Another Song About Me?
Written by Jason Winton : March 18, 2008
I wanted to let you all in on a conversation I was having this afternoon with some friends of mine about worship music. To fully disclose my bias—and it’s probably not much of a secret to those that know me—I have been trying to make sense of my evangelical worship tradition (not merely about the music) for a while now—maybe ever since I was a kid. In fact, I distinctly remember my 7-year-old self sitting in the front row pew of Neighborhood church in Redding, Calif. singing along with the “song director,” Pastor Joe, learning to mimic his fluent hand gestures, seeing myself as co-directing our choir of voices, and wanting to be just like him. Despite the pull I often felt then (and continue to feel now), my experiences with worship music in an Evangelical setting have been too often painfully distracting about the most important things. I love to sing and to freely express myself in music and song and lyric—especially at church—however, the more I’ve encountered the limits of those very worship songs I have grown up with, the more I’ve wanted to move beyond their tunnel vision of American Christianity. The real issue, for me, isn’t simply a resistance to a style of music, but instead a search into, around, through and beyond some of the most fundamental questions/doubts I have had about what some are calling the contemporary “worship industry.” More specifically—and aside from the ominous commercial tones that come from such a term—I have been bothered and saddened by the apparent domestication of our gospel to sappy pseudo-psychological, over-spiritualized, and hyper-individualistic worship songs. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to get a conversation started about the kind of culture we’ve created/are creating as we sing our songs in worship?
This most recent reimagining of worship music started when my friends and I fed some homeless folks at the Jesus Center (a local soup kitchen and recovery house offering hospitality in Chico, Calif.) and it has stayed with me since then. Both during and following that event, I began reflecting about the worship songs I had sung there and I suddenly realized how very limited (in terms of theological and moral imagination) my song choices had been. That is, as long as I stayed within the boundaries of our most popular contemporary worship songs, I sensed there would be something very important and needful missing. These songs, generally speaking, seemed to almost always fall short of or even distort what the Bible clearly included in most (if not all) of its sacred narrative. At the Jesus Center I found myself wanting something more from the songs and, frustratingly, I pretty much knew I would be searching for it without much hope of finding what I was looking for.
It was there that I started wondering and asking questions like these: Could it be that our songs lack the real stuff of life—especially in their spiritualized (i.e., disembodied) themes? Will their messages be a truly authentic alternative for the lives lived by most of the homeless folks at the Jesus Center (who in a lot of ways may not be as interested as you or I in having a deeply personal/intimate mental or emotional worship experience)? I persisted with more questions: God must have had more in mind for our worship music than the self-centered stereotypic songs about how much we love God, how much He loves us (spiritually, that is), and how great it is to be saved, right? How has this sanitized version of God’s all-inclusive dreams for the world crept its way into our worship services? Will we ever get beyond self-absorbed mental massages and romantic (self-congratulatory?) love songs about Jesus? Or will we ever get into deeper missional stories about Love’s embodiment within our local households and communities?
The majority of the contemporary worship songs I have come across seem to exclusively offer a dualistic (that is, unearthly) and individualized (that is, private) version of the Bible’s message, which, unfortunately, set theological (that is, practical) limits to one’s real relationships-in-community as well as how we understand the world God finds utterly loveable (see John 3:16). The social, contextual, and/or historical notes and themes found throughout the Bible’s poems, narratives, letters, and prophecies—along with our current struggles and longings for community—turn out to be strangely absent and/or passive in our contemporary music. It’s as if God were only interested in our personal well-being (i.e., prosperity), on the one hand, and our disembodied soul in heaven (i.e., abstract security) on the other! Especially for our homeless friends—who may just want to get something to eat or to find a “fix” that will satisfy their addictions (or perhaps to give us middle-class White folks a few awkward moments!)—the language of self-love probably rings a bit incomplete. After all, do our songs really include them? When we apparently (and unwittingly) baptize/mythologize a Jesus who dresses himself up in the American Dream, how could we expect anything different? When we present God as someone who ultimately only shows concern for our individual mental (or spiritual) state and wants nothing more than to tell us how His sacrifice made possible a salvation after we’re dead, why would homeless folks give a shit? It’s not that I’m questioning the goodness of our worship music per se, just that something significant occurred in me as I sang some of my favorite worship tunes in that context.
Truthfully, though, I’m a hypocrite. In fact, I say God concerns himself with our whole lives as members, participants, and co-creators in His Kingdom. I try to embody Jesus’ revolutionary and holistic Way (Luke 4:18-19). But most of my favorite Evangelical worship songs were created in a spiritual vacuum of sorts (more or less Gnostic). So, when it comes to what the Empire is selling, I am one of the first to get in line—quickly seduced by the consumer culture of greed made spiritual through poor lyrics.
This realization of mine begs certain questions for me to wrestle with. For example, how different could my worship culture be if the songs I sing grew locally out of a particular context instead of from foreign impositions by placeless psychology or self-help reading? In other words, can we create art that is both spiritually incarnational and deeply sacred? The Hebrew and New Testament scriptures seem to demonstrate local and traditional (i.e., native) ways to prophetically reimagine culture and truth in light of God’s ongoing dreams for His creation. How can we embrace this model, on the one hand, and get past the cultural/political/economic traps set for us on the other? Who would want to be known for a culture (famous for their artistic expression) which ignored or, worse yet, tacitly endorsed the very tools used for destroying neighbors and communities? I know I must sound crazy—and I’ve likely exaggerated my case in order to make a point—but what I’m getting at is this. Maybe it’s time we write some new worship songs that are more shaped by Christ’s mission in our place. Want to experiment with me?
Author Bio:: Jason is married to a beautiful Peruvian gal named Julissa (who, incidentally, knows how to make the best ‘comida peruana’ in the whole wide world!). His current life consists of grad school, work, and procrastination–the real work of any serious student!
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