Key Worship Convictions of Grace Church
I put this together sometime ago, when I was sharing my vision for worship with Luke. Tell me what you think. I would love to read documents of some of you out there that have tried to do a similar thing.
Key Worship Music Convictions: Grace Church of Columbia
God-Centered Orientation: The service in general, and the songs in particular, should point people to God, not self.
Gospel Focus: The service and songs should remind participants of the gospel—that they are sinners saved by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
Theological Richness: Songs should not only be doctrinally true, but theologically rich. Preference will be shown to modern hymns, and shallow, repetitive songs will be avoided.
Historical Connection: The great hymns of the faith should be sung, either with their original tunes or with modern revisions of them, allowing today’s worshippers to be connected to their brothers and sisters of the past and their depth of expression.
Modern Expression: The best of today’s worship songs should also be used, allowing for modern expression of ancient truths, while still preferring God-centered, gospel-focused, and theologically rich songs.
Indigenous Style: The “feel” of worship music should suit the place in which the church is found, allowing the people of that community to give appropriate voice to their praises.
Liturgical Flow: The structure of the worship gathering should have a certain flow, ushering people through the gospel to the throne of God. To say the gathering is liturgical speaks more of the thought put into the service than the feel produced by it.
Diverse Instrumentation and Involvement: Diverse instruments and different believers (ethnically, generationally, etc.) should be utilized to lead all the saints in praise, while keeping a stylistic “center” to the gathering.
Participative Nature: The goal of worship music is to engage and lead the saints in worship. Therefore, arranging, playing, and mixing of music that encourages a performance-spectator mentality will be avoided. The voices in a worship gathering should be the main instruments.
God-Glorifying Excellence: The music leader and team will strive to lead in such a way that God is glorified, and that the saints will not be distracted either by their mastery or by their inability. This will be accomplished partially through weekly rehearsals.
Musical Beauty: God-glorifying lyrics must be matched with fitting, beautiful music that images the beauty of the Creator God who invented music.
Non-Negotiable Importance: As singing is commanded throughout the Bible and serves as the most supreme voice of amazing truths, its importance must be taught and modeled by church leadership. “I don’t like to sing” is an unacceptable statement for a believer of Christ.
Lifestyle Understanding: Worship encompasses all of life—certainly more than Sunday morning, and especially the Sunday singing time. Singing is just one aspect of a worship service, and calling it “worship” confuses the people of God.
Gifted Leadership: As the song leader sets the tone for the gathering of God’s people, he must be a gifted musician, passionate worshipper, and loving servant who can plan and lead God-glorifying singing times.
Elder Involvement: The final responsibility for the songs sung during the worship gathering falls to the elders, so they must be involved closely with the planning of services. They must not completely delegate this responsibility due to the critical teaching component of corporate singing.
Believer Orientation: Singing in corporate worship gatherings should be geared to facilitate the worship of believers, not appeal to “seekers.” Worship can only be truly done by believers in Christ.
Multi-Generational Appeal: A diversity of songs should be sung that appeal to all of God’s saints, not just a certain age group. However, a congregational “center” should be ascertained, enabling for an indigenous expression of worship by the bulk of the congregation.
Multiple Settings: Small groups, family devotions, and youth groups, just to name a few, are other venues that should encourage musical worship.
Corporate Emphasis: Believers should be encouraged to worship God primarily as a corporate body, not as individuals, during the weekly corporate worship gathering. This will affect songs chosen (preference for “we” songs over those “I”) and prayers uttered (“God, forgive us,” over “God, forgive me.”), as well as numerous other aspects of the meeting.
Passionate Expression: Christians must be taught to desire strong affections in worship. Hypocritical, heartless singing is to be avoided, while heartfelt passion is to be pursued.
Loving Deference: Church members must put the desires of others above themselves, not fighting to see that their musical preferences are honored as best.
Unified Praise: The unity of the local body must be pursued in worship gatherings. This is achieved, first of all, by having all the believers gathered in one room, with one voice. Multiple worship gatherings, and multiple, different-styled worship gatherings will be avoided.
Key Worship Music Convictions: Grace Church of Columbia
God-Centered Orientation: The service in general, and the songs in particular, should point people to God, not self.
Gospel Focus: The service and songs should remind participants of the gospel—that they are sinners saved by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
Theological Richness: Songs should not only be doctrinally true, but theologically rich. Preference will be shown to modern hymns, and shallow, repetitive songs will be avoided.
Historical Connection: The great hymns of the faith should be sung, either with their original tunes or with modern revisions of them, allowing today’s worshippers to be connected to their brothers and sisters of the past and their depth of expression.
Modern Expression: The best of today’s worship songs should also be used, allowing for modern expression of ancient truths, while still preferring God-centered, gospel-focused, and theologically rich songs.
Indigenous Style: The “feel” of worship music should suit the place in which the church is found, allowing the people of that community to give appropriate voice to their praises.
Liturgical Flow: The structure of the worship gathering should have a certain flow, ushering people through the gospel to the throne of God. To say the gathering is liturgical speaks more of the thought put into the service than the feel produced by it.
Diverse Instrumentation and Involvement: Diverse instruments and different believers (ethnically, generationally, etc.) should be utilized to lead all the saints in praise, while keeping a stylistic “center” to the gathering.
Participative Nature: The goal of worship music is to engage and lead the saints in worship. Therefore, arranging, playing, and mixing of music that encourages a performance-spectator mentality will be avoided. The voices in a worship gathering should be the main instruments.
God-Glorifying Excellence: The music leader and team will strive to lead in such a way that God is glorified, and that the saints will not be distracted either by their mastery or by their inability. This will be accomplished partially through weekly rehearsals.
Musical Beauty: God-glorifying lyrics must be matched with fitting, beautiful music that images the beauty of the Creator God who invented music.
Non-Negotiable Importance: As singing is commanded throughout the Bible and serves as the most supreme voice of amazing truths, its importance must be taught and modeled by church leadership. “I don’t like to sing” is an unacceptable statement for a believer of Christ.
Lifestyle Understanding: Worship encompasses all of life—certainly more than Sunday morning, and especially the Sunday singing time. Singing is just one aspect of a worship service, and calling it “worship” confuses the people of God.
Gifted Leadership: As the song leader sets the tone for the gathering of God’s people, he must be a gifted musician, passionate worshipper, and loving servant who can plan and lead God-glorifying singing times.
Elder Involvement: The final responsibility for the songs sung during the worship gathering falls to the elders, so they must be involved closely with the planning of services. They must not completely delegate this responsibility due to the critical teaching component of corporate singing.
Believer Orientation: Singing in corporate worship gatherings should be geared to facilitate the worship of believers, not appeal to “seekers.” Worship can only be truly done by believers in Christ.
Multi-Generational Appeal: A diversity of songs should be sung that appeal to all of God’s saints, not just a certain age group. However, a congregational “center” should be ascertained, enabling for an indigenous expression of worship by the bulk of the congregation.
Multiple Settings: Small groups, family devotions, and youth groups, just to name a few, are other venues that should encourage musical worship.
Corporate Emphasis: Believers should be encouraged to worship God primarily as a corporate body, not as individuals, during the weekly corporate worship gathering. This will affect songs chosen (preference for “we” songs over those “I”) and prayers uttered (“God, forgive us,” over “God, forgive me.”), as well as numerous other aspects of the meeting.
Passionate Expression: Christians must be taught to desire strong affections in worship. Hypocritical, heartless singing is to be avoided, while heartfelt passion is to be pursued.
Loving Deference: Church members must put the desires of others above themselves, not fighting to see that their musical preferences are honored as best.
Unified Praise: The unity of the local body must be pursued in worship gatherings. This is achieved, first of all, by having all the believers gathered in one room, with one voice. Multiple worship gatherings, and multiple, different-styled worship gatherings will be avoided.
posted by Kevin P. Larson @ 2:32 PM
4 Comments:
At 9:43 PM,
Kevin P. Larson said…
Bob, thanks for your kind comments.
By the way, your service at Together for the Gospel was much appreciated. I was so blessed by the singing!
At 8:37 PM,
Peter Schott said…
I really like this post. I tried to get something like this together a while ago at one of our former churches, but it didn't really go anywhere at the time. I'd picked up some of the ideas from Worship Evangelism and seen some of these elements touched on in An Hour on Sunday.
Worship Evangelism really struck a chord in the idea that worship is worship and non-believers can't really worship in the same manner as a believer. However, that gives us a powerful witnessing opportunity through our worship and we should not try to bring worship down to their level, but rather help them into a state where they can worship.
An Hour on Sunday drove home a point on how that one hour is all we typically have as worship leaders (including everyone as worship leaders, not just those in the music portion) to help usher people into God's presence and to leave changed from their encounter with God.
I'd be very interested to read similar worship convictions for areas other than the music portion. I know that we too often get caught up in the idea that the music portion is the worship portion, but that's just not the case. Drama, prayer, sacraments (or whatever they are referred to in various denominations), the message, reading of God's word, meditation, and so on are all parts of worship. It would be great to have all of the worship leaders working from a common creed for worship throughout the whole service.
Thanks for the great post and some thought-provoking ideas on worship for music teams.
-Pete Schott
At 9:29 AM,
Josh O. said…
Kevin,
Thanks for posting this. I have been working on a similar philosophy of corporate worship for my church. Here are some strenghts that I noticed and hope to incorporate.
REFLECTIONS:
1. Key terms that communicate. Using temrs that mean something help your corporate worship team understand why they do what they do and also provide a natural bride to further teach the congregation.
2. Global application. You have not fallen prey to North American ideals of corporate worship. Your convictions could be applied in any culture.
3. Thorough. You have put in categories/key words what I've been trying to express, but have not settled on yet. You cover the entire spectrum of biblical, corporate worship in its relation to our life of worship. Even though your document is focused on key music convictions, nearly every conviction applies to every element of corporate worship.
QUESTIONS:
1. How do you communicate this with your corporate worship team? Do you teach have a class on 'Corporate Worship'? Do you or your leaders incorporate one or two of these in weekly practices? Bulletins, sermons, flyers, website, etc.?
2. What has been your most effective means of teaching/modeling that corporate worship involves much more than music?
At 2:49 PM,
Kevin P. Larson said…
Josh, honestly, we're a church plant, and I haven't done anything with this other than a really important thing-- share it with my current music dude before he joined us. Thanks for your kind comments.
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