WORSHIP AT THE
SPEEDOF SOUND
The differences between a song like “Shine Jesus Shine” (1987) and “Who You Say I Am” (2017) are not just a matter of the date of composition, content, or musical style. These songs have lived very different lives.
The Challenge You’re planning next weekend’s service and wrestling over the right songs for your congregation. There’s that new, upbeat song, but you’ve done it four times in the last six weeks, and you don’t want to kill it. You received emails last week from people in your church suggesting the “perfect” song, but none of them match the vision for your pastor’s hoped-for response to the sermon. You’ve already done “I Surrender All” a few times in the last six months and you’re hoping for something a little more contemporary. Yet, all the newer songs you can think of are neither high-rotation enough nor new enough to be really, new. So, you turn to the top song lists to see if what’s trending might work and you find a relatively different list than the last time you checked. Frankly, it all feels like too much. When the psalmist calls us to “sing unto the Lord a new song,” undoubtedly, this is NOT what he had in mind. Yet, how long has it been this way? Charles Dickens wrote in his 1844 novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, “Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast.” Although he was writing about the encompassing societal alterations brought on in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, his words aptly describe the current state of congregational worship and the velocity of change we are experiencing. “The mine which Time has slowly dug beneath familiar objects is sprung in an instant; and what was rock before, becomes but sand and dust.”
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