My philosophy of worship and my vision for music ministry has been defined, in part, by three stories.
- My wife and I visited a church several years ago that had a reputation for great music. Indeed, the calibre of musicianship and the quality of the entire package from a quartet of wind instruments, electric guitars and a full worship team with gifted singers to all the technical aspects of the service including the best of everything were in place. I went early to hear and see some of the practice before the service. It was so loud. In fact, I never do this but, I made a point of telling the music director before they began the service that it was uncomfortably loud. I didn’t even know her. She said, “Wait until you hear the congregation....they sing so loud we have to play like this just so that we can hear ourselves a little bit.” Sure enough, it was true. The service started and I’ve never heard anything like it. The man standing to my left sang so loud I couldn’t help but join in.
- A couple of years before that, my wife and I were hiking in the hills of Lucerne, Switzerland, and we heard what sounded like a choir. It was like the hills really were alive with ‘the sound of music.‘ We saw a stone-grey Church building in the distance nestled in the rolling green hills and we walked toward it. The singing got louder and more familiar as we got closer. I expected to hear some gaelic hymn like ‘Be Thou My Vision.’ Instead, I heard ‘Faithful One‘ by Brian Doerksen, which was a very contemporary song then. I went in the side door of the church which was propped open and sat down in the pew to listen to the music. I saw one acoustic guitar player, a piano player, and a crowd of people who all looked like they were 65 and older singing with all their hearts. During a break I told the leader that he was doing a great job with his choir tackling this contemporary music. He said, “This isn’t my choir, this is part of my congregation. I’m the pastor and we like to get together with the older crowd on Wednesday nights to go over the newer songs that we don’t know very well so we can bless the Lord with some harmonies on sunday morning.”
- A couple of years before that I was taking a class in ethnomusicology - the study of music in different cultures. My professor had recently returned from a trip to Africa where he told story after story about the experiences of worship he had there. I imagined all of the different rhythms and native instruments and the experts who played them and led the people in African praises. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He told me that, in the villages he visited, whenever an instrument was used, if it still worked, it was never played by anyone who was accomplished or even necessarily knew how to play it. Guitars were never in tune, and anytime any kind of amplification was used it would often feedback, and crackle, and hiss. Children were constantly running around him, shouting, singing, dancing, and banging anything together they could find. It was a music pastor’s nightmare. In one service there was a 10 year old boy who began to sing spontaneously and accompany himself with only a snare drum that was held together with black duct tape. He had one broken stick and beat the drum with all his might. Within minutes he was leading hundreds of people for over an hour singing the one song, “Jesus, all for Jesus” at the top of their lungs. Every single person had their arms in the air, some were kneeling, some were weeping, and the sound of their voices united in brokenness and humility was thunderous and spine-tingling.
In all three of these stories all of the people sang, loudly. There was no hesitancy or hindrances in their worship of Jesus. I used to wonder why and how this can happen without a common musical formula. And then I realized it didn’t have anything to do with the music. The people in all three stories were going to sing no matter what. Electric guitars, acoustic guitars, out of tune guitars, old songs, new songs, and broken drums. They were singing. The music didn’t matter because their hearts were so full of the love of Jesus Christ and so completely surrendered to Him they didn’t notice or care about what was accompanying them. It was their broken, humble and thankful hearts that defined their worship.