Beneficial? Considering the Contemporary Worship Movement

Beneficial?

Considering the Contemporary Worship Movement

Jeremy Aiello

(Smashwords Edition)

Copyright 2017, Jeremy Aiello

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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For Pastors Harold Polk and Pete Scribner, the former pastor and current pastor, respectively, of Calvary Presbyterian Church in Flint, Michigan who, knowingly or not, helped to make this book come about through their sound preaching.

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Acknowledgements

As with any project, writing or otherwise, there are a number of people to thank for their insight and support. Among those deserving to be named are the following people: Pastor Jeff Luplow of St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church in Frankenmuth, Michigan, for his painstaking reading, light editing, and suggestions in order to produce a better text; Pastors John MacArthur of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California; Doctor R.C. Sproul, founder of Ligonier Ministries and pastor of St. Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Florida; the aforementioned Pastors Harold Polk and Pete Scribner; Pastor Jonathan Fisk who runs the Youtube channel Worldview Everlasting; Pastor Jordan Cooper of Just and Sinner Publications; Pastor Brian Wolfmueller; Pastor Chris Rosebrough, the mastermind behind Pirate Christian Radio; Pastor Todd Wilken and his predecessor, Pastor Don Matzat, the current and former hosts, respectively, of the radio program Issues, Etc.; Manny Silva, who is involved with the group Concerned Nazarenes; Pastor Bob DeWaay of the Critical Issues Commentary website; and the late Dr. Paul Vanaman, former pastor of Dixie Baptist Church in Clarkston, Michigan, who ingrained into me the love of many an old hymn.

And of course, I would be remiss for not mentioning my wonderful wife Karen and my children Kami and Connor, all of whom had to suffer through me spending many an hour writing, rewriting, editing, re-editing, cutting, pasting, looking up, looking up again, looking up a third time, and slaving over this book. They are far better a family than I deserve to have.

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Introduction: A Personal Testimony

"Contemporary Worship? What's that?"

That would have been my response to you if you would have asked me as a young child whether or not I liked contemporary worship. From my time in the first grade, when my mother was introduced to Christianity through a co-worker of hers while working at General Motors in Michigan, she, my brother, and I attended an independent fundamentalist Baptist church (my father did not, as he was not converted to Christianity until many years afterward). And in that church, the musical portion consisted of a grand piano, an organ, a bass guitar and drums1, a choir led most often by the pastor's wife, and a musical repertoire consisting almost entirely of hymns, with the occasional songs written in the Southern Gospel style thrown in from time to time; and on extremely rare occasions, a mellow contemporary piece such as Steve Green's People Need the Lord made its way into the offertory rotation. While the music played in the church was not as historically linked to the Church catholic as music found in churches of a higher liturgical sort, the music was, nevertheless, categorized as traditional insofar as the definition of the word traditional fit within the broad understanding of American evangelicalism in the early 1980s. It predominately showcased hymns (many of which had been sung for centuries) as the primary pieces for singing, and kept the arrangements for those hymns on a very basic level. Even though drums and bass guitar were found in the church, they were used sparingly and at a very low volume, and most of the time they registered only faintly to my ear, taking a backseat to the vocal-dominant congregational singing.

While this particular fundamental Baptist church's music might not have been classified as traditional in the strictest sense of the word, it was far from what would be looked upon nowadays as contemporary music. During a few of the sermons, the pastor—a man I admired very much, even when I did not agree with him—made occasional remarks of a disparaging nature toward the majority of contemporary Christian music, particularly with regard to music that might be incorporated into the church for worship. In addition, it was made very clear to us that we did not clap in church during the music, as this was a church service and not a concert. Nor were we to applaud after a particular performance of music during the offertory; to do so was taking the glory away from God and applying that glory to the performer. The idea that hymns could be mixed with rocking guitars, heavy drumbeats, and a pop/rock genre was unthinkable, and churches that employed such methods in their services (which were far rarer in the 1980s than they are now) were deemed worldly and misleading in their worship.

As I grew older, I became acquainted with peers who belonged to churches in the charismatic/pentecostal denominations, and during my high school freshman year I was introduced to contemporary worship through visiting a church that one of my friends attended with his girlfriend. What I experienced firsthand astounded me. Instead of hymns being driven by pianos, organs, and a choir, the song leader was strumming an acoustic guitar! Behind him were backup singers (one of which was playing a tambourine) a bass player whose thumping line could be clearly heard, and (if my memory serves correctly) a drummer prominently included in the mix. And while the music they played wasn't particularly loud in the sense sternly warned about by my fundamentalist Baptist church, it was far from somber in its tone. That Sunday, I saw people clapping, dancing, moving to the music. I heard music other than hymns: something referred to as praise choruses, which reduced the lyrical content to a couple of verses repeated many times. And, as is the case with many people when introduced to something new, I was mesmerized by it. So attractive and alluring was this new style of worship to my youthful, inexperienced person that I couldn't shake the experience from my head. On the contrary, I wanted more of it—and I knew I wouldn't get it at my Baptist church.

By the time I reached the eleventh grade, I had ceased from attending the Baptist church and had found a nearby pentecostal church, which by today's standards would be deemed a megachurch. And one of the chief reasons for that switch? You guessed it—the music. This particular church had it all: a full orchestra, a worship leader (again, the pastor's wife) backed up by four other singers and a full choir, a rhythm section consisting of a large drum set placed behind a plexiglass shield, a keyboard, a bass guitar, and a fully distorted electric guitar (a Les Paul to be precise). The music rocked. The beat pulsed through the songs, which consisted primarily of praise choruses, and it was hard not to dance and sway to the rhythm. The tone set by the music compelled me and other parishioners to raise our hands, to close our eyes, to freely bow to the whims of the emotions welling up within us and remove any inhibitions against them. It was ecstasy in the divine, I thought. It made me feel good at the end of each service, as if I had just sat through a free concert that gave me the music I wanted to hear. In short, it satisfied me and my desires, and therefore I deemed it good for me to engage in.

And that's how it went for the better part of the next two decades. I spent much of my time in churches that utilized the contemporary format of worship; and if a church didn't have it, I did my best to introduce it through being active in the musical portion of the service. As I had been playing guitar for quite some time by then, I brought guitars to various Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night activities. If the church knew only hymns, I started there and worked choruses into the rotation; if it knew the trendy praise choruses that were becoming more prominent in evangelical sanctuaries, so much the better. I was all about promoting the incorporation of the contemporary service, because I believed that it was more spiritual, more uplifting and alive than the dead worship (as I considered it) of the traditional church.

In my early twenties, I met the woman who would eventually go on to become my wife, and began attending her Nazarene church. This large church was in the midst of transitioning from traditional to contemporary worship, and over the following years put together a song service that definitely favored the latter over the former. Not long after that, I offered my services to play bass guitar for the services, and did so with enthusiasm and joy—at first.

Then, something happened: I started paying attention to the worship.

The area in which it first became apparent to me was in the lyrics of some of the praise songs. Up to that time, I am ashamed to admit, I did not give nearly as much thought to the theological content of the praise choruses being employed in worship as I should have. All I cared about was that the songs mentioned Jesus while delivering a good groove and a catchy melody reinforced by the prominent sound of guitars (adding solos whenever possible, of course). But one Sunday, while in the middle of playing a song entitled Give God the Glory, I had to stop when I ran across the line Satan, the blood of Jesus is against you. That was a puzzling thing to read in a song that was supposed to be directed toward God: why, in the middle of this praise chorus, was a phrase addressed to the Prince of Darkness included? And furthermore, what does the blood of Jesus do against Satan? The lyrical line implied the presence of a talisman-like quality to the shed blood of God the Son, when the truth is that the blood is not meant for the warding off of Satan, but for the salvation of souls. This was bad theology, and it was a bit troubling for me to see that the song was being used for Sunday morning worship.

As time went on, more songs with questionable lyrics came to my attention. There were songs that referred to God in a lyrically oblique manner, addressing Him much in the same way that one could address a romantic lover. There were other songs that introduced outright bad theology, making claims about sickness having to heal at the mere mention of the name of Jesus: an assertion never made by Scripture. And while the occasional hymn was still incorporated into the rotation of the music, the praise choruses (and consequently some of the songs with the bad theology) began to take a role of greater prominence. Whenever I brought this up to others, the response was often a sheepish shrug or a laughing away of the matter, as if it didn't matter, because it was Christian music, and that was all that counted.

Other things previously thought little of became relevant and concerning as well. Applause, which I had fully embraced at the time as being given to God during the service, was often proportionate to the performance of the singers or instrumentalists who played during the offertory, which made me question whether or not the object of applause and adoration really was God after all. And more than once during worship, members of the congregation whom I could clearly see from my spot at the front of the sanctuary allowed their worship in the Spirit to become more akin to a distraction than a genuine expression of worship, as people at times began to move wildly and in a distracting manner, clearly becoming the point of attention for others who were trying to focus on the worship of Almighty God2. And as with the issue of the lyrics, the responses received when things such as these were brought up ranged from indifference to implied support of such occurrences.

Along with the observations of things like this came questions that I began to ask myself: exactly why was I up here, playing the bass guitar in a manner more akin to a musician hired for The Saturday Night Live Band? Was the function of the orchestra and rhythm section one of facilitating worship, or was it intended for the entertainment of the congregation? Did the people clapping, singing, and moving really feel The move of the Spirit, or were they simply responding to the music in a manner no different than the emotionally-charged attendees of a secular concert? These questions began to haunt me as the time passed, and the attempts at self-justification I made to myself came across as nothing more than hollow excuses. Something was wrong, and ignoring it or trying to explain it away didn't make it any better.

But perhaps the most significant change in my attitude about the music I was playing came during a Wednesday night practice, during which the choir, orchestra, and rhythm band