Worship Wonderings

"Christmas may be the only time when people want to hear traditional music, no matter what age they are. Even kids who are totally into hard rock want to hear a few carols, which makes it easier to put together a service that pleases everybody. We try to do the same thing during Holy Week and Easter."

That’s Jeff Crandall, the 46-year-old worship pastor of High Desert Church.

The quote caught my attention because High Desert Church was featured in a New York Times piece for their “FM dial” approach to their worship services:

• They offer what they call their "Classic" service for Baby Boomers and others who came of age during the "Jesus rock" explosion in the '60s and '70s. The service is built on an acoustic rock style along the lines of the Eagles.
  
• Then there’s the "Harbor" service for people between the ages of 30 and 50. It features the kind of inspirational rock in the style of U2 and classic bands from the 1980s.
  
• And then the "Seven" service cranks things up another notch with what the worship pastor described as a "dark" and "moody" mix of postmodern music for young adults under 30.

The Times piece adds: “The church also maintains even more bands for services at the junior high, high school and elementary school levels. Each band carefully calibrates its sound toward the pop culture disposition of the target age group.”

The megachurch reaches thousands in each of the carefully calibrated services.

The Times piece came out November 7, and I’ve been holding on to it, trying to figure out what to write about it. I’m trying to figure out: Is this good for outreach or bad for fellowship?

On the one hand, I acknowledge that a church’s choice of worship music (more particularly, it’s choice of instruments and instrumentation) is vital for connecting with the culture you want to reach. As the pastor at High Desert Church puts it, “When you start a church, you don't decide who you're going to reach and then pick a music style. You pick a music style, and that determines who's going to come." Rick Warren has said that the biggest mistake he made as a church planter was underestimating the importance of music. He found he had to more narrowly define the music style of his services in order to see real effectiveness in his outreach.

As I said, though, I’m trying to figure out if the Times piece on High Desert is an example of effective outreach or an indication of broken Christian fellowship.

It’s not just an academic question for me. Our church has two worship styles: what we’ve nicknamed the “Bold Blend” led by a praise band, and our “Smooth Blend” led by a robed choir and orchestra.

I like offering prospective guests the options, but I sometimes wonder if our congregation would be better off learning to worship under one roof using a skillful blend of elements from both services.

In an excellent Books and Culture piece, Mark Noll asks, “What explains the power of song so powerfully to shape, anchor, encourage, disturb, unite, divide, and distract Christian communities?”

Noll does an effective job pointing out how the “worship wars” is not a recent phenomenon: Christians have been dividing and uniting over music for a long time:

Long before the contemporary "worship wars" that have become such a central feature of both church formation and church division in North America, battles over song littered the historical landscape—from full-scale encounters in the Reformation era to major skirmishes in the early 18th century over introducing the hymns of Isaac Watts (who offered loose paraphrases of Scripture), then a bit later over the hymns of Charles Wesley and other notables of the evangelical awakenings (who mostly gave up paraphrasing in favor of biblically normed accounts of Christian experience), over the use of organs and choirs (much debated throughout the 19th century), over whether and where to sing the gospel songs of Fanny Crosby and Ira B. Sankey (much derided as dangerously sentimental), over how to regard the burst of hymn-writing attending the rise of Pentecostalism (ditto), and, most recently, over what to make of the Jesus People bringing rock-n-roll into the church.

Noll acknowledges the difficulty of learning to worship together, but he also points out that it's a worthy goal. He updates the poet’s call in Psalm 150:

"Praise him with syncopation and on the beat. Praise him with 5-tones (the Thai xylophone), 12-tones (most Western music), 24-tones (Arab music), and all scales in between. Praise him a cappella, with orchestra, and with drum set. Praise him with works of supernal intelligence and greatest simplification. Let everything that breathes praise the Lord! Together."

So, would our congregation be better off learning to worship under one roof using a skillful blend of elements from both services? Maybe I shouldn’t post a question on this weblog until I’m ready to answer it, but that’s the matter I’m exploring at present.

Wer spricht mit mir ist mein Mitmensch;
wer singt mit mir ist mein Bruder.
“The one who speaks with me is my fellow human;
the one who sings with me is my brother”