It’s not unusual to hear people complaining about the
banality of many contemporary worship songs. I’ve complained about a few
myself, with my current preferred target being The Splendour of the King. But in ‘Listening for the Lex Orandi’, Stephen Holmes offers a
spirited defence of contemporary worship songs in so far as these, like any
other element in worship, can be fitted, and be made sense of, within a wider
liturgical framework. Holmes writes, ‘Many songs which appear trite in their
expression … are nonetheless able to become part of a rich liturgical event
through their careful deployment in a particular context.’ (p. 195). To
elucidate his point, Holmes analyses Matt Redman’s Facedown and Tim Hughes’s Happy
Day DVDs, showing how each of the songs within the recorded times of
worship in fact contribute to a wider liturgical movement, and all without
falling victim to that other commonplace criticism, that modern-day worship
often assumes a performance/rock star mind-set. The paper ends with Holmes
first recognising the efforts of many theologically untrained lead worshippers,
and, secondly, expressing his desire that more scholarly attention be paid to
contemporary worship.
Personally, I find that Holmes is more convincing on Redman
than on Hughes. At one point, when discussing Hughes’s Happy Day DVD, Holmes comments, ‘The song [‘Give us your courage’;
I don’t know if the link I’ve provided is actually from the Happy Day DVD, but it seems to show the
same kind of thing that Holmes is describing] opens with a repeated yodel-like
call which I can best represent as “Weh-Oh”; this inarticulate lyric is
repeated many times at the end, and seems to have become a meaningful
expression of worship for those present.’ (p. 205). Perhaps; but my cynical
side would simply query how or why such a ‘yodel-like call’ could become ‘a
meaningful expression of worship’. Also, while I accept wholeheartedly his
point that the potentially hackneyed contemporary worship song could find new
life when placed sensibly within a liturgical framework, I still have a number
of questions – well, three questions – that for me arise legitimately from Holmes’s
paper.
First, the two DVDs that Holmes discusses are ‘worship
events’. Holmes’s presentation of the DVDs’ contents suggests that these are services
where the liturgy is substantially formed of songs. However, in many churches,
there are no ‘worship events’. Instead, there are ‘times of worship’, often a
15–20 minute period of songs enveloped by other liturgical elements. So, in a
typical evangelical service, what is the purpose of this 15–20 minute period of
songs? How do these 15–20 minutes function liturgically within the wider ninety
minutes (say) of the whole service?
This leads to my second question. Holmes’s helpful comments
notwithstanding, I’m not sure why the worship events were captured and then
sold as the Facedown and Happy Day DVDs. Is there an attempt here
to market worship, with the added ‘danger’ (if that’s not too severe a word)
that local congregations will then try to copy or reproduce the event, and all
to the detriment of encouraging the congregation’s own creativity? And, given
my opening question, is there a sense in which the 15–20 minute ‘time of
worship’ is thought to be about generating a particular experience?
And finally, I have a question about musical style. I think
Holmes does a good job of defending contemporary worship events against charges
of mere performance. But so much of contemporary worship seems to assume that
the most appropriate forms of music for worship include soft rock, singer-songwriter
acoustic stuff, whatever kind of style Hillsong is, and even alt-folk.
Personally, none of these fit my own musical tastes at all, really; so why must
I sing praise in these ‘tongues’? Now it could be argued that because all our
worship is made in response to God in Christ and by the Spirit, the precise
musical style doesn’t matter. But I dare say that The Prodigy, Cannibal Corpse,
Depeche Mode and Kraftwerk aren’t likely to be influencing Redman, Hughes or
Hillsong any time soon. I suppose if I concentrated all this into a
one-sentence question, it would be this: Is
there a musical style, or a set of musical styles, which is more conducive to (corporate)
worship than others? I suspect a musicologist would really need to answer
this one!
For anyone interested in contemporary worship, I thoroughly
recommended Holmes’s essay. Also of interest may be this forthcoming book:
Monique Ingalls, Carolyn Landau and Tom Wagner (eds.), Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity and Experience
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). And just for the heck of it, here’s a fun YouTube
video:
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