Order my cartoon book, NAKEDPASTOR101, from Amazon.
cartoon: worship
Leave a Reply
-
My name is David Hayward, and I am the nakedpastor. I am a graffiti artist on the walls of religion.
-
-
My name is David Hayward, and I am the nakedpastor. I am a graffiti artist on the walls of religion.
NP, This is great. I have wondered, with all “the church’s” recent talk of “relevancy,” “transparency,” and being “real,” why that’s not reflected in our music. Can’t wait for the worship song that goes like “O my Lord, is this really it? ‘Cause honestly, it feels like …”
now there’s one!
Love it.
Also, have you noticed this?… In the Christian music industry, the male worship leaders sing and play guitar. I’ve never seen a woman guitarist (I’m sure they’re there, but certainly not pushed). The industry seems to tell us that Women worship leaders should just sing and look pretty, and ideally be young and blonde, whilst the men are multiskilled, and it doesn’t really matter what they look like. We should really be doing better that this inclusivity stuff than the image obsessed secular market, but sadly we seem to do worse…
correction: “…doing better AT this inclusivity…”
Love it!
Louise, your comment reminds me of the way it was at the last church we were a part of. The worship team leaders were husband and wife – she was always fake blonde and extra made up and he could play any instrument and was rather portly. However, they are out of that business and are good friends of ours now, so it’s all good.
hahahahahahaha!
Probably true of all modern music and a lot of hymnal music too, but that doesn’t make it any less lame.
I see the worship clones ad nauseum as well, but it’s not true of everyone. We had an amazing, sincere, unique, wonderful couple leading us in worship for years before they recently moved. We are presently without anyone- and that’s been a really great season in worship as well.
No matter who is leading, it is too often true that we just follow along mindlessly. We depend on someone else’s intimacy, or even just their personality, to define the moment, which I think is a definition of religion itself.
A few weeks ago, our worship was just silence. No background music, no one speaking, just silence for about 40 minutes. People had deep, profound experiences in God without having been lead by anyone else, including skinny-tall-scruffy-faced-axe-spray-guitar guy.
Love it! We just started attending a UU church, and this made me realize another thing I like about their service. No performers on stage! They do have a choir sometimes. I think they had on robes. But no worship team. I never did like those.
Why can’t UUs sing very well in choirs? Because they’re always reading ahead to see if they agree with the next verse.
Old joke- sorry, Lynn, couldn’t resist the set-up.
I’m afraid the worship industry is just that – an industry!
Larry Norman used to say that if God really gave the songleaders/writers the song then the royalties should go to Him for feeding the poor etc.
Having been a charismatic jumper in my youth I now sit down and switch off on my very rare visits to such performance lrd churches.
It’s all about the performance.
Bread and circuses and all that…
HA! I love this.
This covers so many ways in which a worship song can go wrong.
Sometimes I think we need to go back to traditional hymns.
I’m surprised that the revolt within churches that use “worship leaders” and “worship bands” has not reached a feverish pitch yet. Humans tend to only like to be ‘played’ emotionally for a while before the vomiting begins.
OK, sure, a lot of contemporary worship music sucks. It’s banal trite and cliched. But so is most contemporary music, period. And hymns. God, the hymns.
But there are some good songs out there, and for crying out loud, does the theology have to be perfect every time? There are some songs I have some theological issues with, but they work on a lot of other levels, so I use them.
(And let’s see, all sports commentary, most of the news, you name it, is pretty much a string of cliches strung together)
And not every church is a megachurch with a professional band. Most churches get along with whatever they have in local talent. Choirs, bands, whatever, can be great, they can also be pretty mediocre and even downright bad on occasion. Such is life.
But most people are trying their best, and the ones that don’t get paid for it particularly don’t deserve your contempt.
whoa dave lightn up. i’m critiquing “us”. myself included. i’ve sung and written such songs. let’s laugh at ourselves shall we?
i wrote a song for church titled ‘cliche’. it had this line in it…
“i know it sounds cliche’ but i’ll sing it anyway”
Louise: Carrie Newcomer – search for her on YouTube.
NP: The image seems to refer to those “7/11″ praise songs: 7 words repeated 11 times.(In these parts, “7/11″ is the name of a chain of convenience marts.)
Dave H – it probably looked like I was criticizing your post/cartoon, but I was really responding more to the piling on going on in the comments…
That said, there are plenty of “real” songs out there (Flood and just about anything else by Jars of Clay, for example) that are anything but happy clappy, Jesus is my boyfriend rubbish. I’d rather see people talk about that and suggest good songs than harp on what’s wrong all the time…
I know there’s a lot of trite, unimaginative stuff out there, but there are a couple things I appreciate about contemporary praise and worship music. It often addresses God directly. Much of the traditional stuff I grew up with were songs about God or about the individual’s experience with God. Some, I think,were simply meant to be instructional. But few were actually crying out to God himself with words of praise and adoration and honor. Also, many of the lines in contemporary praise and worship music are taken directly from the Bible itself. Sometimes the songs can get a little repetitious, but how can you go wrong singing the words of praises that David sang out to God, or the words of the angels in John’s vision at Patmos?!
I agree Dave P. The contemporary songs were not that bad. I liked and still do like a lot of them and I don’t believe the theology has to be flawless. There is nothing wrong with simple lyrics that aren’t theological but instead move the soul and touch the emotions.
The song and worship leaders…. now that’s another story.
The problem with praise services is they require a God who is narcissistic.
@Doug Sloan,
“The problem with praise services is they require a God who is narcissistic.”
Are you implying that the god of the old and new testaments is NOT narcissistic?
I know from my own experience that people can get pretty hot about this subject. One of my brothers is a worship leader, guitarist, and songwriter, and I’m a classical choral singer whose taste in sacred music runs to Bach cantatas and Renaissance Masses and motets. To me, his tunes are boring (not to mention almost always in a completely unsingable key for this high soprano) and his lyrics are trivial to the point of meaninglessness; he thinks my kind of music doesn’t connect with people who just want to sing about “having Jesus in their hearts.” After all, “this is worship, not a concert!” (To which I say: “This is church, not ‘singing around the campfire.’” LOL!) When our mom just happened to mention one day in his hearing that she prefers “my” music… woe unto her! He and my sister-in-law didn’t speak to her for almost 6 months afterward.
Can’t win ‘em all, I guess… sigh…
(Full disclosure: I wrote a few hymns and hymn tunes and even an anthem or two back in my churchgoing days, but they were of the “mainline” variety. BTW, technically “hymns” are the lyrics, whether set to music or not.)
p.s. @John T: A classic: “If there is a Holy Spirit, If there is a Heavenly Dove, I would like to see and hear it, changing this cold world with love.” (Avery & Marsh, 1967)
@Rob: LOL! (Although I must say I’ve sung in a couple of pretty kickass UU choirs in my day.)
=^..^=
To add to this, the church I used to attend had often gotten husband/wife pairs, and the wife was always blond. They were good singers, though without fail, they tend to ululate needlessly, and their mics tended to be set a little “hotter” than the choir’s, so it was grating. The guy is also a tad pushy too. I was working on the stage lighting, at half power so the bulbs were cool when one needed to be replaced, and the worship leader complained. I didn’t think he needed lights at full power to lead music that doesn’t have sheets. Needless to say, I quit without saying anything, I didn’t need to listen to that ninny.
Eisenhower warned us about the Industrial Military Complex. He should have included a warning about the Industrial Religious Complex also.
this also works for a lot of pop music… especially love songs…
Rob – the 40 minutes of silence sounds wonderful, we really do need more times of silence in our lives