Whistle while you work

My day job is to be an auditor. Yes, I know, it sounds boring. Don’t worry, to keep myself entertained during the day I tend to sing, to the frustration of everyone who sits close to me.

Auditors don’t like to sing.

But I’m not sure why. I think it’s because auditors tend to think of themselves of being a tad too serious for singing…but it seems that G.K. Chesterton agrees with me on this point!

If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while auditing and bankers while banking?

He even went as far as to write some suggested verses that auditors and bankers could sing while at work.

They didn’t go down very well.

Chesterton summed up the sorry state of affairs:

Bank-clerks are without songs not because they are poor, but because they are sad.

Do you sing while at work?

Should you?

Another thought on worship

Every so often I’m drawn back to the word ‘worship’, and why we use it the way we do.

Contemporary Christianity has taken to using ‘worship’ to describe the act of singing. We call it ‘the worship’ during a Sunday meeting and we listen to ‘worship CDs’…but at the same time we somehow want to cling to the biblical idea that all of life is worship.

Here’s a thought for a Monday – compare the Old Testament and New Testament ideas of the temple. In the Old Testament the presence of God was encountered once a year when the high priest entered the Holy of Holies, but in the New Testament we’re told that our bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit; God dwells within every Christian!

But in our use of the word ‘worship’ are we falling back into the Old Testament attitude that the gathered body of believers is somehow the only way that we can truly connect to God?

I’m re-reading a book right now called Unceasing Worship by Harold M. Best – it’s wonderful. And he suggests that the best way of understanding the biblical idea of worship is in the phrase ‘continuous outpouring’. We are continuously outpouring worship to some god or other in our words, ideas and actions; whether that god is Jesus, or ourselves, or something or someone else ultimately comes down to us.

That idea makes sense of Jesus’ words in John 4 after the Samaritan woman asks him where the right place to worship God is. He doesn’t give a place name, he instead gives her an attitude: ‘in spirit and in truth’. If that lady had asked a typical contemporary Christian ‘where is the best place to worship?’ I’m not sure the Christian wouldn’t default to something along the lines of: ‘Well, that depends on what sort of music you like.’

Is it a worry that we’d so blatantly answer such an important question differently to Jesus?

I’ve written about this already (at least here and here) so if you feel like I’m flogging a dead horse you may have a point…but I suppose you clicked the link to get here so it’s actually your fault. Haven’t quite worked that thought through yet.

Why Christians sing

Jesus was once having a conversation with a lady who wasn’t Jewish. She was a Samaritan, and wanted to know where the best place to honour God was – the Jews said on one particular mountain, and the Samaritans said a different mountain. All she knew was that she wanted to adore God.

Jesus’ reply seems obvious to the Christian mindset: it doesn’t matter where you are, all that matters is how you worship. But then he gets a bit cryptic:

The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. (John 4:23-26)

What does this whole ‘spirit and truth’ thing mean? I think it’s more straightforward than it appears at first.

Truth

Truth is objective – if something’s true, that’s the end of the story. So to worship God we must worship within strict, true boundaries, properly defined by the Bible. That means true worship must engage with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. No matter how much we love watching X Factor it’s not worship of God in and of itself because there’s no input from the Bible into that moment.

Spirit

Our spirits are far more subjective – I change my mind more often than I care to admit, and my feelings and opinions are certainly very different to everyone else’s. But in order to worship God properly we must also engage ourselves; it’s not good enough to speak through some true words in an emotionally-detached way, because that would be worshipping only in truth.

Spirit and Truth

When we gather together to worship we could do all manner of things. We could speak words of the Bible together, or dance together, or perform some community action together…but all of these somehow don’t guarantee true worship in spirit and truth…but singing’s different. When we sing, we can sing songs that are filled with biblical truth. But also, we can engage emotionally with the sound of the music.

For one person, they may be able to emotionally engage with simply reading the Bible (I’m that one person), but others may find it easy to emotionally detach from that. For another, a carefully choerographed dance may enable them to express truth…but I’m not that person. So singing is the easiest way to enable a large congregation to all worship simultaneously in spirit and truth.

How do you find it easiest to worship in spirit and truth?

Whole-body worship

At my church we believe in ‘whole-body’ worship. That means that every member of the church body (see Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12) is equally involved in corporate worship. There’s not one leader and many followers, there’s one facilitator enabling every individual to engage.

But worship is way bigger than we perceive it. I follow The Resurgence, who recently posted about the importance of the human body in worship. We worship with our body through daily living, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, but when we join in corporate worship it’s important we worship with our whole body too:

Scripture, however, presents an active, physical involvement in worship: the raising of hands, indicative of both blessing God (Psa. 134:1) and pleading for his help and mercy (Psa. 28:1-2; 88:8-10); kneeling, bowing, and falling down, exhibiting humility and abject shame before the Lord (Rev. 4:9-11; 5:8-14; Ezra 9:5-6; 2 Chron. 6:12-14; Psa. 35:13-14; Neh. 8:5-6); dancing or leaping, manifesting intense joy (Psa. 149:3-4; Ex. 15:20-21; 2 Sam. 6:14-17); and clapping and shouting praise to God (Psa. 47:1-2; 66:1). Certainly, many cultural—including generational, ethnic, geographical, socio-economic, and denominational—realities must be considered in this discussion, but embodied human beings qualified to worship God “in spirit and truth” (John 4:23-24) are to engage in this activity with the entirety of their being—and that includes their body.

Clapping during corporate worship

I heard recently that someone said clapping during corporate worship is inappropriate – I’m sure that person isn’t the only one to think so. The thought of coming before a holy, awesome, magnificent, all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing, perfect beyond description God and trying to clap in time with a snare drum just seems a little mismatched, doesn’t it?

At the same time, our reverence and fear of God should lead us to want to obey his word:

Clap your hands, all peoples!

Shout to God with loud songs of joy! (Psalm 47:1)

God commands us to shout with loud songs, and to clap our hands! Not only that, but he demonstrates it. In Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son the description of the people’s response to the father’s grace to his son is moving:

they began to celebrate…as [the older son] came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. (Luke 15:24b-25)

Our awesome God commands us and demonstrates that we should sing loud, shout, dance, and clap before him.

There are some Christians today who are perfectly able to do all these things, but are unwilling to.

Why?

Hillsongs

I am so aware that blogs can very quickly become a pile of the blogger’s rants about everything they see, and I know that I very easily fall into this trap. That being said, I am now going to rant a little bit.

I seem to have (unfairly?) inherited a classification as one who does not like Hillsong. This is not the case, but I would like to state now what I feel uneasy about. Apart from what is stated here I actually think that I quite like Hillsong. Their songs are catchy, and their churches are growing. Good on them.

Implied theology

This one’s the biggy. I’m not sure that I could say with any authority exactly what Hillsong’s doctrinal statement is, but anyone who has heard of Hillsong knows their music, so that’s what this impression is based on:

1. The fact that the music is so prominent means that the authoritative preaching of the Word of God is pushed back to a time filler; it’s not particularly challenging and doesn’t, in my opinion, present a very high opinion of Scripture. I don’t really like that.

2. Nearly all of their songs are responses – let me explain. Have a look through Hillsong lyrics; while most of it is fine (see below) pretty much every song is a declaration of ‘I’m going to shout’ ‘I’m going to run’ ‘We’ll dance’ ‘I love you’ ‘I live my life for you’…it’s all about how much we love God and what we’re going to do. Not enough, in my opinion, is sung about what God has already done for us, and that should always be the starting point!

Clumsy lyrics

This is my other bugbear. To say that Hillsong produce such a lot of very good music it seems that their quality assurance process is not very good. Consider this verse from the excellent song, Mighty to Save:

So take me as you find me
With all my fears and failures
Fill my life again
I give my life to follow
Everything I believe in
Now I surrender

1. ‘So take me as you find me’? To my mind that sounds like an arrogant child, unwilling to change: ‘God, I don’t care what you say so take me as you find me’. A far better line would be what my church would have opted for: ‘You take me as you find me’. Now this is a humble recognition of the fact that God does not demand anything of us, yet he takes us as he finds us. Far better, far more biblical, far more humble.

2. ‘I give my life to follow/Everything I believe in’ – this is just clumsy; anyone of any faith anywhere could, and indeed should sing this line! An atheist could absolutely sing that with full conviction, and that’s just wrong. Be clear about what you believe, don’t be ashamed of the gospel. We would change that line to ‘I give my life to follow/The glorious King of heaven’ – yes, a definite declaration about this is who I’m following.

Conclusion

I think that Hillsong are good at what they do in general, but I’m not sure they appreciate the influence they have. A wise person once said that people take their theology from the songs they sing, and that is absolutely correct; churchgoers sing the songs from Sunday throughout the week, so we should be doing our utmost to make sure they’re singing good stuff!

I’d far any Christian was caught singing, ‘Nothing can separate me from the love of God’ rather than ‘So take me as you find me’.