that there are people like the Gettys, CityAlight,
Matt Papa, Matt Boswell, Sovereign Grace, to name just a few who I believe are
real gifts to the church and are writing music that does both - lift our
intellect and mind up with rich truth and our emotions with modern and
accessible music that matches the reverence of the words. Why don’t more of the
churches in our area incorporate them more often? What I’m trying to say is
that doctrinally rich lyrics are a beautiful complement to the preached word,
and I wish they were present more often, and we would do well to encourage the
depth such singing and lyrics bring to the worship service and what reverence
they inpire in the worshipers. The kind of depth that helps build roots that go
deep enough to not be touched by the frost when we go about our week. I’m not
going to be that person who joins a church and begins complaining. No, once we
find our new church home, we will submit and love that church...and sing. But I do find
myself on Monday morning, pulling out my playlist and filling up on richer
music.
This is just where I am today.
Hopefully it’s ok to think out loud a little bit.
Here’s what I’ve had on repeat today
on this Monday:
