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“Please God may I catch this fly ball…”

You are playing outfield for the Heaven Defense Department softball team. God himself is at the plate; for the sake of your own limited imagination, he’s taken the form of a sort-of mid-millennial Anglo-Saxon long-hair-with-a-robe kind-of guy. There you stand, center field, and a stomach-churning feeling of impending doom comes over you-He’s going to hit it straight to you.

You’ve caught this ball before, you know. There was the time when God took you out to the field, when no one else was there, and popped them out to you one after another. You watched them beautifully sail through the atmosphere, placed yourself under their apparent path of decrement, and caught them as they fell into your open hands.

But here you are, at the big game. You see God at the plate. He’s swinging. The ball is sent starward with a harmonic crack and it begins its perfect arc toward YOU.

Suddenly, your coaches are all about you. The first base coach stands ten yards to your left, shouting, “Stand here! The ball is going to come down here!” The team manager shouts encouragement from behind you: “Just step back a few feet, hold your hands up, and get ready!” The third base coach is sending you signals; it looks like he’s trying to act out what you should do...

Thunk. The ball lands behind you...

There is a phenomenon in this country right now, known as “praise and worship”. This Christian fascination is not without its price: all across this great nation of ours, people are flocking to concerts, picking up CDs, and otherwise (*ahem*) singing the praises and filling the coffers of praise and worship music’s select. There is a hunger, an intense hunger, for the “worship experience,” and those trained in the musical creation of such experiences have found themselves with plenty of employment lately... Unfortunately, as it has become with most things in the modern church, music has become a victim of the church’s loving embrace with modernist philosophy. Worship music has become formulistic, predictable and secure in its execution---making the typical “worship experience” very stale, rote, and anesthetic (this from the movement first begun in response to the “boring” liturgies of “old” church).

Most tragic of all is the compartmentalization that has occurred around not just worship music, but also our entire experience of God. God has become someone we meet only on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings (Saturday nights if we’re hip), and the goosebumps-up-the-arms take-my-breath-away God has become available to us only within the context of the evangelical music event. Should our encounter with such an event be disrupted by our schedules, or worse yet, a talkative couple in front of us, we will miss out on God. The bush was a-burnin’ up on the mountain, but we missed the tram ride to the top.

But before we jump right to the end of this story, let’s look at where we have been. First, by way of definition: what do we exactly mean by “praise and worship?” Do we mean the experience of God? The liturgical order of worship? The holy of holies? No. We mean, literally, praise and worship music. Praise and worship music is primarily a style of music. It is often referred to as “choral” music because of its trait of having oft repeated “chorus” sections-short, easily sung parts of a song. Many times new music is kept out of the church canon simply because it does not fit into the understood style of “P&W.” Recent attempts by contemporary P&W artists, like Delirious and Sonic Flood, to update P&W’s relevancy to popular music have been accepted with open arms by a church culture finally ready to add a modern feel to their P&W (never mind that groups like The Choir were creating modern liturgies a decade ago). However it is important to observe the constancy of style that exists even within the “modern” P&W “movement.” This is because there is, in fact, a theological and philosophical root to our contemporary praise and worship of God that threatens to bury church worship experience forever in pretension and irrelevance.

The common myth perpetuating the praise and worship music phenomena is that of the “sacred” versus the “secular;” that is, that there are segments of our lives more holy, sacred, and set apart for God than others-in this case, the praise and worship music service, specifically. As long as this ideology continues to steer the church at large, our worship of God will remain no more than a distant affair wrapped in the best of intentions.

What are the reasons for the current segmentation? Why is it wrong to believe in such compartmentalization?

There are many examples of biblical texts that have been used to support such a worldview, many of them condemning any activities of the “world”. For example, James warns, “You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” (James 4:4) The issue here is certainly not the validity of James’ statement, but rather the exact definition of “the world”. In modern times, the world has been defined to be anything outside of western Christian culture. It is easy to surmise that James had no such concept as “Christian culture,” let alone that which is represented by western Christians today. How did Scriptural statements such as this one become to be known as tenets of a sub-cultural phenomena rather than spiritual encouragements, or at worst, admonishments?

It is possible that many of us have fallen into the trap of using Scripture to support our already existing world view, as opposed to allowing Scripture, in the words of Mike Riddell, “to do [its] radical work among us” (from Threshold of the Future, SPCK: 1998). Much due to the Enlightenment, we have allowed a type of cerebral idolatry to mark our world and God view. The Enlightenment certainly is not the only development to influence our modern outlook: Darwinism has also given our faith a utilitarian tinge:

The dominant Christian philosophy of the 20th century, modernism, is in some respects an intertwining of these two threads. It is this cord in particular that has led the church, and subsequently its art and music, by the neck for countless years. It has caused our worship of God to become segmented apart from the rest of our daily existence. We must allow Him back in.

 

This cord of intellectualism and utilitarianism has been twisted tighter and tighter throughout our world’s culture by such ideologies as Freudianism, Marxism, McCarthyism, the Cultural Revolution, and effected some of the most rapid change history had theretofore ever known: the industrial and technical revolutions. It has also resulted in the dominant philosophy of modernism, and the dominant Christian-cultural outlook of Evangelicalism. 20th Century Christianity did not oppose modernism or liberalism, but rather stuck its arrow in the same fire. It adopted the same basic creeds of the need for intellectual rigor and laborious usefulness in any endeavor. The Bible became a reference for debate, much like the Encyclopedia Britannica or your statistics textbook; science became a tool to reveal the truth, and masters of Bible-idolic data manipulation looked very much like the university researchers, using creative statistics to prove points and thereby gain more monies; and music and spiritual experience became sterilized and compartmentalized. Sunday-morning-ish music could be spiritual, in the right context (certainly on Sunday morning); pop music was sensual (Lord knowing sex is no proper subject for a religious person to breach); rock music was borderline devil worship (with its gothic undertones and association with marginalized culture); and college radio was spurning rebellion in the very places our young people should be learning to defend God’s word!

The very faith which was once such a major contributor to culture sank into sub-cultural irrelevance through fear and intimidation; but mostly because those who desired to uphold their faith against the fire of the “world” did so with the same fire that threatened the thatch which had been built over hundreds of years by saints and artisans such as Francis, Beethoven, King Jr., Dylan. Our beliefs, and the music which represented them, was separated from real life and real culture, and left in the ghetto for dead.

Praise and worship, as a segmented and process-driven event, suffers futility-it fails to reflect real life, but instead promotes pride, isolation, individuality, and a limited experience of God. To become again relevant, humiliating, uniting, and awesome, our worship of God must integrate our entire lives; it must involve our communities and our day-to-day experience. The fact is that there is nothing more spiritual about your Sunday morning service than there is about a Sting or Pearl Jam concert. In fact, elements of performance such as Eddie Vedder’s writing “Pro Choice” across his arm or Rage Against The Machine’s standing silent on stage, wearing nothing but duct tape over their mouths, involve more spiritual interaction with congregants than your typical worship leader ranting “Everybody now!” Typically such acts both understand what they are communicating and how to communicate it with vigor, engagement, and creativity-much more so than acts in the P&W genre. It seems the Spirit has been working with a great deal of efficacy in the very places we have been isolating ourselves from.

Praise and worship music, even just by its intentions, is the most presumptuous and inauthentic art in existence today. There are two specific reasons for this: First, as Dr. Bilezikian of Wheaton College writes in Community 101, “Corporate worship is not just quantitatively different from private devotions...it is qualitatively different.” Songs written for the praise and worship genre have been traditionally written from one of two emotional places: that of individual devotion and longing for Christ, or that of scientifically creating works for the expressed purpose of eliciting an emotional response from a Christian congregation. When brought into the group setting, the former loses its authenticity in trying to become for many what was only meant for one, the latter, while inauthentic to start with, becomes something much more dark in nature when that elicited emotional response is chalked up to something more than the calculated production that it is.

The second driver behind worship music’s slip into insincerity is closely linked to that very last point, and is the very essence of this entire story. That is, unified awe-experience of God cannot be segmented from the rest of a person’s journey; it cannot be a sacred moment reserved for church auditoriums and Christian concert halls; it must be part of the very marrow of life. Tearing the emotive experience of God away from life is akin to tearing away a joint ligament from its bone: the limb remains intact visibly, but its functionality is all but ruined.

We’ve been standing in the mud for so long, our pants, our shoes, our socks are soaked in it. It squishes in-between our toes when we try to move. But move we must.

First, we must get worship away from form. God, and his worship, are mysterious, complicated, beyond our human understanding. We can certainly hope for a glimpse, a glimmer, a goose bump, a gasp of thin air. But we cannot continue to pursue Him week in and week out from within the same form and the same boundaries.