our generation’s worship music

Sorry about the long respite; it’s a rough season :p

Since my entry into the world of songwriting, I have been very critical of the “Contemporary Christian Music” genre. In my opinion, there are 2 things that I have observed that contribute to its weakness and its overall ineffectiveness in the church today:

1. Musically, the chord structures are boring. There is very little display of creative thought about the harmonical movement of a song. All I hear is 1 5 6m 4, and it’s really annoying. The game seems to be, “Who can come up with the most interesting riff to go behind the most uninteresting and overused chord progression in the past 50 years?” It’s a demonstration of laziness, a lack of musical training, and/or a lack of understanding of the role of melody and harmony in the listening experience.
2. Lyrically, there is no focus. Usually, songs are written around the same general theme of “God’s good, let’s worship Him” and there’s nothing done to flesh that out or convince the listener of why someone should do that. Choruses are not engaging, and leave you more confused than in love with God. I find myself asking, “What am I singing?” and it’s not in that deep, introspective way.

The end product: a jumble of words with a mediocre melody over an expired harmony. Sounds worshipful, huh?

(Now, I’m not going to apologize to you for sounding harsh. And please don’t think that I am foolish enough to forget that a generality always has exceptions; I am aware of the exceptions and brag about them to everyone I can. But now is not the time for that.)

Many of you have heard this rant from me, and I know that some of you are tired of it. But I would like to once again focus your attention on my friend Jeremy Begbie. Lo and behold, I have found someone so much smarter than I who supports my rant (at least to some extent). In his essay entitled Beauty, Sentimentality and the Arts, Begbie gives a concise, threefold definition of sentimentality, and then begins to explore its connection to music in the worship setting. In particular, he says that the past thirty years have given rise to “a certain kind of devotional song, often directed to the risen Jesus: a direct and unadorned expression of love, with music that is metrically regular, harmonically warm and reassuring, easily accessible and singable” (56).

To elaborate, he says the following:

“However, questions have to be asked if it is assumed that this kind of song exhausts the possibilities of “singing to Jesus,” or if these sentiments are isolated from other dimensions of relating to God. Devotion to Jesus, after all, entails being changed into his likeness by the Spirit – a costly and painful process. It certainly involves discovering the embrace of Jesus’ Father, Abba, but this is the Father we are called to obey as we are loved by him, the Father who judges us just because he loves us, and the Father who at salvation’s critical hour was sensed as devastatingly distant by his only Son.

“If we ignore this wider trinitarian field we are too easily left with a Jesuology that has no room for Jesus as the incarnate Son of the Father, even less room for the wide range of the Spirit’s ministries, and encourages us to tug Jesus into the vortex of our self-defined (emotional) need” (56).

As much as I think that I need to learn more about my craft, that is not the key to me writing great songs. As much as someone may tell you to take drawing lessons or learn music theory or listen to more of the classics, those things are not the key to you making great art. Simply put, your art will always reflect the relationship that you have with God. You may think that you can hide behind awesome technique and flawless execution, but you can’t. The worship music and CCM that we have today is, in my opinion, a result of a mediocre spirituality that has been built upon over the course of time. Generation X and the Millenial Generation have been inundated with so much anti-Christianity, and the music that defines each one of us tells the story. For GenX, it was grunge rock and for us, emo rock. And now we are people trying our very best to escape self-absorption and self-promotion, but that’s what we were taught and that’s what has seeped into our spirituality.

Plain and simple, Christian artists need to have deeper lives with Jesus. You need to know that he is your healer, and you need to see him do that. You need to know that he is a genius, and you need to hear his words and know that. You need to know that he is your agent of freedom, and you need to experience that as you run to him for forgiveness. You need to know his love and patience. You need to see his justice and passion. If your relationship with him is not deep, life-giving, and the best part about your life, then your art will reflect that. If he’s something on the side that’s competing with your parents and your significant other for the top spot, your art will reflect that. If it’s all a sham and you don’t really love Jesus but you’re pretending because you like community and you don’t want to be alone, your art will reflect that.

God is teaching me how to be honest with him. It’s hard. Since I grew up using deception to get by, this sort of honesty is crazy. But I see what God is doing. The thing I am learning is that he knows it all anyway, and the only way he can get to the deeper pain in my soul and heal it is if I show it to him. If I don’t, then he’ll stay where I put him, which, over time, is likely to be that narrow box of “self-defined emotional need.” But my honesty has opened myself up to God teaching me more about myself, and more about his plans to heal me and give me good things. Though the past months have been really hard for me, I have felt really alive and been really cognizant of Jesus’ presence. And it’s not that my songs have been about this rough time in my life, but songs have come, and they have been good and fun to work on. I love creating because I hang out with the Creator all the time, and he’s the best inspiration you could ever have. And though I can’t guarantee you that all the songs I’ve written over the past 5 months have been awesome, they’ve all come from a place where my connection with God is real, and so my music feels real. I’ll take that.

proper citation:
Begbie, Jeremy. “Beauty, Sentimentality and the Arts.” The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts. Ed. Daniel J. Treier, Mark Husbands and Roger Lundin. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007.