How Music works in Worship?
Recently my friend Bruce Reyes-Chow suggested I blog “How does music touch your soul?”
He left it pretty broad so I’ll have some fun with this. I’m going to unpack the use of music in worship and take it from a systems approach rather than a “everyone should sing because the bible includes songs and faith traditions invite people to sing” approach. Not that I care to disprove the later, just that the former is more interesting to me.
Here are three thoughts on music/soul/worship:
- Beauty saves us
- When we sing we vibrate together
- Our selves are all we have
Advent songs of longing
Is it poor form to be sad that Advent is drawing to a close?
Somehow the more maudlin honesty about longing, with the cooler air (though Atlanta has been uncharacteristically warm this December) and the bare trees invites me to a place of peace and deep beauty more than any other of the year. Not to be confused with the 25 day calendar countdown complete with daily chocolates, the four weeks of Advent leading up to Christmastide originates in the Hebrew lament and apocalyptic traditions. The prophets and prophetesses of the Jewish people anticipated a day when their suffering would be reversed and when God would usher in an age of freedom, Sabbath, and reconciliation (check out Isaiah 27.6-28.13, or Handle’s Messiah). Walter Brueggemann writes, “It is for good reason that prophetic imaging is characteristically done in daring metaphor, surprising rhetoric, and scandalous utterance, for to do less is to fall back into conventional distortions of reality.” (Brueggemann, NYAPC, August 2006) Music has been a vehicle for that metaphor for centuries and folks like Bob Dylan and Curtis Mayfield brought it into the fore of pop music. Christmas season in the west is filled with the kind of longing aesthetic, just check out the #sadchristmas hashtag.
In years past songs like Tom Wait’s Jesus Gonna Be Here, Joni Mitchell’s River, or U2′s Wake Up Dead Man have been strong Advent soundtracks, but the two songs this year that particularly captured this feeling for me were Rory Cooney’s Canticle of the Turning, and Paul Simmon’s Getting Ready For Christmas Day .
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structure verses interaction, is this a fair dichotomy?
For year I’ve been having conversations with friend, blogging-preacher-mom MaryAnn McKibben Dana, about worship. We were in seminary together and led many an alternative approach to preaching and liturgy. But now she is serving in a traditional context. Recently I asked her to hit me up with a question or two for this blog.
She writes:
My question comes from serving a traditional congregation that has a lot of potential. I have introduced all sorts of things with them, basic stuff like prayer walls, talkbacks in worship, and the like. Thankfully, I have never experienced resistance to any of these funky things. But… I sense that they put up with this so long as I don’t do it too often. I’d rather the interactive stuff be more of the norm, not that there’s not structure, but it’s a skeleton, not an exoskeleton, that limits our growth.So I wonder what tips you have for congregations that are open to change, but are coming from a very traditional place (I keep using that word). This is a church that until 5 years ago did the Apostles’ Creed EVERY Sunday.
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