I wrote a previous post about how much I'm enjoying the music at CHBC, and then this week in Sunday school, we received this article by a pastoral assistant and I thought it was really interesting and wanted to share.
Worshiping God through Song at CHBC
One of the greatest privileges we have as a congregation is to
praise God together in song. Because
music is such a powerful vehicle for glorifying God and encouraging one another,
our desire is to approach worship through song with deliberate thought and
care. Here are five main considerations
that give shape to our use of music in the services of CHBC.
1. We strive
to exalt biblical truth in music that leads to an appropriate emotional
response. Colossians 3:16 says, “Let
the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another
with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with
gratitude in your hearts to God.” God
created music as a medium that stirs great emotion in the human heart. Our goal is to harness this power responsibly
by using music to highlight and celebrate biblical truth. We recognize that music can make people feel
certain emotions regardless of the
lyrics’ message, so we’re careful both to pick songs that have profound
biblical content and to avoid over-emotionalizing our music. The emotion in worship should be a response
to the truth of who God is and what he has done.
2. We strive to cultivate rich congregational
singing. When
John views God’s throne room in Revelation 5-7, the whole gathered congregation
joins their voices together to praise the Lamb.
Our goal is for singing to be a participatory experience, not an
observational experience. Paul tells the
Ephesians, “Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” (Eph.
5:19), which reminds us that although our worship through song is primarily
God-oriented, it also has a secondary purpose of encouraging one another. For this reason, we print the music for many
of our songs to make the melodies (and harmonies) easier to learn, we have
plain rather than overwhelming musical instrumentation, and we avoid
performances and “special music” in our services.
3. We strive to use a simple musical style that
promotes unity. Our
prayer is that CHBC would be a community of faith that includes people from all
backgrounds and cultures, united in our trust in Jesus Christ. When it comes to worshiping God, the style of
music we use is extremely unimportant in a theological sense. Therefore, our hope is that by using a simple
style with minimal arrangement and instrumentation, a diverse group of people with
varying musical tastes would be able to sing together and enjoy unity around
the lyrical content of the songs. The
musical style may not be everyone’s favorite, but that means worship through
song is an opportunity for all of us to sacrifice our personal preferences for
the sake of the whole congregation.
4. We strive to appreciate God-honoring music
from all eras. In
our services, our aim is to incorporate not the “best of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and
today,” but the best from all of the periods of Christian history from which we
have music – including today. Singing
edifying hymns from long ago is one way that we appreciate the witness of our
brothers and sisters from past centuries who have persevered in the faith.
5. We strive to reflect the full spectrum of the
Christian experience in our music. Our
goal is to sing music that captures the whole array of the Christian life –
from the sorrow we have over our sin to the joy of our redemption in Christ,
and from the happy expectancy of heaven to the pain of trials and
persecution. We see this variety of
expression conveyed wonderfully throughout the Psalms. Some of the slower, minor key songs we sing
at CHBC may be new to you, but we pray that these hymns would become helpful
companions to you during times of suffering, as they have for so many of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment