Learning Worship Music

I’m sorry…

I swear that this isn’t a blog solely focused on Religion, but usually the things that I write about are whatever are going on in front of me. This week happened to have a lot of “religion-heavy” things, so, there you go.

I’ve had a strained relationship with playing worship music in church in general. When I became a Christian in high school, playing guitar was my only marketable skill. I was O.K., but O.K. enough to get me into the worship music rotations. And, in all my innocence, it was fun, really. After spending my entire life up to that point hearing jazz fusion takes on liturgical music in the catholic church, banging out some power chords felt more accessible and freeing. So, on my quest for greater acceptance, I took those skills to college and immediately found the first Christian group I could find, which happened to be Campus Crusade for Christ.

In my freshman year I auditioned for the worship band and made the lead guitar position in the first quarter and started playing in one of the two bands in rotation. Things progressed handedly until the leaders of CCC decided to consolidate the worship teams down into a single band. So the group that I was with, aside from our bassist, was scuttled.

I didn’t take it well.

In fact, I’m sure somewhere out there on Facebook you can still find all my “Notes” entries that contained every ounce of divisive vitriol that I could muster at the time.

I took time out of my day to sabotage CCC and be an asshole in general, because something that made me feel included and wanted and seen had been taken away from me without any explanation. And, of course, my reaction only demonstrated my need to grow before I could take the stage again. Every pissed off post was just another shovel of dirt onto the pile for the hole I was digging myself. For the rest of college, the closest I could get to the worship stage after that was behind the mixing board, or when I was asked to play bass, albeit because everyone else that could play wasn’t available. The lowest point for me was when I was at a spring retreat my Freshman year when I was hanging out behind the board making suggestions on what to do in the mix and the worship leader asked me, very directly, “Can you please leave?”

After college I went back home and music kind of fell off my radar. My amp was too loud to practice songs in my little makeshift office where my wife and I lived and I was being run ragged by my job working in packaging at Stone Brewing Company. (At the time we lived on the property of a church we were attending, inside a refurbished duplex.) So, on Sundays there was a guy who played guitar out of a Mesa Boogie Lone Star, which had low wattage toggle switches (lower the wattage, quieter the amp), and I asked if I could try it out. The cycle then repeated. Worship leader sees me playing O.K., but O.K. enough. I was asked to play a little bit, but my chemistry with the leader wasn’t happening, at least in the way he ran the band. Later on he would ask me to play acoustic for a Christmas Eve service, where there were three practices for. I played the first one, then was distracted and forgot to play in the second one. When the third practice came up I walked over all my gear, from the duplex and was told that I couldn’t play because I missed the previous practice. My only thought at the time was, “I live a 100 feet away and no one bothered to check in, send me a reminder text?” Instead, I punched the back door to the sanctuary and quietly took all my stuff back to the duplex feeling exhausted and defeated.

I have since cordoned myself off from worship music participation, seeing the level of stress and disappointment associated with it as a non-starter.

Now that the context has been established, here’s where I was actually going with this…

I’ve been volunteering a lot with teaching Sunday school this year at my church, which has been very good for me. The nice thing about kids is that they don’t seem to grasp the concept of shame yet, so I can mess up constantly during a lesson and they will be none the wiser. There’s been a need though at the church to offer some kind of worship music to the kids in a substantial sense, that listening to music on a Bluetooth speaker hasn’t really addressed and… well, you know where this is going…

When this was brought up, I very reluctantly considered playing for the kids, knowing that their forgiving tastes would at least deal with the stress of playing, but what about my anger and mistrust? Worship music in the USA uniquely originates from what I would coin the Christian Media Complex (like the “Military Industrial Complex,” only more sinister). With consumerism and capitalism being the dominant religions in our country, the unfortunate consequence has been that all our ministries have conformed to the pattern of this world to meet jet-ski towing, RV owning, rifle toting, ‘Merica groaning, Americans “where they are at.” Worship music, like television and print media before it, has become it’s own industry, with record labels, concerts, and promoters (literally “Country Christian Music” or “CCM”). I even remember being a part of a church plant where the theft of all of our sound equipment basically signaled it’s own imminent death. (Not the preaching or lack of attendees.) So the art and glitz of performing music has become inextricably linked with the worship itself, as well as a marker for the “vitality” of a church.

At the end of the day, the purpose of worship music is, ideally, very simple: to invoke an adoration and love of God in a corporate setting. Ancillary roles in worship also include leading people in prayer, casting a vision for the congregation, and, generally, using one’s worship as an offering to God. It’s not something we “have” to do, but something we “get” to do. (If that makes more sense.) Because music evokes such an emotional response, it can likewise be abused to meet a certain end. Parishioners can be manipulated by bad actors with appeals to partisan causes, false promises, and coercion to tithe. The community can be whipped up into a frenzy to stand with a presidential candidate. Worship leaders can “speak with authority” about the way “God is leading them,” without any means to assess if it’s genuine or not in the moment. And with our conditioning to consume content, exacerbated by the internet age, worship music becomes just another concert or experience, and the tithe just a cover charge for entering. (My mom does this all the time when she goes to church with me when she visits. She tithes! And I discourage it because it’s not right for her to give money to my church out of a sense of obligation or cultural conditioning. It needs to be a willful contribution to our mission as a bonded member to the community.)

All these feelings of suspicion and apprehension just washed over me while I was learning Your Love Never Fails by Chris Quilala. That’s where all this is coming from!

Honestly, I really love the song. I just feel so dirty playing it.