As one of the seven current worship music leaders, I often wrestle with this question.  Of the seven, I’m one of the few with a long history of leading music in the church.  In the past, I’ve used many contemporary praise & worship songs and yet today I’m one of the most consistent songwriters at Mars Hill.  I can explain why I stopped looking to contemporary church culture for praise songs. 
 
At Mars Hill we chose to not use mainstream contemporary Christian music for three main reasons.  The first reason is their theological content is often pretty minimal.  Of course, there are exceptions, but generally this is true.  For the ones that do contain good theology, there’s a second obstacle we have to pay to use them (due to publishing laws).  Since we live in a place where songwriters and creative people abound, we’ve simply not considered paying for worship music a viable option. Instead, we opt to write our own music and rearrange old hymns.  (more…)

A couple of years ago I came across an extraordinary book called Unceasing Worship by Harold M. Best. Over the last couple of years this has become my one of my favorite works on theology of worship. Here are a few reasons why I like it.

First, most people these days, particularly when in comes to theology/philosophy of corporate worship and the arts, dig into the ministry for a few years, have some measure of success and then write a book expressing the formula for replicating that success. With Best, he spent over fifteen years as the dean of the conservatory of music at Wheaton college. He spent years honing his ideas in both the academic world and the local church and then wrote his book. His depth of experience and perspective are clear throughout his writing.

Secondly, the first chapter is titled, “Nobody does not worship.” He begins with the understanding that worship ceaselessly pours out of humans for better or worse; for God glorifying worship or self glorifying idolatry. Best reveals just how much we have reduced worship to music sung at particular places and times and created an idol out of these experiences. He emphasizes that we have only one mediator between ourselves and God and that is Jesus Christ, not any kind of music, art, gathering or experience.

Lastly, through a very interesting turn of events Harold has become a personal friend and theological mentor to me. His son Gareth plays guitar in one of our bands (”The Brothers of the Empty Tomb”) and I have had the privilege to spend a number of afternoons with him wrestling through the finer points of the biblical theology and practice of worship. I have found him to be extremely helpful, thoughtful and on top of all that he has a delightfully dry sense of humor.

I am very excited to announce that Harold will be joining me and Pastor Mark Driscoll this fall for the “Continuous Worship Conference”. This conference will be brought to you by Resurgence and will take place at the Ballard campus of Mars Hill Church, September 17th and 18th. The cost will be $35.

We will begin the conference Monday afternoon with a “pre-conference” track dealing with pragmatic issues of corporate worship with breakouts taught by a number of Mars Hill staff dealing with how to build a corporate worship band that you actually want to listen to, live and post production technology, songwriting and various other topics. Then, Monday night we will start to dig to some meaty theology together with Pastor Mark. We will spend Tuesday with Harold Best and then I will wrap it up Tuesday evening. Each main session will be followed by a Q & A panel discussion where your questions will be fielded by a carefully chosen group of folks who are working out these ideas in various stations in life.

It is absolutely essential that we first engage with a deep, rich, biblical understanding of worship before we discuss the pragmatic issues of corporate worship. If we fail to do this we run the risk of making an idol out of the very thing we are intending to bring glory to God. This is not simply an issue for “worship leaders”. Everyone is a worshipper and a right understanding in this area has huge implication for all areas of life and ministry. Please join me in September for this important discussion.

More details including conference schedule, discussion panel participants and many more surprises will be coming soon. For more information and to register click here.

We’ve been gearing up in the Music and Productions department to record a studio compilation CD consisting exclusively of re-vamped versions of old Hymns. I will take on the role of Executive Producer along with Tyson Paoletti as we guide the big picture process of the recording including overall aesthetic and general production values. Tyson will also be our “outside ear” so-to-speak and he’ll help us shape what we do to reach a broader audience.

Our own Brian Eichelberger of E-Pop fame will be producing and engineering two of the five bands’ songs including:

• I Sing the Mighty Power of God
• What Wondrous Love is This?
• Here is Love
• Man of Sorrows
• Nothing but the Blood of Jesus
• I’ll Fly Away
• Solid Rock

I will also be producing and engineering three of the five bands’ songs including:

• All Creatures of Our God and King
• We have not known Thee
• When I Survey the Wondrous Cross
• O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus
• Tomorrow
• Come Unto Me

We hope to make this the best CD that we’ve done yet at Mars Hill, and most of all, we want to see Jesus glorified by showing the unique ways that our congregation collectively responds to his work in our lives. We have a lot of good bands and this album will showcase a select few of them that we feel mesh together the best. Stay tuned as the studio project ensues!

How the Auto Didacticism of the Italian Rock Intelligentsia Helped me Connect the Dots

A couple years ago I was privileged to interview Joe Carducci-an author of a fantastic book titled Rock and the Pop Narcotic -for a local Seattle magazine where I had the privilege of serving as associate editor for about a year and a half. It’s been a few years since our initial conversation but Carducci made a few simple cultural observations that challenged me to think about music in a much different way and I’ve been beating that Carducci drum ever since.

Carducci recalled a story about a recent visit to the Philippines. The gist of the story being that he was struck by the Filipino experience of music in day to day life-that common people sang all the time, in a community context with songs rooted in deep folk tradition. (Read a full transcription of the interview here) (more…)

III.) Bib overalls, War and Peace, McDonald’s and the Cultural Mandate

Before I attended Mars Hill, church music seemed like unnecessary accessory in corporate worship. I’d observed that there were basically two types of music styles in most churches: Corny, pop oriented praise music with no theological girth or high brow, dusty orthodox liturgy that failed to connect with people. Given the two options it seemed like what Mars was going for couldn’t have been anything other than mere performance.

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I came across an interesting article about a study that was conducted regarding the self-esteem of “Generation X-ers” and “Generation Y-ers”. The study essentially asserts that–surprise, surprise–”Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors.” Well, duh.

Most of the research cited in the article comes from San Diego state psychologist Jean Twenge. Per the article: “Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006. The researchers trace[d] the [narcisism] phenomenon back to what they called the ’self-esteem movement’ that emerged in the 1980s, asserting that the effort to build self-confidence had gone too far.”

The article isn’t particularly in-depth but it got me thinking: Narcissism is really just a symptom of a much bigger problem–self-worship. And as is so aptly put in Harrold Best’s fantastic book titled Unceasing Worship–and I’m paraphrasing here–we as human beings are never not worshipping. Because, in essence, worship is not something that starts and stops in a particular location (i.e. in a church building for example) rather, worship pours out of us continually. Of course when worship isn’t properly focused on God through the work of Jesus by the power of the spirit, that worship turns inward and essentially becomes idolotry, self-worship or in this particular case narcissism.

Twenge, the psychologist cited in the study, has written a book titled “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before”. Hmm…could be a good book for review. Stay tuned.

The issue of what aspects of culture a Christian should or shouldn’t participate in is a central preoccupation of the collective evangelical mind. On one hand we see the effects of evil and depravity embodied in the culture around us, but on the other hand, through God’s common grace, we’re able to see beauty and value in culture as well. Scripture tells us “Do not love the world or the things in the world” (1 John 2:15), but we also see in Acts 17 that Paul reaches out to the people of Athens by engaging them through their own culturally idolatrous presuppositions. Paul truly strove to be “all things to all people that by all means (he) might save some.” (1 Cor 9:22)

A couple years ago I had an experience that drove this dilemma home for me. My wife and I had recently moved from Washington, DC to Seattle. In DC, we were in an environment of knowing almost no Christians but when we moved to Seattle and started attending Mars Hill, we found ourselves in a new environment where just about everyone we knew were Christians. As a relatively new believer myself, I’d never been in such an encouraging environment and Mars Hill Church was, and continues to be, a wonderful place for me to grow in my faith. But sometimes I missed the many opportunities I had back in DC to share the gospel with people who didn’t believe.

Around that time some good old friends of mine from DC, a band called Darkest Hour, were making a record (subsequently called “Undoing Ruin”) up in Vancouver BC and invited me to come up and hang out for a day. It ended up being a great day all around. For those guys, and my good friend Mike in particular, I think it was a refreshing time after long days surrounded by the same people in a mostly dark studio recording heavy metal for weeks on end. I have known Mike since 1997 when our bands toured together, long before I was a Christian, and I pray for him regularly. I am always looking for a way to present the gospel in a new way to those guys, in a way that maybe they haven’t heard before, and I pray that God gives them the ears to hear it.

While we were hanging out in the studio listening to the playback from some of their new recordings I saw a copy of Slayer’s God Hates Us All (which was released interestingly enough on 9/11/01*) among various other CDs in the studio. For those unaware of who Slayer is or what they’re about, they are one of the quintessential metal bands of the last two decades, taking some of the style of the bands that preceded them, making it faster, heavier, and more brutal (especially with 1987’s Reign in Blood) and thus redefined the metal genre in general (while simultaneously pioneering thrash.) Needless to say with a title like God Hates Us All, Slayer are no friends of Christ or his followers. I find the image, art, and lyrical content of Slayer to be more comical than threatening, especially now that the members are in their 40’s and are pretty much doing exactly the same thing they were doing for the same angst-ridden demographic as they did twenty years ago. I also realize that for some this imagery can lead down dark paths. I have listened to Slayer records on occasion and personally have not felt conviction or evil thoughts, and usually it is no more than with passing curiosity that I would listen to them at all.

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