Music in the Church

Biola Magazine:

Last spring, evangelicals across America were abuzz when Atlanta’s North Point Community Church released “Sunday’s Coming,” a short film that parodied contemporary evangelical worship. The popularity of that video — which went viral across Facebook and Twitter and dominated chatter for weeks on the Christian blogosphere — is a testament to the accuracy of (and our familiarity with) its depiction of contemporary worship. Featuring a stereotypical evangelical church with formulaic rock music (“lights and big drums”) and laughably predictable worship leader banter (“I’d like to invite the ushers to come…”), the video was a hilarious, slightly disturbing reminder of how silly our worship can look from a distance.

“Sunday’s Coming” raises questions about the homogeneity and shallow predictability of contemporary worship. Many evangelical churches in America today share a very identifiable style of worship music: a five-piece band with electric guitars, singing U2-sounding songs about God’s love written by Hillsong or Matt Redman. The experience of “worship music” has become formulaic, standardized and narrowly conceived within much of evangelicalism. In some cases, it is simply the “thing we do” for 25 minutes before the pastor preaches a sermon.

How can we go deeper in our worship? How can we make it more meaningful and less worthy of parody? And how can we make worship more about “we” the church than “me” the consumer, but above all about God?

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