Over the past few years, there's been a recurring conversation in our household. Of course, there have been many iterations, with different thoughts thrown into the mix each time.

Now, however, I think it's time to share it with you.

It's about worship.

Worship is what makes Peter tick. When I first met him, he was newly back from a year of musical mission work, heavily involved in the church worship team, attending as many worship conferences and workshops as he could find, and freely sharing his passion with any who would listen. (His initials are PTL, for heaven's sake!) When he used to work as an associate pastor, one of his roles was that of worship pastor.

I must admit that, at first, I didn’t see the point of being quite so all-in on church worship. After all, it’s just a small part of each week’s services. Sermons, prayer and Bible studies, discipleship and serving others are bigger factors, I thought. 

Sure, worship songs are a good way to soften our hearts towards God, so that those other things have more of an impact, I thought. But they’re not the main thing.

Over time, however, I’ve realized that perhaps I was wrong to dismiss worship as only a preparatory part of our meeting together.

Impact of Temperament

I’ve written before about the different spiritual temperaments. Each of us interacts and connects with God in different ways. For some of us, it’s through nature or ritual, silence, or caring for others. We might be dominant in one trait, or be a mix of a few. In the same way, each of us absorbs spiritual lessons differently.

This leads me to believe that our church services should likewise endeavour to speak to a range of spiritual temperaments, rather than engaging only a subset. The God of all creation did not deem that only those with intellectual temperaments would be able to grow deeply into Him. (Remember Jesus’ admonition, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”[1])

I’m a spiritually intellectual type. Much as it pains me to say this, if sermons only speak to those with an intellectual bent, then they cannot be the most important thing on a Sunday morning.

Let’s do a comparison to illustrate.

  • How many times in a week do people rewatch the Sunday sermon?
  • How many times in a week do people listen to worship music in their cars and kitchens, while jogging or running errands?

As preacher, author, and hymn-writer Charles Spurgeon once said, “Music is portable theology.”[2]

Appropriate Caution

If worship music is so important, then we should also approach it with appropriate caution. Worship pastors aren’t just musicians. They are spiritual leaders.

These days, we’ve been concerned by a growing trend of churches hiring as worship pastors people who are musically gifted but with no theological foundation. Without the proper underpinning, our spiritual leaders cannot hope to lead us towards ever-deepening godliness. [3]

Worship as a Business

We’ve also been concerned with the trend of making worship a business. The influx of money is good for giving Christian artists the resources to continue making music—but it comes with a big drawback. Worship-for-hire is also dangerous in that it can attract songwriters who are in it for the money. In fact, they may sometimes not even claim to be Christians at all.

If the story of Jesus turning over the tables in the temple showed us anything, it's that when we make worship a business, the vulnerable are harmed (in that case, the Gentiles' place of prayer was usurped) and God gets angry.

The Danger of a Dormant Brain

In our society today, it’s common for people to turn off their brains when hearing music, and not listen to the words. But a worship pastor or leader can't be like that. We can’t afford to choose songs because they're in the same key, we like the rhythm, or we enjoy a favourite riff. Choice requires prayer, serious thought, and dependance on the Holy Spirit.

The danger of turning our brains off is that even if we’re not actively thinking, the content we hear is still passively absorbed into our subconsciouses. The things we hear often serve to “prime” us to interpret what we see and hear in ways that align with the things that have gone before in our experience. For instance, if someone has just seen the colour yellow, when asked for the name of a fruit, they will be much more likely to respond “banana” than they would “apple”. Perception influences our reality and reactions.

If we don’t apply the same rigour to selecting our worship music as to the creation of our sermons, this can make for some very bad song selections indeed. Here are a few possible mistakes we can make:

Bad Theology
Please understand, I’m not saying that old songs have good theology and new songs have bad. That’s not the case at all. Some of the old hymns had remarkably bad theology too. However, over time, discerning Christians stopped singing them, and many are no longer in our repertoire. Our modern music is too young to have gone through the same historical filter, so the job of filtering is left up to us.

Perhaps an example would be helpful. Let’s look at Jars of Clay’s “Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet.” It has a beautiful melody, and an almost hypnotic rhythm. But the error is in the title, which also happens to be the line repeated throughout the song. Can you see it?

Imagine how a wife might feel if her husband, with stars in his eyes declared to all his friends, “I haven’t cheated on her yet!”

The word “yet” implies that though something hasn’t happened until now, it is coming. When we sing this song, we impugn the power and all-sufficiency of Jesus’ blood. This is not a song glorifying God at all.

Crossover Music
I get it. Christian artists want to make more money by creating songs that could be sung in secular circles as love songs. But when we generalize Jesus and God out of our songs, we’re on dangerous ground.

Again, here I think we see the peril of the commercialization of worship music. When we remove the things of God from our worship music and replace them with things that could pass as secular, we ignore the truth that the things of the Spirit are foolishness to those who don’t believe [4].

After all, ”fine music without devotion is but a splendid garment upon a corpse." [5]

Lacking in Substance
Worship music comes in all shapes and sizes. Some of it is short, with lots of repetition. Some of it is rich and deep, perhaps with lots of verses. Some are old hymns (Trust and Obey, for example) or newer ones (In Christ Alone). Whatever the case, they can all be a source of theological training for those who don’t go to Bible school. For instance, the revered preachers A.W. Tozer and Charles Spurgeon never attended seminary. But they both were trained and informed by the Scriptures, reading books, and the hymnody of their time.

Though cotton candy is a wonderful treat, it’s important not to create an entire diet around it. In the same way, it’s important to provide the people we lead with things they can sink their spiritual teeth into, and not offer only filler songs. We don’t want our congregations, especially those with non-intellectual temperaments, to be malnourished.

A Recommended Remedy

Now we come to the crux of the matter—the part that speaks directly to the decision makers in our churches. Given all that’s gone before, I would ask you to prayerfully consider a few courses of action when you’re next hiring a worship leader or pastor.

Please consider using similar rigour in hiring or appointing a worship pastor as you would with hiring a senior pastor. These worship leaders are the ones who will be equipping your congregations with the “portable theology” that they will carry into the rest of the week.

What might this look like?

Here are some ideas:

  • Ask for 6 worship sets on a particular topic, then ask the potential leader to describe his or her process in making each set.
  • Do trial periods before committing to a firm hire.
  • Interview them for theological understanding. They may not have gone to Bible school, but they need to have a deep foundation of wisdom and insight to draw from.
  • Examine their life. It’s easy to fake a God-honouring lifestyle for a while based on rules, but eventually misunderstandings of foundational principles will be apparent.
  • Make sure your worship leaders are focussed on nurturing spiritual growth, and not solely on musical excellence.


The best worship I’ve ever experienced was led by people who weren’t musical superstars. But they had hearts that were committed to Jesus, and possessed a depth of spiritual character that called my own spirit towards Jesus. That worship was bursting with beauty, and life-changing.

At the end of the day, God is interested in the state of our hearts, not the perfection of our vocal cords.


NOTES

[1] Matthew 19:14, NIV.

[2] Scott A. Gayer. “Did You Know Spurgeon Wrote Hymns?” The Spurgeon Center. Last modified 28 September 2017. https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/blog-entries/did-you-know-spurgeon-wrote-hymns/.

[3] Bible school is one possible source for such a foundation, but is by no means the only one.

[4] 1 Corinthians 2:14.

[5] Scott A. Gayer. “Did You Know Spurgeon Wrote Hymns?” The Spurgeon Center. Last modified 28 September 2017. https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/blog-entries/did-you-know-spurgeon-wrote-hymns/.