All the Cool Kids are Singing It Part II

This post is the second in what will be a string of posts on the role of the music pastor (or worship pastor or creative arts director or worship arts pastor or whatever you call it) giving special attention to the art of, need for, and absence of indigenous worship in the local church.

First we need to talk about what the role of the worship leader is in scripture. What specifics does the Bible give us for a qualified worship leader and what he or she should be doing?

Nothing.

Well, kinda. The role of worship leader is really an extra-biblical role. It doesn’t mean it is wrong. We certainly assemble a list of general leadership qualities from scripture. We can read about singers and poets and musicians. We know pastoral qualifications. But, the role of worship pastor or leader is a role we have created in the church.

Quite frankly, we can say the same thing about the role of senior pastor, children’s pastor, youth pastor, and a myriad of other roles.

So, God gives us an incredible amount of freedom in crafting roles that best suit the needs of local franchises of the kingdom.

So, what do we do at Westwinds? What is the role in our environment?

At The Cue (our weekend shindig) , our aim is to facilitate an environment—celebratory, liberating, engaging, full of hope and expectation, affirming, restoring, free of distractions, thought provoking, and reflective—where individuals can meet with God (though it will not always be all of those things at once).

Our goal is not to get people to worship corporately. Though certainly, that happens in our environment. We cannot manipulate it if we tried by nature of worship being an act of an individual’s own will. We can influence and create space conducive for it.

But worship—biblically speaking—is a responsive way of living. It is more fabric and global than simply an act or strictly about music or any interactive vehicle we may design. Typically, church nomenclature has minimized and contextualized worship into acts largely revolving around music as well as other acts within the “worship service.”

But we still have worship services. And, the corporate worship experience can be an amazing response.

Yet, I am troubled at how homogenized, uniform, similar, streamlined, and packaged our corporate worship has become in the church world. It’s an assembly line.

It’s Costco.
It’s IKEA.
It’s ClipArt.

I would suggest one of the most often overlooked roles that should be honed in a worship leader is that of . . . artist. You would think that would be a “duh.”

As worship artists/musicians, people who best connect with God through creative expression, our role is to create. To make things.

We create space.
We create vibe.
We create reflections of godliness.

But, the corporate nature of the church has molded artists into it’s own image.

We are losing our ability to discern what is good, what is mediocre and what is crap.

Furthermore, we are losing our ability to foster creative environments, respond to what is going on around us, speak into the chaos, and create commentary and discussion in light of our local church.

Is it wrong to cover the latest Chris Tomlin song in church? Absolutely not. It might be perfect.

But, I would suggest if we sit back and take what the industry is giving us without question and kid ourselves into thinking “it must be good because everyone else is singing it” we are slowly dying.

If we constantly allow someone else to tell us what our congregation needs, we are missing out. And, we are probably lazy.

And . . .

We are killing our imaginations.

We spend more time thinking about how to copy the chord progressions and find the right inversions of chords than we do dreaming, searching, and making.