{"id":5383,"date":"2011-02-11T08:42:22","date_gmt":"2011-02-11T08:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.musicademy.com\/?p=5383"},"modified":"2019-08-01T14:41:24","modified_gmt":"2019-08-01T14:41:24","slug":"is-it-just-me-or-are-a-lot-of-worship-songs-mediocre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.musicademy.com\/blog\/is-it-just-me-or-are-a-lot-of-worship-songs-mediocre\/","title":{"rendered":"Is it just me or are a lot of worship songs mediocre?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was reading a\u00a0recent Musicademy blog post<\/a> which had some interesting (and controversial) thoughts about worship songs. Here are some snippets from it:<\/p>\n

“Now you will notice that I said \u201cvery poor\u201d, not terrible, not abysmal, not \u201cfrom the very pen of Beelzebub himself\u201d, just poor. Honestly I wish they were completely awful, because there is truly nothing worse than a mediocre song. You don\u2019t love them, you don\u2019t hate them, they don\u2019t challenge you, they don\u2019t raise any particular emotion. They aren\u2019t too noisy, the guitars are very smooth, you probably more-or-less agree with the lyrics and the man playing them looks like a rather nice chap who you would very much like your daughter to marry. It\u2019s all just terribly, terribly nice\u2026<\/p>\n

I want songs with edge, with attitude, songs that challenge, songs that express real emotion \u2013 everything from true, uncontainable joy to total dark despair \u2013 because that reflects reality. I don\u2019t want the same old cliches about tongues confessing and lambs being slain. I don\u2019t want guitars with some lame, gutless, poor-imitation-of-U2 effect”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I found myself agreeing with a lot of what this guy was saying. As a worship pastor, I hear a lot of worship music and I have to say, a lot of it sounds the same. Same style, same format, same builds, same instrumentation, same lyrics… However, I do have some questions as to whether this is because the songs are ‘mediocre’ or if the problem is actually me?<\/p>\n

Have I become too familiar and desensitised to worship music?
\nHave I made the worship experience too much about me and what I like to feel and listen to?<\/p>\n

Should we even be critiquing worship music the way we would any other music? The thing is, when you are critiquing a worship song, you are not just judging the song’s music and lyrics in a distant and detached way, you are critiquing that person’s revelation of God and how they have recorded it. You are judging how they relate to God and describe their experience. And whereas I might not like the song, to another, it could bring the words of life.<\/p>\n

Worship music is such a tricky thing to balance. Whilst we want to strive to give God our best musically- which of course we should, it is about so much more than that. It is about drawing people to worship Jesus. If worshipping in Spirit and in truth is to become so lost in God, that we lose focus of all else around us, then whose responsibility is it to get us to that place?<\/p>\n