Sunday's Song Selection

I thought I'd post up some of the factors that go into choosing the music for a Sunday gathering.

For the core team launch on Sunday we sang Let Your Kingdom Come (Sovereign Grace, Valley of Vision), Holy Holy Holy (the old hymn, inspired by the arrangement by The BCG from Mars Hill), Rock of Ages (with the 1998 Ruth Buchanan arrangement) and Never Alone (Emu Music).

Some of the factors in choosing these songs were:

1. Size of band/size of congregation/size of room. We had just acoustic guitar + piano + 1 singer leading around 30 or so people in a room that didn’t have much space to spare, so we needed songs that would sound ok without the Hillsong stadium treatment.

2. Make-up of congregation. We have mostly people in 20s and 30s, with a sprinkling of 70 plus-ers. You can’t make everyone happy all the time, but the plan is to make everyone feel that they have been taken into consideration at least some of the time.

3. Flow. We lead off with Let Your Kingdom Come, which seems appropriate for a fresh church plant trying to reach lost people, and is also a bit more upbeat to get us going. We paired this with Holy Holy Holy in a 2-song bracket up front. HHH hits a more reflective vibe (which is why it needed to come 2^nd), but builds to be quite anthemic. We finished with Never Alone after the sermon, which keyed in to the part of God’s word we were looking at (not as well as I’d like, but it’s something to work on), and then built up at the end to finish on a rousing and positive note.

4. Variety. I wanted to flag our major sources of songs up front, and to have a mix of recently written songs and older hymns (in various stages of contemporary re-arrangement).

Got any thoughts on choosing songs?

Well, well… look who’s come crawling back

(Me.)

I was going to apologise for the long silence here on The Rules, but then I realised that I’m not really sorry – I just had other stuff to do.

Since we last spoke, faithful RSS application, things have changed a little for me. I am no longer at St. Dorcas’, sitting on the musical sidelines and complaining about things. I am co-ordinating the music at Erskineville Village Anglican Church (a freshly planted/re-potted church in Sydney’s Inner West), so from this point on The Rules will actually contain some reflections from practical experience, and at some point the facts may even get in the way of a good rant (perhaps).

Stay tuned.

(Or don’t, because you know what I’m like with posting.)

Rule #11. Order of service matters.

'Hoc est corpus meum? Blimey, Harry.'

In ye olde days, evangelicals had to fight against ye Roman Catholics, who thought you came to God by human works, and especially by re-sacrificing Jesus every week in the Mass. This was a Ron Weasley (i.e. halfway done) transfiguration job: it gets turned into the real actual kind of gross body and blood of Jesus - it just looks like bread and wine. It's Jesus in disguise. But of course Jesus offered himself 'one sacrifice for sins forever' (Heb. 10:12) - you can't do it again, and it undercuts Jesus' grace if you try. So the guys who believed that you were saved by grace through faith alone had to fight hard in the form of the church service for the correct understanding of grace to be communicated and understood..

That's right: liturgy is actually important, because what you do in church says a lot about how you think you get right with God.

In ye moderne tymes, we still have to fight the battle against the idea that humans co-operate with God in salvation. But I think there is another battle to be fought - against the idea that 'worship' is primarily music. Now of course we do worship God through music, but it's only one of lots of ways. And when we over-stress the idea that worshipping God = singing, we get into all kinds of trouble. Your relationship with God becomes tied up with the quality of the singing, and what you feel as you sing. The 'worship leader' (stay tuned for more on this hateful term) and band become the priests who create the right conditions for access to God. Needless to say, this is no good. Only Jesus gives us access to God.

So, whilst I like the idea of a big block of songs, I don't think we should put it at the front of the service. Hillsong opens with a 15 minute block of 'worship' (i.e. music). I reckon that copying this runs the risk of creating the impression that we lead people into God's presence at the beginning, and, having come to him by experiencing him in 'worship' (singing), we can now speak to him in prayer and hear from him in his word. This is not an impression we want to create. Jesus gives us access to God any time, any where, by his sacrificial blood. We sing because Jesus has brought us close to God, not to get close to God.

So where should the singing go? I think maybe it should come in a big block right after the sermon. After hearing about God's mercies towards us, we can then express our thanks and praise to him in song. What do you reckon?

Anyways, I think that there is a really important nexus between the song leader/music director, service leader/MC, and preacher/speaker. More to come.

Rule #10: Be humane.

'I'm still down here... and I'm still in quite a lot of pain. Maybe someone in the lobby could call an ambulance. Oh, the pain is really quite severe. I... I've fashioned a makeshift splint. Here goes nothing. Aaaah...'

Put that thing out of its misery.

I'm talking about reprising the last line of a song. The victorious triple repeat of the last line, in my experience, is about cruelly dragging out a song that has already limped through 3 uninspired verses and an excruciating double chorus, until finally, in a diminuendo of volume and crescendo of pain, it tails off into a final, plaintive, 'Lord I lift your name on hiiiiiiighh....'

Ouch.

Just don't do it. Let it die peacefully at the end of the chorus with whatever dignity it has left.

Final Top 20

Here was the final top 20. Lessons learned:

1. It's really hard to keep a trim song list. I kept thinking 'but what about this? what about that one?'

2. Lots of those older pentecostal-ish songs are really slow. It's pretty hard for most people to hold the notes in really slow songs, and unless you're in a very particular moment in the service where you're feeling a certain way, I think those super-slow songs can be a little oppressive.

3. The Emu catalogue is much stronger than I thought. There's a bunch of great stuff there, and even the second-tier stuff which I've mostly omitted here is pretty good.

4. Some songs definitely age better than others. Going through CCLI and finding out exactly how old certain songs are is a surprising thing. Did you know that 'My hope is built' (the Chiswell re-write) is seven years older than 'That's why we praise him'? Some certainly age more gracefully...

5. The songs basically fell out in 3 categories: older pentecostal-ish songs, contemporary-ish (90s/early 2000s) songs (mostly Emu), and hymns (mostly re-arranged).

Anyways, here is the final list (in date order, except for the really old ones):

There is a Redeemer

Servant King

Amazing love

Lord I Lift Your Name On High

My Hope is built

May the mind

How deep the father’s love

This Kingdom

Consider Christ

Jesus, your blood and righteousness

Before the throne of God above

Highest Place

Rock of ages

That’s Why We Praise Him

Hallelujah to the King of Kings

Nothing but the blood of Jesus

In Christ Alone

Let your Kingdom come

Never Alone

When I survey

Amazing Grace

You may note that I cheated - there are 21.

Top 20 Challenge

Greetings, fearless blogophiles. I need your help. The task is simple: to come up with 20 easy-to-sing, guitar-friendly songs for a church plant which is just establishing a music ministry.

But, as with all good reality TV, THERE'S JUST ONE CATCH!

You have to have some stuff in there that people who may or may not have been around in Pentecostal churches up to 20 or so years ago might know. This makes it a little trickier...

Here is my list, but I'm really struggling on good old Pentecostal-friendly stuff. I need your help - please comment!

Servant King

The Heavens shall declare

Amazing love

There is a Redeemer

Consider Christ

Highest Place

Never Alone

Hallelujah to the King of Kings

Let your Kingdom come

In Christ Alone

Jesus, your blood and righteousness

May the mind

How deep the father’s love

My Hope is built

In His Image

Amazing Grace

Be thou my vision

Before the throne of God above

Rock of ages

When I survey

Rule #9: People are unlike robots

'These aren't like Daft Punk. We wanted ones like Daft Punk...' Image from here

Perhaps in the distant future, the distant future - but not now.

So we can't expect people to instantly shift into singing mode. If part of what music does is give articulation and expression to an emotional response to God, we probably need to pay closer attention to music as:

1. Emotional

and

2. Responsive

1. Music seeks to elicit and give expression to our whole-personed (including emotions) response to God as he is revealed in his word. But when I first walk into church, whatever emotions I am experiencing probably have more to do with the fight I just had in the car on the way to church, or my concern about whatever has been happening all week, than they have to do with what God has done for me in Christ. Either that, or I'm just in 'getting stuff done' mode - I have been rushing to get the kids in the car, get to church, find a park, etc. etc. I need a little time to unwind and refocus.

I think this is why singing a few songs in a row is a good idea - people are just like that. Music in church isn't the same as a gig, but people are people everywhere. And if you go to a gig, the band isn't expecting people to be going crazy and loving it during the first couple of songs. They take a few songs to warm people up. We should think about doing something similar. (You might like to check out this post on Sydney Anglicans to a similar effect)

2. Music is responsive. It's not just a way to get everyone to come and sit down because the service is starting now! It's how we corporately respond to what God tells us about what he has done for us. I reckon this means we need something to respond to before we can sing - we need a testimony of God's faithfulness: someone's personal testimony of God's grace to them during the week, a passage of Scripture, etc. Otherwise while we are singing I am just expected to kind of mentally recall all that stuff and respond to whatever I can dredge up - if I can even be bothered. In real life, I reckon what most often happens is I stand there singing the first song, thinking about something else. Give me something to respond to when I'm singing.

People aren't robots. We don't instantly shift mode. We need both motivation and time to switch into a mode where we will be able to sing in a whole-person kind of way to God and one another.

PS - sorry about the long silence, I'll try to keep the momentum up a little better...