Healthy Worship: Countering Consumerism (Part2)
One of the ways we can counter the culture of consumerism on our worship is to value creativity in the local church differently.
These days, if I want to introduce a new song into the church, within a few minutes I can find the live video on youtube, the chord chart on a website, send it all to my band so they can learn the song, and copy the arrangements, and turn up on Sunday ready to play it. I can even buy the tracks that play behind the songs so I can even make it sound just like the CD.
Of course, all of this is a huge gift. And I don’t want to undermine the amazing resource that such things are to the church. What I would like to challenge the way it can become something that stops local churches investing in their creatives and songwriters properly.
It’s hard to build a culture where your worship leaders are writing their own songs for their church….and grappling with how they work at songs, peer review songs, refine songs, and even graciously reject songs for public use. And that is the challenge. It’s hard, and time consuming, and expensive. Far easier to google it.
Apparently, around 80% of the new songs that the church are singing these days come from just 17 writers world-wide. And of course, such songs are amazing. Please don’t hear me wrong on this. But I wonder whether, if more churches and church leaderships encouraged, facilitated, even insisted, that songwriters gathered and wrote their own songs we would see some more diversity and freshness coming into the song repertoire of the Church, and more creatives flourishing in their craft.
Being able to access so much great stuff so quickly is amazing — but we miss out because we don’t make the time to take what God is doing uniquely amongst us as a people and craft it into a song. We end up singing someone else’s story.
In fact, this is an issue for the church generally. Where church culture, and specifically church staff culture becomes increasingly driven and corporate, the more that creatives can become sidelined. Let’s face it, lots of creatives will tend to fade away into the background when they are faced with the corporate spirit. Creatives do not fight in that way. But maybe that’s for another day…
Coming back to worship and creativity — I have to say that my heart sinks a little every time I go to another church and I hear the same songs done in the same way. Not because I don’t value those songs and those songwriters, or because I don’t value the time and effort those teams have put in to get those songs worked out, but because I am sure that local churches are missing out because they are trying to re-create some other churches story in their worship.
Rather than imitating other churches stories and songs, let’s be inspired by them, inspired to seek out and encourage creatives and songwriters in our churches. Purposefully create the spaces for them to dwell and inhabit that nurtures their gifts. To listen prophetically to what God is doing amongst our own churches and help us all sing it into being.
It requires a brave type of leader who will allow this — encourage this — and protect the creative process and the creative space where it can be allowed to flourish.
