Of course, for many churches liturgical leadership (though they’ll rarely call it that) involves a band and a person or persons who put a ‘set’ together and, at its best, craft the playing of the music to the way that the congregation is responding and who will skilfully weave prompts, prayers and encouragements into the […]
music
Tools for evaluating worship
I got to wondering whether there were any helpful or useful web resources for informing processes of reflecting on and evaluating acts of corporate worship. If you do a search, there seems to be a lot but not all of it is helpful in the kind of way that I’m thinking of. One issue is […]
Worship songs beyond naff
Do we fetishise music in worship? the current state of “worship songs” has been discussed many times and I’m in complete agreement that a) we use too much King James language b) we no longer lament c) we talk way too much about blood and penal substitutionary atonement d) we don’t speak of the bigger […]
Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley: A celebration of vapid worship
It was fun to see this order of service built round showing off, all together, a range of songs for worship … … singing songs that may be perfectly OK in the context of a balanced diet of modern church music, but get a bit much when you stick them all together into a glorious […]
Is Video Technology in Church Manipulative?
I think that this question is worth asking. It’s also worth looking at the arguments and seeing how far they might apply to other dimensions of corporate worship, like music. My short answer to the question is ‘yes’ and ‘no’! Mainly because I think that the question is mis-put. For why go here and read […]
Ancient AND modern, if you please
This is worth considering: AN ARTICLE in a newspaper in the United States took exception to new trends in church music: “Because there are so many new songs, you can’t learn them all. It puts too much emphasis on instrumental music rather than godly lyrics. This new music creates disturbances, making people act indecently and […]
Keeping score: a potted history of western Church music
I’m not an expert on church music history by any means. But it can be useful to know something and perhaps this is a good place to starte, a Church Times article giving a potted history. Here aro some of the things it says that I think are particularly noteworthy… (With thanks to the compiler […]
Confess songfully
I have been thinking how it is a shame that there is such a lot of Christian song-writing but how little of it actually helps us to do the liturgies together. This is because so much of it is actually about praise or how we’re feeling about God. There isn’t much that enables singing of […]