Hope for Contemporary Worship Music
I've left Washington DC, following the Wor/Th event that took place at the Museum of the Bible, feeling very encouraged, less about the "industry" of contemporary worship music (CWM) because that's too big for me to fully comprehend and because it’s too complex to figure out in one day, but about specific people who are choosing to be humble, relationally grounded, and open to new theological challenges.
I am so grateful to Matt Redman for modeling a different way of being a worship leader and for his hospitable spirit. Grateful also to meet the delightfully lighthearted, mad talented Pat Barrett and the extraordinary songwriter Jason Ingram (who’s written with everybody from Nick Jonas to Lauren Daigle). Grateful likewise to meet the good people who work at Integrity Music and who are trying to bring to the attention of church’s a different kind of worship song, including one of my new favorite, “Son of Suffering.”
(It was also fascinating to hear how, if the first decade of the twenty-first century was dominated by the Passion group of musicians and the second decade was dominated by the “Big Four” (Hillsong, Bethel, Elevation, Passion), there is a sense that the third decade that we’re currently in will involve a dissipation of the “big” groups and a kind of de-centralization of the worship industry and a welcoming of a different, more “human,” more theologically robust mode of making and producing and releasing and experiencing contemporary worship music.
The caveat, as always, is that change to an entire ecosystem comes slowly and in fits and starts, and things don’t always turn out like somebody might have imagined or predicted things in advance. So everybody of honest effort matters, even when it feels like it does not in fact matter.)
It all started on Tuesday with a helter-skelter tour of the Museum of the Bible, racing through re-created first-century Israeli villages and centuries’ old copies of the Bible. We also watched Matt & Friends record a video in the inner sanctum of the temple. And I got to sing so many of the songs that I’ve loved over the years: “Heart of Worship,” “Great Are You Lord,” “King of Kings,” and “Build My Life.”
Wednesday morning Matt started off the day by playing a number of songs and then speaking on the topic of “Holy, Holy, Holy in a World Full of Me, Me, Me.”
I followed him with a talk about the Sympathetic Father who is the God who is for us, the Sympathetic Son who is the God who is with us, and the Sympathetic Spirit who is the God who is in us.
I invited the songwriters in the room to write a song to this Sympathetic God of ours who not only rescues us from “the depths,” nor only stands sovereign over them, but who remains with us in “the depths” of our griefs and losses.
This was followed a convo between Matt, Pat and Jason on the craft of songwriting. After lunch Mat and I talked about the theological topics that remain under-developed in CWM. That included topics like creation and new creation, the Incarnation, repentance and confession of sin, the Holy Spirit, the communal dimension of the Christian life, and more a richly Trinitarian view of the faith.
Then it was a Q&A with all four of us. So many good giggles with that conversation. The event concluded with an extended time of singing, and I an opportunity to lead Communion for everybody, which was an honor to do. And the whole thing ended with a magnificent time of laughter and conversation at the hotel bar.
Oh—and Matthew W. Smith showed up unexpectedly in the green room to say hi.
What a funny world I find myself in. But I do feel awfully lucky that I get to do what I do.
