jesiah

Emo Worship

// March 2nd, 2010 // Theological illogical

I was snowboarding a few weeks ago and I ran into someone who goes to my church.  We shared the ski lift to the top of the run which lead to conversation about family, school, snowboarding, sports and then we got to the subject of church and this person asked me “Why do we always do such sad sounding songs at church?” and I honestly had no answer for the question.  To be honest I was wondering the same question for months.  There had been a few select times where I had made it to church late and heard the worship team already playing worship and it sounded very sad and emo.  Which when you get out of your car feeling fired up after listening to Hillsong United “Tell the world” and walk into a sad emo musical vibe, it makes you wish that you were back in your car worshiping sometimes.  Now this has nothing to do with anyone’s heart or the quality of worship because we have a lot of talented Christ loving people on our worship team, its just the power of mood and emotion that a song can set.

I started going through our churches song list that I’m told to pick songs from and they are all lyrically great songs but a lot of the melodies and musical arrangements are the same.  Generally slow to medium tempo songs with a soft intro and a build to a strong ending chorus that ends in an acapella of said chorus.   I’ve had a few people come up to me and ask me why worship is so loud and I never had an answer.  The only way to put energy into these sorts of songs is to get louder, hence the build up to the strong ending chorus in almost all of the songs.   Now another way to add energy to a song is to play faster songs with edgier sounding arrangements. We really don’t have any fast songs in our song book other than the old ones that we’ve overplayed.   I think that is the best explanation I can give for these questions.

In conclusion I’ve learned a few things about churches:

1. Each church gravitates to a certain style of music and generally stays there until a change of leadership (whether hiring a new pastor or an old one resigning or another pastor running a different service).
2. Almost every single head pastor of churches that I’ve gone to have always liked the slower songs better.
3. Almost every youth pastors that I’ve known has had encouraged a great balance between high energy and low energy worship (then again sometimes that even became to predictable).

We all agree that it would be great to be in a worship service full of our favorite worship songs but if we let these sorts of things get to us we’ll lose the meaning of why we are worshiping.
Colossians 3:2 says “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.”

Keep your focus.