“Praise” Music and the Modern Contemporary Church Service

G.W. Picard

Mankind has always seemed to seek out more than just speech to communicate.  Somehow music has always been around to supplement our feelings with more than just words.  I suspect that led to the body movements we call dance.  We are body and mind creatures and we seek to put our feelings into that integrated form we call “us.”  I get all that, and it doesn’t seem out of place within the context of Christian worship.  However, of late I have seen the more typical contemporary “worship bands” using that music for what I suspect is the wrong purpose.

Today, in a lot of churches, we copy our secular society where band performances to huge audiences are the rule.  Now it seems that the typical praise or worship band is composed of those who want to show off their talent and showmanship.  It is more than the exhuberance of spiritual feelings.  It smacks of an act or a show (and often it’s really loud.)  They want you to watch THEM.  More expression of the music beat through body movement and movements on the stage accentuate the performer and not the music.  It becomes the Sunday morning “entertainment program” part of the service.  It often distracts from the actual message of the music being sung (if there even is much message.)  I think the old church idea of having the choir off to the side of the front part of the church made sense.  The music and the words were the central idea, and the performers were just the hardly visible instruments.  Nowadays the praise band is center stage and they perform for a long time up there.  The lead guitarist rips out his licks and a lead line and the keyboard player does the same.  People are dancing in the pews, repeating endless monotonous chorus repetitions…only to have the minister come up and say “wasn’t that great, I want the band to do the last two lines of that song again before I start my message to you this morning…” and the band not only plays the last two lines, but they play them eight more times.  Mindless and hypnotic is what it feels like. 

As a long time performer myself, it is hard for me to say these things.  I know I probably sound like some old geezer who should just pipe down and mind his own business.  I confess, I love getting up there and doing a good song. You have to have some ego to be able to do that, so I have to at least address the performers part in all this.  They work hard to put together the music, and they want it to be good so people will like how they did it.  That’s not a bad thing, but the music and the worship is the central idea and the performers are just the vessels that carry it.  If their ego gets in the way, it’s no longer worship…it’s their “show.”  The audience loses and they lose if that happens, and it’s no longer worship…it becomes a sort of worshipping of the performers.

I remember James Dobson complaining once that modern Christian music wasn’t effectively teaching as the songs of old did.  I long for the performance of a song with a real message rooted in biblical principles that can actually teach as it is sung. We don’t do those kinds of story songs and teaching songs today.  Contemporary worship has been designed to reach the young who have grown up being given diluted messages spoon-fed to them by media in slick “performance” media.  I wonder if we haven’t succumbed to doing the same thing in our churches.  Take a look at your church music and see what you think.  Hopefully the worship is enhanced by it and your program has balance, and it’s about the person of God and not the personality of the performers.