The Challenge of Freedom
R. KENT HUGHES
Unlike the Anglican Mark Ashton and the Presbyterian Tim Keller, I came to my Reformed convictions and theology of worship apart from a defined denominational tradition.
My earliest religious memories extend back to 1949 when my Southern Baptist grandmother, Rose Hughes, took me as a six-year-old to a huge tent on the corner of Washington and Hill Streets in Los Angeles to hear a young evangelist named Billy Graham. The dressed-up crowd, the young evangelist’s blue eyes radiating in the spotlights, and cowboy Stuart Hamblin singing “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” are etched on my memory.
During the following years my family trekked in from the suburbs to worship at Vermont Avenue Presbyterian Church. It was there, hushed and seated next to my mother along with other reverent worshipers in the dark, Scottish-kirk ambience of that old church, that I began to sense the transcendence of God and to be drawn to Christ.
But it wasn’t until I was a teenager in the mid 1950s that I came to Christ—and then it was through the ministry of mission-minded evangelical Quakers who had recovered their gospel commitments in the Wesleyan revivals of the late nineteenth century. In retrospect, I see that their corporate worship was an eclectic mix of Methodist, Nazarene, and Baptist traditions—decidedly Free Church. Aside from a thirty-second time of silence (a vestige of the old silent meetings), the services were indistinguishable from those of our Baptist and other Free Church neighbors. Sunday mornings were a warm blend of gospel songs and choruses, perhaps a hymn, a choir number, and a sermon.
Quite frankly, “worship” was never a concern; it was evangelism that was important. So apart from my regular attendance at services, my considerable energies were devoted to youth work and the outreach of Youth for Christ for which, after graduation from high school, I worked as a club director. I have searched my memories of those years, and I cannot recall having a single reflective thought about corporate worship. I certainly never gave any thought as to the purpose of our Lord’s Day gatherings, other than as a venue for preaching.
It wasn’t that as a young man I didn’t think theologically. Quite the contrary. As a teenager my soul was so ravished by the book of Romans and the truth of God’s sovereignty that “the doctrines of grace” became the backbone of my theology—as they remain today. My newfound Calvinism enhanced my love for God and his Word and fueled my evangelistic fervor. But in regard to corporate worship? I simply made no connection.
My seminary and youth pastoring years coincided roughly with the 1960s, the tie-dyed, bell-bottomed, guitar-toting, and (for Christians) Bible-toting decade. My students carried immense New American Standard Bibles covered with fluffy rabbit skins! Positively, on the one hand, fresh winds swept across the church, so that everything was questioned and subjected to the painful tests of authenticity and relevance. Much of the effect was salutary as vapid old gospel songs were dropped and unadorned Bible teaching replaced homiletical discourse. And in some quarters, music and corporate worship focused more on God.
On the other hand, irreverence became widespread. Congregational prayers were often a mindless stream-of-consciousness offered in a “kicked-back” cannabis tone. Mantra-like music was employed to mesmerize worshipers, and preachers were replaced by “communicators” who offered bromides strung together with a series of relational anecdotes.
It was in the midst of this as a youth pastor that my theology began to kick in with questions relevant to this chapter: What do the Scriptures have to say about corporate worship? What does our sovereign, holy God think of our gathered worship services? How is Jesus Christ (our Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer) glorified by this? Is this meeting Word-centered? How, then, is the Word read and preached and sung? What is this song actually saying? Are the lyrics biblical? Does the music support the lyrics? Is this entertainment or authentic worship?
These elementary questions took on special urgency for me in the 1970s when my wife and I were called to plant a church. Everything was new. There were no traditions other than the experiences that our varied congregation brought with them. And experiment we did! My Reformed convictions were the only constant.
During the 1980s and 90s, my philosophy and practice of worship underwent a continual tweaking in the congenial environment of College Church. This has produced some firm convictions and deep concerns about corporate worship in today’s Free Church tradition. But before I express these, a brief profile of the church I have pastored for the last two decades is in order. College Church was founded by Jonathan Blanchard, an abolitionist and the first president of Wheaton College. He was a friend and disciple of New England’s famous Beecher family, so the church was congregational—College Church of Christ. Naturally, College Church stands proudly in the Free Church tradition. In fact, its logo is a profile of the Mayflower, which celebrates its Puritan roots. In the 1930s, after many congregational churches had become Unitarian, the church severed its association with the denomination, and presently it has no affiliation other than with the National Association of Evangelicals. Free indeed!
Though College Church has always been separate from Wheaton College, its proximity to the campus has given it a significant ministry to students and faculty over the years. But today the bulk of the congregation is “thirty-something,” and the church overflows with babies. On one recent Sunday there were one hundred three-year-olds in the nursery! The church has been in an extended springtime. Some 117 missionaries have been commissioned by the church in the last decade, and nearly half of the church’s budget goes to missions. Eleven short-term mission teams were sent out from the church this last year. Evangelism and missions are alive and well at College Church.
Sunday morning corporate worship at College Church is bibliocentric and traditional. The congregation is noted for its singing and hearty declaration of the Apostles’ Creed. Music, prayers, Scripture reading, and testimonies are designed to increase congregational participation and edification under the unifying theme of the morning exposition. The evening corporate gathering is more casual and less structured, and the music is more eclectic in its service of the unifying scriptural theme.
I relate this positive picture to give weight to what I say. I fear that many in the Free Church tradition may be giving away the very heart of an effective ministry as they uncritically enfold seeker-sensitive corporate worship patterns.
In recent years biblical theology has exercised a profound effect on my thinking with its nuanced emphasis on the order of biblical revelation in respect to the history of redemption. The writings of William Dumbrell and Graeme Goldsworthy have been particularly helpful in this respect.1 For some time I have been in implicit agreement with Don Carson’s assertion that New Testament worship encompasses all of life and that it is misleading to imagine it as only a corporate activity of the assembled church.
The biblical evidence is conclusive. Jesus’ coming fulfilled the Scripture’s promise of a new covenant (cf. Jer 31:31-34). And it is most significant that the entire text of this substantial prophecy is recorded in Hebrews 8:7-13, in the midst of a section (Heb 7-11) which asserts that there is no longer sacrifice, priesthood, or temple because all have been fulfilled in Christ.
The worship language of the Old Testament is now transmuted in the New Testament so that “worship” is a broader phenomenon, encompassing all of life. There is, as Carson says, a de-sacralization of space and time and food—or better, a re-sacralization of all things for the believer. There are no longer any sacred times or sacred spaces. Under the new covenant Christians are thus to worship all the time—in their individual lives, family lives, and when they come together for corporate worship. Corporate worship, then, is a particular expression of a life of perpetual worship.
The New Testament “cultus” is expressed in terms of our lives being living “holocausts,” whole burnt offerings: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship” (Rom 12:1). This is what worship is: day-in-day-out living for Christ, the knees and heart perpetually bent in devotion and service.
The understanding that new covenant worship is centered in Christ, who is at once temple, priest, and sacrifice, argues for the Protestant and Free Church tradition over against the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglo-Catholic traditions. Since Christ is the temple, “sacred spaces” and consecrated grounds are a delusion. Since Christ is high priest according to the order of Melchizedek, the priesthood is superseded and obviated. Likewise, priestly vestments and clerical dress are out of date. Since Christ is the Lamb of God slain once for our sins, there is no justification for the Mass or for sacrificial accoutrements such as an altar or chasuble. These superseding new covenant realities should also serve as a warning to those in the Reformed tradition whose devotion to the “Regulative Principle” inclines them to draw from the cultus of the old covenant.
As to everyday living, the fact that Christian worship is to be coextensive with all of life suggests that care must be taken in the way we speak of it. To call our public meetings “worship” can unwittingly install a re-sacralization of time and space. It is better to employ terms like “corporate worship.” Other unwieldy expressions can sometimes work—“believers worshiping together” or “Christians assembled in worship” or “the worship of gathered believers” or “the congregation assembled in worship”—but “corporate worship” or “gathered worship” works best for me.
Because worship is a way of life, you cannot worship corporately on the Lord’s Day if you haven’t been worshiping throughout the week—apart from repentance! Christians don’t have a Sunday “worship switch,” despite what is sometimes portrayed on television. Neither must we be allowed to think that “worship” is only a part of the service—as if singing and praise were worship in contrast to the preaching. And “worship leader?” What an odd term! Does the worship end when his or her part is done?
Certainly it is true that mutual edification is the hallmark of corporate worship, as David Peterson argues.2 And edification must not be understood to be merely the cognitive reception of biblical truth through preaching. Of course, it is true that mutual edification takes place through preaching. But congregational singing, sitting together under the Word as it is read, contemplating God’s Word sung, uniting in Word-centered congregational prayer, corporately confessing our faith, and rebuke and exhortation—all these edify.
Here we must understand that the togetherness of corporate worship aids edification. As Robert Rayburn explains:
When there are a number of worshipers present, there is a participation in worship which is more intense than is the individual passion of any one of them when he is by himself. It is common knowledge that a mob is more cruel than any individual in it would be by himself. Similarly, the enjoyment of an elite company of music lovers at the symphony is more intense than that of a single music lover sitting by himself listening to the same music. God has so created man that there are deeper delights and more intense inspiration in the worshiping congregation than in individual devotion.3
This intensifying effect of corporate worship enhances edification. In fact, edification will not flourish as it ought apart from it, because hearing God’s Word amidst the corporate assent of a congregation intensifies the mind’s engagement and reception of the truth. Likewise, participation in the community of belief intensifies taking the truth to heart. And then the example of the truth lived out moves the believer to live out the radical truth of God’s Word. Corporate worship is essential to edification.
Thus, I have come to see that while all of life is worship, gathered worship with the body of Christ is at the heart of a life of worship. Corporate worship is intended by God to inform and elevate a life of worship. In this respect, I personally view how we conduct gathered worship as a matter of life and death.
There was a time when the Free Church tradition was the poor, outcast relative of the established Church of England; but today this is no longer the case, especially in North America, where the majority of Protestants (and the overwhelming majority of evangelicals) attend churches that conduct corporate worship in the Free Church tradition. More than fifty million American Protestants corporately worship in one of the variations of the Free Church tradition.4 A cause for rejoicing? I think not.
There is no doubt about the principled beginnings of the Free Church tradition in early-seventeenth-century England as a protest against the ecclesiastical demand that they use the Book of Common Prayer. The designation “free,” in fact, records the desires of both Separatists and Puritans to be free to order corporate worship according to God’s Word.5 The name “Puritan” recalls the closely parallel desire to reform Prayer Book worship according to the “pure Word of God.” The Separatists and Puritans were largely in agreement except for their marked differences in attitude toward the established church. Indeed, Horton Davies, the renowned authority on Puritan worship, includes Presbyterians, some evangelical Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Baptists under the Puritan rubric.6 Significantly, the famous Puritans of Cambridge University became a diverse lot. William Perkins and Thomas Cartwright became Presbyterians; Thomas Goodwin and John Cotton, independents; John Preston, a nonconforming Anglican; and Richard Sibbes, a conformist.7
The penetrating critiques offered by Puritan and Free Church leaders in their historical contexts were both substantial and salutary. The seven points that follow are necessarily broad brush strokes and lack the qualifications and subtleties of a detailed portrait; nevertheless, they do convey the essence of the critique.
At the heart of the critique was the nature of preaching. The Anglican preference for Prayer Book homilies was countered by the Puritan insistence on weighty exposition of Scripture. The typical Puritan or Free Church sermon was part of a continuous serial exposition of a book or section of the Bible.
William Ames, whose Marrow of Divinity became the indispensable Puritan theological text, decried topical preaching. He insisted that the sermon be drawn from the text.8 Plain exposition was the Puritan preachers’ goal. “The plainer the better,” wrote William Perkins in his Arte of Prophecying. In the use of ostentation, he said, “we do not paint Christ, but…our own selves.”9 Because communicating the Word was such a priority, their sermons were models of order, with clear headings and discernible skeletons that enhanced memorization.10
Application was taken to a new level by Perkins’s classification of the types of people the minister must keep in mind for application and then by the catalog of types of application listed in the Westminster Directory for Publick Worship.11 Such preaching was aimed to penetrate like arrows into the hearers’ hearts. And such sermons were lengthy, prolix, passionate, and exhaustive—full of prophetic zeal and fire.
Because the Puritan and Free Church clergy took the sermon to new levels, an educated clergy became a must. The reason for the founding of Harvard College only a few years after the Puritans’ coming to America was the fear of leaving “an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”12
Notwithstanding the likes of John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes, this Word-centeredness gave the Puritans a massive intellectual and spiritual ascendancy over the typical Anglican clergyman who read his service from the Prayer Book.13
The main Puritan/Free Church objection to the lectionary in the Book of Common Prayer was the joining together of brief disparate texts, which they contemptuously called “pistling and gospelling.” In contrast, the Free Church tradition gave itself to the reading of full chapters of the Old and New Testaments.
The Prayer Book’s collects were rejected by the dissenters as “short cuts,” and its responsive prayers were dismissed as “vain repetitions” or “tennis playing.” In contrast, lengthy prayers offered extemporaneously or from a book became the practice in the Free Church tradition.14 Ministers were encouraged to prepare well for such prayers.15
The Free Church tradition came to stress the need for the congregation to express their praise in hymns rather than leaving it to a professional choir as was typical among the Anglicans. It is a matter of record that most of the ten most often sung hymns in America between 1737 and 1960 have been from the Free Church tradition.16
Free Church advocates faulted the Prayer Book’s “Order for Holy Communion” for: (a) not employing the Dominical words of institution (cf. 1 Cor 11:23-25), (b) its emphasis on individual participation as contradictory to the Lord’s command, and (c) its allowing of unworthy reception of the Lord’s Supper by not requiring an examination of the communicants. Kneeling at Communion was rejected as promoting the adoration of the elements and the doctrine of transubstantiation.17
Baptism was seen to be encrusted with unscriptural additions: crossing the child, private baptism, baptism by women, questions to the child, and the presence of godparents. (And of course the English Anabaptists understood the Scriptures to teach only believers’ baptism by immersion.) Such were the convictions of the Pilgrim Fathers when they came to America.
The Separatists’ radical opposition to set forms of worship and their example of liturgical simplification greatly influenced the Puritans and other Free Church expressions toward simplicity in corporate worship. This simplicity moved them away not only from the Anglican tradition but also from the practices of the continental Reformed churches. This movement to simplicity was so profound that it fostered a distinctive church architecture, as is seen in the meetinghouses of New England.
The Free Church tradition rejected vestments as being Aaronical and unsuitable for ministers of the new covenant.18
When these Free Church distinctives (about preaching, Scripture, prayer, singing, sacraments, simplicity, and vestments) were carried to North America by their English and Scottish forebears, the effects on corporate worship were largely beneficial. Pastors were free to dress like their congregations, perhaps donning a simple black Geneva gown for preaching. They were free to order their Lord’s Day meetings with biblical simplicity. They were free to structure their God-centered worship around the centrality of the Word of God, publicly reading extended passages from the Bible, preaching weighty sermons from the text. Devout preachers who knew their Bible and their people were free to offer extemporaneous prayer from their hearts with an immediacy that set prayers rarely attain. They were free to administer communion and baptisms with chaste simplicity according to the theological dictates of Scripture as they understood them.
At its best, the corporate worship of the Free Churches was radically biblical, ever more scriptural and authentic. Certainly there was some regrettable iconoclasm, and sometimes they went too far and abused their freedoms. Who today can read the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and not appreciate its excellencies?19 Who with Bible in hand can defend the radical Separatists’ extremes? But the Puritans and their Free Church friends reached a certain consistency. They were energized by the unshakable belief that the Word of God is the sole guide for directing corporate worship. Free Church worship was patterned on the Bible and nothing but the Bible.
For more than 150 years the Free Church tradition operated on the “Scripture only” principle. The last two centuries brought change. In America, where the Free Church tradition had once meant the freedom to order corporate worship according to the Scriptures, it came to mean the freedom to order such worship as one pleased or as one felt it would work best. As James White describes it, “The ‘freedom’ of the Free Church worship became not so much freedom to follow God’s word, but freedom to do what worked.”20 In short, Free Church biblicism deteriorated into Free Church pragmatism. The great proponent of this was the nineteenth-century revivalist Charles G. Finney, who promoted the revival system of “new measures,” which if followed, he promised, would bring a harvest of souls.
The result of this de-biblicizing of corporate worship was that in many quarters it was reduced to “a revivalist message with opening exercises.” The structure of corporate worship became: (1) the preliminaries, (2) the sermon, and (3) the invitation. This three-part organization became the order in most Baptist, independent, Methodist, and some Presbyterian congregations. Singing and musical selection were made in regard to their effect rather than their content. Gospel songs (celebrating experience) often supplanted hymns to God. Scripture reading was reduced so as not to prolong the “preliminaries.” Prayers were shortened or even deleted for the same reason. As to the sermon, the careful interaction with the biblical text so treasured by the Puritans was in many instances replaced with a freewheeling extemporaneous discourse. After all, the Bible had become the optional resource for the sermon rather than the source for the whole of corporate worship.21 Frontier Baptists, for example, would countenance no preacher who used notes.22
The descent from biblicism to pragmatism was also accompanied by a slide into anthropocentrism. Baptist historian T. R. McKibbens writes:
Perhaps the hymns more than any other medium of worship reflect the shift from theocentrism to anthropocentrism. The Baptist hymnals published between 1784 and 1807 were notably theocentric, giving God the leading role in the drama of worship and salvation. Later hymnals, especially those published in the nineteenth century, were characteristically anthropocentric, with a tendency to define the drama of salvation more in terms of human response rather than divine initiative.23
The congenital twins of pragmatism and anthropocentrism have vastly influenced twentieth-century Free Church corporate worship. What McKibbens describes of Baptist practices has been generally true across the Free Church tradition. Corporate worship has taken the form of something done for an audience as opposed to something done by a congregation. And in many places it has come to be regarded as entertainment, as the egregious terms “stage,” “program,” and “musical number” suggest.24 It is not too much to say that some preachers have debased the sermon to a form of mass entertainment.
Today the “seeker-sensitive” movement at its worst has consciously cultivated anthropocentrism and pragmatism. And my concern is that it could, given enough time or the same trajectory, lead to post-Christian evangelicalism. The issue of how corporate worship is to be conducted is of utmost importance. Because of this, I have discerned six distinctives that must inform and control Free Church corporate worship, and all of life as worship.
The six distinctives of Christian worship anticipate and indeed demand one another. A full exposition of any one distinctive would necessarily touch upon the others. Here, as we move through the essential distinctives of corporate worship, their bouquet will become increasingly evident and, I think, compelling. Because all of life for the Christian must be worship, these distinctives must inform life in its totality. But here the emphasis is on how these distinctives must shape corporate worship, which is, of course, central to a life of worship.
It can be inaccurate to characterize any form of Christian worship as “human-focused” because if it is consistently so (avoiding any God focus), it cannot be Christian. But the term is appropriate for making distinctions regarding where modern churches begin when setting the trajectory of their corporate worship services.
The human-focused model begins with what its proponents consider to be the average person on the street and asks, “How can we design our corporate worship so that it will be least offensive and most inviting to the unchurched?” The motivation (and it is clearly noble) is evangelism. It must also be said that the human-focused trajectory may be accompanied by an emphasis that is more or less on God. It is the “less” that is of greatest concern.
The human-centered approach has some unfortunate characteristics. Preaching, for example, is often reduced to a fifteen or twenty minute homily, and Bible exposition is jettisoned as “too heavy” in favor of lighter, more topical fare. Some communicators have gone so far as to make a point of not carrying a Bible because they believe its presence will put off the unbelieving. And with this comes such overt attempts at relevance that any language, prayer, or music deemed to be out of sync with popular culture is consciously avoided. The end effect, to use Marva Dawn’s term, is “a dumbing down” of the church—producing a people who are weak in their knowledge of the Scriptures as well as of the great writings and music of the church. Such people live with the unfortunate illusion that they have come from nowhere, ex nihilo, without heritage or roots.
There is an intrinsic downward gravity in human-centered worship. Among the greatest dangers is pragmatism, because where pragmatism becomes the conductor, the audience increasingly becomes humans rather than God. And when humanity is played to first, when what humanity wants becomes the determining factor, it will corrupt not only worship but theology.
God-centered worship begins with a focus on the awesome revelation of God, the God of Holy Scripture who is the omnipotent Creator who spoke everything into existence; who is likewise omnipresent, being above everything, below everything, in everything, but not contained; who is omniscient, even numbering the very hairs of his children and knowing their thoughts before they become words; who is transcendent and omni-holy, and who dwells in the unapproachable light of his own glory.
Because worship encompasses all of life, this awesome focus must perpetually be cultivated. When we meet for corporate worship, we must consciously begin with the question: How must we conduct our lives and shape our meeting so as to glorify God? This vision and this question are of the greatest importance for our generation, for these reasons: (1) Corporate worship that is informed and shaped by the Scriptures’ vision of God will cast off idolatries and foster worship in truth and in spirit. (2) A stunning vision of God will promote holy living. (3) Such a vertical focus will enhance horizontal unity. As A. W. Tozer memorably explained:
Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshipers met together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be were they to become “unity” conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship.25
(4) A massive vision of God and worship consonant with this vision will keep hearts from wandering. Many who have grown up in the desolate worship of evangelical churches have an unrequited need to worship, and as young adults they leave for traditions that have a reverent form of worship, even where the reality has long departed.
By insisting that corporate worship must be radically God-centered, I am not in any way suggesting a disregard for humankind and the lost world, but rather I insist that the proper approach to worship must first be God-focused and then human-sensitive. Only when the question of God’s glory and pleasure is addressed can the second question, regarding humanity, be pressed. Again, my concern is that the second question is the dominant force today in many circles and that this has a pernicious effect. A persistent focus on humanity could lead to a post-Christian, human-centered evangelicalism.
Certainly the church must be culturally attuned and sensitive. It had better be in its preaching! Preachers must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. They must “understand the times” (cf. 1 Chr 12:32). The church must be creative and relevant in all aspects of worship—and appeal to the hearts of lost men and women. But at the root of all of this, it must be radically God-focused.
The ultimate question must be: What does God think of the way we worship him?
The New Testament does not reveal a greater God than does the Old Testament, but the New Testament provides a greater revelation of that God. As the Apostle John so beautifully said, “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). The phrase “has made him known” is the single Greek word exegesato, from which comes our English word exegesis—so that, as Carson says, “we might almost say that Jesus is the exegesis of God.”26 Jesus explained (exegeted, narrated) God for us. As the Word, he is God’s ultimate self-expression.
The early christological hymn, Paul’s great hymn of the incarnation in Colossians 1:15-20, provides a mind-boggling revelation of God in Christ as the Creator, Sustainer, Goal, and Reconciler. The hymn first sings of Christ as Creator: “For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him” (Col 1:16). Jesus Christ created the invisible spirit world, for that is what “thrones…powers…rulers…authorities” refer to. He created the vast visible world and universe. He created the fires of Arcturus and the firefly. He created the colors of the spectrum—aquamarine, electric blue, orange, saffron, vermilion. He created every texture, every living thing, every planet, every star, every speck of stellar dust in the most forgotten backwash of the universe. And he did it ex nihilo, from nothing.
The song goes on to celebrate Christ as Sustainer: “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:17). There is a medieval painting that shows Christ in the clouds with the world of humans and nature below. And from Christ to every object is painted a thin golden thread. The artist was portraying this same truth in Colossians—that Christ is responsible for sustaining the existence of every created thing. The tense used in the Greek emphasizes that he continues presently to hold all things together; thus, apart from his continuous action all would disintegrate. Astounding! The pen I write with, the book you hold, your very breath that falls upon this page are all held together by his powerful word (cf. Heb 1:3). And if he for one millisecond ceased his power, it would all be gone.
The majestic truths of his creatorship and sustaining power virtually demand this truth that Christ is the Goal of creation: “All things were created…for him” (Col 1:16)—an astonishing statement. There is nothing like it anywhere else in biblical literature.27 He is the starting point of the universe and its consummation. All things sprang forth at his command, and all things will return at his command. He is the beginning and the end—both Alpha and Omega. Everything in creation, history, and spiritual reality is for him!
The hymn of the incarnation ends with Christ as Reconciler: “He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Col 1:18-20).
If you worship Christ as the Creator of everything, every cosmic speck across billions of light years of trackless space, the Creator of the textures and shapes and colors that dazzle our eyes; if you worship Christ as the Sustainer of all creation, who by his word holds the atoms of your body and this universe together; if you worship him as the Goal of everything, that all creation is for him; if you further worship Christ as the Reconciler of your soul—then you worship the God of the Bible. Anything less than this is reductionist and idolatrous.
We also have it from Jesus’ lips that he himself is the focus of the Old Testament Scriptures. As he explained to Cleopas and his companion after the resurrection: “’How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?’ And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:25-27, cf. vv. 44-47). Luke’s descriptive “in all the Scriptures” indicates that it was not just the prophecies, not just the sacrificial system, not just the tabernacle, but the entire Old Testament that speaks of Christ.
Christ, of course, is not found in the specious pietistic typology that sees Rahab’s red cord as the blood of Christ, but rather in the great salvific events and personages of Israel’s history, as well as in the classic prophetic texts. Israel’s history points to the kingdom and to the coming King. The epic sagas of Genesis articulate the theme. The Exodus foreshadows the great deliverance wrought by Christ, a salvation that is by grace alone. The stories of the judges—of people such as Ehud, Gideon, and Samson—are stories of mini-salvations that point to the ultimate work of grace through Christ. The lives of the great leaders, such as David and Moses and Joshua, foreshadow Christ. God would work a sovereign deliverance through the son of David even as he had sovereignly done through young David. David prefigures the saving person and work of Christ. So wherever you turn in sacred Scripture, whether to the Psalms or to the Prophets, you come to Christ. Could there be any grander, more scintillating theme in all history than Christ? What joy to search the Scriptures and repeatedly find Christ (cf. John 5:39–49).
The Old Testament, of course, is matched by the consuming Christocentricity of the New Testament. The writer of Hebrews argues in chapters 7-10 that believers no longer need a priesthood, a sacrifice, or a temple because Christ is at once their priest, their sacrifice, and their tabernacle.
Because Christ is the ultimate revelation of God, because he is the great epicenter of the New Testament, he must be the central focus of New Testament worship. This is worship that embraces all of life. Christians must focus on Christ every second of their lives. And when they come together for corporate worship, they must set their hearts to join together in radical Christocentricity. To this end, E. V. Hill, pastor of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, told of the ministry of an elderly woman in his church whom they all called “1800” because no one knew how old she was. On unsuspecting preachers “1800” was hard because she would say, “Get him up!” (she was referring to Christ). After a few minutes, if she didn’t think it was happening, she would again shout, “Get him up!” If a preacher did not “Get him up!” he was in for a long, hard day. Dear old “1800” was no theologian, but her instincts were sublime. True worship exalts Jesus. It cannot fail to “Get him up!” because both Testaments lift him up.
There is nothing more important, and more salutary for the church, than Christ-centered worship.
In the sixteenth century the Scottish church, flush with the Reformation, began a beautiful ritual for opening and closing its services. When the people were seated for worship, the doors to the nave opened and the presiding ministers were led to the pulpit by a parish officer who bore before them the large pulpit Bible, held high so that all the congregation might see it. And as the elevated Bible passed by, the people reverently rose to their feet. They did this, not in worship for the book, but in respect for its divine author.
As the Bible was carefully placed on the pulpit, the parish officer (the beadle in Scottish parlance) opened it to the lesson of the day. This symbolized that the preacher had authority only as he stood behind the book and preached from its riches. At the completion of the service, the beadle once again ascended the pulpit, closed the Bible, and elevated it. As he did this the people again reverently rose to their feet, and the Word of God was carried out with the ministers again trailing in procession. This beautiful tradition evokes deep resonance in my soul because corporate Christian worship, and indeed all of life, must be radically Word-centered from beginning to end.
(a) Old Testament. The necessity of life-encompassing, Word-centered worship has substantial roots in the way God’s Word was regarded under the old covenant. A particularly defining instance occurred early in Israel’s history at the end of Moses’ life when, after Moses finished writing the law, he commanded the Levites to place it beside the ark of the covenant, called for Israel to assemble, sang his epic song, and then immediately declared, “Take to heart all the words I have solemnly declared to you this day, so that you may command your children to obey carefully all the words of this law. They are not just idle words for you—they are your life” (Deut 32:46, 47; cf. 31:9–13; 32:1–45). God’s covenant people were called to a radical day-in-day-out absorption in God’s Word.
Later the psalmist gave this call magisterial expression in the 176 verses of Psalm 119. There, in twenty-two stanzas (one stanza for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet) he repeatedly emphasized the sufficiency of God’s Word as covering “everything from A to Z.” Subsequently, the prophet Isaiah would record the divine declaration, “This is the one I esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word” (Isa 66:2).
Still later in Israel’s history, when Nehemiah superintended the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s wall and Ezra opened the newly recovered Book of the Law to read, all the people stood in reverent attention from daybreak to noon—some six or seven hours. It was an explicit gesture that the Word was to be central in Israel’s existence. Indeed, it was their life. It would seem certain that the Scottish reformers had Israel’s response to Ezra’s reading of the Word in view when they stood for the entrance of the Word.
(b) New Testament. When we come to the New Testament, we discover a remarkable Word-centered continuity with the Old Testament. Jesus’ summary response to the Tempter was like a corresponding bookend to Moses’ declaration that the Scriptures are “your life.” Jesus insisted that they are the soul’s essential food: “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matt 4:4; cf. Luke 4:4; Deut 8:3). The Scriptures were life to Moses and food to Jesus—which, in effect, mean the same thing: the Scriptures are essential and indispensable to life itself. In fact, Jesus’ call to life in the Word is a quotation from Moses!
Jesus’ preaching expounded Old Testament scriptures and concepts. The Sermon on the Mount is a prime example, as is his exposition of key Old Testament texts, not to mention the texts from Luke 24 already cited, which indicate that Christ preached himself from all the Scriptures. The book of Acts repeatedly demonstrates that apostolic preaching followed suit.
As we would expect, corporate worship in the early church centered on God’s Word. Paul’s order to Timothy was precisely this: “Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching (paraklesis) and to teaching (didaskalia) (1 Tim 4:13). Justin Martyr, writing toward the middle of the second century, provides a window as to how this worked out: “On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles and the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has finished, the president speaks, instructing and exhorting the people to imitate these good things.”28
So we must see that corporate worship in the apostolic church and subapostolic church was Word-centered from beginning to end. This, of course, is consonant with Paul’s bibliocentric instructions to Timothy regarding preaching (cf. 2 Tim 2:15; 3:14–17; 4:1–5). Thus, we conclude that Word-centered worship was rooted in the Old Testament and explicitly flowered in the New Testament.
(c) Word and Spirit. There is a further substantial reason why all corporate worship must be Word-centered: Word and Spirit cannot be separated. In a 1995 article in honor of the British preacher R. C. Lucas, Australian Old Testament scholar and pastor John Woodhouse makes a compelling argument for biblical exposition based on the inseparableness of the Word of God and the Spirit of God. He notes that the Hebrew rûah and the Greek pneuma can mean “wind” and “breath” as well as “spirit,” and that in many biblical texts “the Spirit of God” can be well translated “the breath of God.” Thus, “in biblical thought the Spirit of God is as closely connected to the Word of God as breath is connected to speech.”29
Woodhouse shows that the connection of Word and Spirit begins in the opening words of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit (rûah; read breath) of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Gen 1:1-3, italics added). Furthermore, the dynamic connection between rûah (Spirit) and speech (“God said”) is often missed. But the psalmist made the connection:
By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath [rûah] of his mouth
(Ps 33:6, italics added)
Again, Spirit and Word are as closely connected as breath and speech.
The prophet Isaiah affirms the connection with similar poetic parallelism: “For the mouth of the Lord has commanded, and his Spirit [rûah; breath] has gathered them” (Isa 34:16, RSV cf. Isa 59:21; 61:1). Dr. Woodhouse comments: “The logic is that where the Word of God is, there the Spirit (or breath) of God is also. For one’s word cannot be separated from one’s breath.”30
This inseparable connection between Word and Spirit flows right on into the New Testament. Jesus says: “For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit” (John 3:34, italics added). And again Jesus says, “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life” (John 6:63, italics added). Indeed, there are many statements in the New Testament in which “Spirit” and “Word” are virtually interchangeable (e.g., James 1:18; 1 Pet 1:23; cf. John 3:5).31
Thus, it follows that if we have any desire for the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our corporate worship services, those services must be radically Word-centered. Authentic worship is Word-centered because:
This means that our corporate worship must be Word-centered from beginning to end. We do not meet for “worship and the Word.” It is all a ministry of the Word. This means that the preaching must be wholly biblical—in a word, expositional.
But installing exposition as the main event is not enough. God’s Word must infuse everything. The careful reading of the Word must be central. Hymns and songs must be Word-saturated. Prayers must be biblically informed, redolent with biblical reality—often reflecting the very language and structure of Scripture. The preaching of the Word of God must be the Word of God. Such a service requires principled, prayerful thought and hard work. There may be no need to parade the Scripture in and out while God’s people rise in reverence. But it must happen in our hearts. Corporate worship must be Word-centered if it is to glorify God as it ought.
This ought to give serious pause to many in the Free Church tradition who consciously minimize the Word of God in corporate worship.
There are those who argue that worship does not—almost cannot!—take place in church because hymn-singing and listening require so little of us in respect to how we live. They argue that authentic worship takes place when we live obediently Monday through Saturday amidst a hostile world. Certainly they have a point. Worship cannot be separated from consecrated service to God. The notion that you can come to church on Sunday and bend your knee in worship when in fact you have not done so during the week is a delusion. Such “worship” is a spiritual impossibility. Certainly no liturgical exercise performed in a putative “sacred space” can presume to be worship apart from weeklong service of God.
Yet to limit the purpose of the corporate assembly of God’s people on the Lord’s Day to edification is needlessly restrictive and reductive. Properly understood and administered, corporate worship will strengthen authentic worship throughout all of life. Corporate worship regularly functions to intensify our consecration to service. Martin Luther said, “At home in my own house there is no warmth or vigor in me, but in the church when the multitude is gathered together, a fire is kindled in my heart and it breaks its way through.”32
Was Luther an unconsecrated man? No. Did he serve God throughout the week? Yes. But his heart was joyously harrowed and fired for a life of worship by regular corporate worship. Indeed, this is one of the principal reasons for worshiping with the body of Christ—because through the reading and preaching of God’s Word, through corporately singing the Word in hymns and spiritual songs (most hymns are intrinsically consecrational), through corporately praying for God’s will, and through participating together in the Lord’s Table, God’s people will be encouraged and strengthened to live consecrated lives.
We must understand that it is often during corporate worship or as a result of such worship that many Christians come to deeper consecration—and so live daily lives of profound worship. The Apostle Paul was clear that consecration is essential to true worship: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship” (Rom 12:1). Corporate worship must always fuel the sacrificial fires of everyday worship.
To understand that worship is consecration means that the pastor must see to it that everything in gathered worship leads to Isaac Watts’s conclusion: “Love so amazing, so divine / demands my soul, my life, my all.”
Encompassing. Jonathan Edwards’s treatise The Religious Affections is a brilliant exposition and application of 1 Peter 1:8: “Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy.” Edwards employed this text as a lens through which to evaluate and authenticate true Christianity. He held that truly regenerate souls are characterized by such love, faith, and joy.
Unlike us, Jonathan Edwards didn’t use the word affections to describe a moderate feeling or emotion or a tender attachment. By “affections” Edwards meant one’s heart, one’s inclinations, and one’s will.33 He wrote, “For who will deny that true religion consists in a great measure in vigorous and lively actings of the inclination and will of the soul, or the fervent exercises of the heart?”34 Edwards then went on to demonstrate from a cascade of Scriptures that real Christianity so impacts the affections that it shapes one’s fears, one’s hopes, one’s loves, one’s hatreds, one’s desires, one’s joys, one’s sorrows, one’s gratitudes, one’s compassions, and one’s zeals.35 Thus, he offers these conclusions:
For although to true religion there must indeed be something else besides affection, yet true religion consists so much in the affections that there can be no true religion without them. He who has no religious affection is in a state of spiritual death, and is wholly destitute of the powerful, quickening, saving influences of the Spirit of God upon his heart. As there is no true religion where there is nothing else but affection, so there is no true religion where there is no religious affections.36
If the great things of religion are rightly understood, they will affect the heart. The reason why people are not affected by such infinitely great, important, glorious and wonderful things, as they often hear and read of in the Word of God, is undoubtedly because they are blind; if they were not so, it would be impossible, and utterly inconsistent with human nature, that their hearts should be otherwise than strongly impressed, and greatly moved by such things.37
Certainly, then, true worship is demonstrative: it pours from your heart, it infuses your inclinations to please God, and it directs your will to serve him. True worship is not the outcome of a moderate feeling or emotion. It galvanizes your whole being. In a word: it is encompassing! So much then for the Calvinist whose worship is neatly measured and conveniently interior—who references God in scholastic, Latinate categories but is embarrassed when others become enthusiastic about God’s love.
Worship engages the whole being.
Passionate. Certainly we all understand that authentic worship cannot be dispassionate. But not all are comfortable with the assertion that worship must be passionate. Nevertheless, this is wholly true—with the proviso that we understand that passion is mediated through the uniqueness of our cultural backgrounds and God-given personalities. Some personalities are naturally baroque, while others are more “Bostonian” in nature. But when worshiping, both the effusive and the reserved must be passionately involved.
We must also allow that there may be times when our religious affections are stirred to extraordinarily passionate worship. Mary of Bethany’s anointing of Jesus was a one-time worship event. Indeed, it was never repeated because his death followed so closely. Jesus said of Mary’s worship, “She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial” (Mark 14:8).
Mary’s heart erupted in a fervent expression of devotion as passionate as found anywhere in Scriptures. Snap went the bottleneck! Out poured a fortune of perfume! And down came her hair as she used it humbly, worshipfully, to wipe her Savior’s feet (cf. John 12:3). It was a spontaneous outpouring of her love, and so very extravagant—scandalously so in the eyes of Jesus’ disciples (vv. 4, 5). But Jesus placed his imprimatur on her passion: “Leave her alone,” he said. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me…I tell you the truth, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her” (Mark 14:6, 9).
We must leave room in our lives for such humbling extravagance if God so inclines our hearts. As King David said at another signal event in salvation history, “‘I will celebrate before the Lord. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes’” (2 Sam 6:21b, 22). Worship demands all our affections. It calls for passionate devotion.
Heaven regrets the lore of nicely calculated less and more.38
Engaged. The point is, there is no room for detached, laid-back worship or cold intellectualized formality. We must be engaged.
The hymns and songs of the church demand radical engagement. John Wesley’s “Directions for Singing” written more than 230 years ago in the preface to Select Hymns sets the standard:
Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing. Aim at pleasing him more than yourself, or any other creature. In order to do this attend strictly to the sense of what you sing, and see that your heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually; so shall your singing be such as the Lord will approve here, and reward you when he comes in the clouds of heaven.39
Likewise, the reading of the Scriptures must be attended by close attention. The picture of all the people of Jerusalem standing from dawn till noontide as Ezra read from the Law conveys the idea (Neh 8).
Congregational prayers must be matched with interior and exterior “Amens” as our hearts resonate with what is prayed. True engagement in corporate prayer affords our souls the benefit of riding the prayers of others to places we might not otherwise go, and of expressing thoughts beyond our normal capacities.
And preaching? Inasmuch as it is true to the Word, it must be listened to as the Word of God.40
Here we must reflect on the two contrasting mountains of Hebrews 12 (Sinai and Zion) because together they provide the vision that must inform all New Testament worship. Briefly, the author’s argument in Hebrews 12:18–29 is this: You have not come to Mount Sinai and the consuming fires of God (vv. 18–21); rather you have come to Mount Zion and the consummate grace(s) of God (vv. 22–24). Your graced standing requires two things of you: obedience (vv. 25–27), and worship: “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our ‘God is a consuming fire’” (vv. 28, 29).
So the paradox: though you are standing on Zion’s graced slopes and not at fiery Sinai, the reverence with which you are to worship in all of life is informed and infused by Sinai’s revelation that God is a consuming fire. How is this? Very simply, both mountains reveal God. The God of Zion is the same God as the God of Sinai. And though we can approach him because of his unbounded grace, he remains a holy consuming fire. Note well the tense: “our ‘God is [not was!] a consuming fire’” (v. 29; cf. Deut 4:24). This is an abiding new covenant reality.
Mount Sinai. Sinai as it is memorably described in verses 18–21 provides a salutary background for a life of worship. We see a mountaintop blazing with “fire to the very heavens” (Deut 4:11), cloaked with deep darkness, lightning flashing arteries in the clouds, with the mournful blasts of trumpets baying through the thunder and the ground shaking as God’s voice intones the Ten Commandments. The holy God radiates wrath and judgment against sin. He cannot be approached.
Mount Zion. Of course, the other mountain, Mount Zion of the New Testament, completes the picture. This mountain, with its sevenfold benefits, is eminently approachable. “But you have come”: (a) to the city of God, Mount Zion, “the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God”; (b) to angels, “to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly”; (c) to co-heirs, “to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven”; (d) to God: “You have come to God, the judge of all men”; (e) to the church triumphant, “to the spirits of righteous men made perfect”; (f) to Jesus, “the mediator of a new covenant”; (g) to forgiveness, “to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (vv. 22–24).
What a vision we are bequeathed from Calvary. Here is God the Son with his arms nailed wide as if to embrace all those who come to him, his fallen blood speaking a better word than the condemning blood of Abel. Here is the consuming grace of God. Mount Zion, crowned by Golgotha, shows us God and his grace.
Both mountains—Sinai and Zion—reveal the God we worship. Neither can be separated from the other. God is not the God of one mountain but of both. Both visions must be held in blessed tension in our hearts. This massive dual revelation of the mountains is meant to shape how we live our everyday lives in worship. We must worship God according to his revelation, not according to our disposition. We must worship God with reverence and awe, for our “God is a consuming fire.” This is an individual, domestic, and corporate necessity.
Not a few church leaders have failed to understand this. And the corporate folly here described probably indicates deficient worship in everyday life. While on vacation, one of my associates visited a church where, to his amazement, the worship prelude was the ragtime theme song from the Paul Newman/Robert Redford movie The Sting, entitled (significantly, I think), “The Entertainer.” The congregation was preparing for divine worship while cinematic images of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in 1920s garb hovered in their consciousness! And that was just the prelude, for what followed was an off-the-wall service that made no attempt at reverent worship. The “high point” was during the announcements when the pastor (inspired, no doubt, by the rousing prelude) stood unbeknownst behind the unfortunate person doing announcements making “horns” behind his head with his forked fingers and mugging Bozo-like for the congregation. This buffoonery took place in a self-proclaimed “Bible-believing church” that ostensibly worships the holy triune God of the Bible.
But what was in the pastor’s and people’s minds? What did they really think of God? How could anyone do such things and understand who God is? They were unwitting evangelical Marcionites whose ignorance of both Testaments had so edited God that divine worship had become human-centered vaudeville.
Of course, the example is extreme. Such bathos is rare. At the same time, the unremitting horizontal trajectory of many Sunday services, the inattention to God’s Word, both in reading and preaching, and the casual, unthought-through stream-of-conscious prayers have trivialized corporate worship.
Certainly, Christians ought to connect with each other, and they ought to have the best sense of humor on this planet. Christians ought to enjoy life to the fullest. But they must also know and understand that God remains a “consuming fire” and that acceptable worship takes place when there is authentic reverence and awe in all of life, not the least in corporate worship.
These six distinctives of worship are the controlling principles for how we conduct our corporate services at College Church. This is not theory, but practice.
Each of the six by themselves will, when taken to heart, exert a profound influence on gathered worship. And when they are purposefully mixed in bouquet—when worship is at once God-centered and Christ-centered and Word-centered and consecrated and wholehearted and reverent—the effect is all-controlling. Indeed, our experience is that these six essences, like a good perfume, augment each other in rich fragrance—a sweet aroma of worship to God.
The importance of these distinctives, even at the horizontal level, is immense, because corporate worship is where edification most effectively takes place. If the church-gathered effectively worships God, then the church-scattered will better worship God in all of life.
Before we move to the “how-to” of corporate worship, music must be given proper perspective as a medium of gathered worship. Music has validity in Christian worship only as it participates in, and contributes to, a service of the Word from beginning to end. That is why music must remain under constant scrutiny, and the ministry of music must be constantly reforming so as to be Word-centered. The historic examples of Ambrose and Luther, whose hymns brought people to the faith and taught them the Bible, are as important today as at any time in Christian history.41
In our setting, we understand music to be the servant of preaching. And because the entire service is built around the sermon, all the songs and hymns are made to relate to, or comment on, some aspect of the text. This may mean singing about the character of God as revealed in the text; it may highlight a teaching principle or application; or it may underline a commitment that the text emphasizes. Sometimes what is sung is related to a parallel Scripture passage or is a paraphrase of the text itself. So what the congregation sings and what it hears sung will flow from the central biblical text of the day.42
Likewise, instrumental music is often based on apt hymn tunes and their association with well-known texts. Many times the character of the sermon passage will suggest the musical character of nonvocal music—peaceful, martial, joyous, and so forth.
We believe that music must principally serve the text. Don Hustad (the “dean” of evangelical church music) describes music for worship as essentially “functional.”43 The words and actions of the people of God assembled for worship create the need for music, provide the environment for music-making, and must finally serve as the judge of how successfully it lifts up Christ and his Word.
The very act of singing God’s Word, or singing scriptural truth about God, is intrinsically edifying because music is so easily remembered. The immense scope of the five books of the Psalms testifies to music’s power to edify. Because music is so naturally affective, great care must be taken to assure its biblical fidelity. Too often today the church serves up affective sentiments without much care for the discipline of the Word.
So we see music’s role in its finest practice as obedience to the Word of God. Worship is elevated when music-makers (composers, directors, and all who sing or play instruments) and the congregation they serve bow the knee to God’s glory and make music in obedience to God’s Word.
In the Old Testament music was a priestly function; in the New Testament it still remains a priestly matter. Jesus, our High Priest, says, “I will declare your name to my brothers; in the presence of the congregation I will sing your praises” (Heb 2:12, quoting Ps 22:22). And of course, as a kingdom of priests, God’s people are enjoined to sing. The Apostle Paul commented on this musical responsibility when he instructed the church in Corinth about the public exercise of gifts. He said, “I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my mind”—as he encouraged them to full mental engagement with the words they were singing (1 Cor 14:15). A few lines later he instructed them, “When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church” (v. 26). As God’s people they were to employ their voices to build up the church. It remains everyone’s responsibility.
In his letter to the Ephesian church, Paul charged his readers, in respect to the Spirit’s filling, “Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:19–20). Similarly in his exhortation to the Colossian church, the apostle demonstrates his grasp of the teaching and reforming role of music: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God” (3:16).
Paul understood the inseparability of Word and Spirit (they are as speech and breath) and commanded God’s people to engage corporately in a mutual ministry by Word and Spirit as they sang. It is the responsibility of Christ’s body whenever it assembles.
The selection of appropriate worship music is not merely a matter of choice between traditional and contemporary Christian music. The decision must be made on principle. Whatever the genre of music, it must meet three criteria: text, tune, and fit.
Text. Evaluation of the music’s text or lyrics comes first. Whoever selects music must do the biblical work required to conform all textbased music to the thrust of the sermon text. The music leader must work with a hymnal in one hand and the Bible in the other.
Are the lyrics biblical? Scriptural allusions, even abundant allusions, do not ensure this. Some lyrics conflate disparate allusions into confused montage. The well-known song “You Are My All in All” is a case in point. It goes in part:
You are my strength when I am weak,
You are the Treasure that I seek…
Seeking You as a precious jewel,
Lord, to give up I’d be a fool…
There can also be Scripture-based lyrics that do not represent what the Scripture means in its context. An example of this is the chorus:
This is the day
(This is the day)
That the Lord hath made.
(That the Lord hath made.)
We will rejoice
(We will rejoice)
And be glad in it.
(And be glad in it.)44
The chorus’s bouncy tune is evocative of believers exulting on a sunny day, and it is often used to begin morning assemblies. But the quotation is from Psalm 118:24, which is in the context of eschatological judgment. This sense is apparent when read with the preceding sentence: “The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Ps 118:22–24).
Indeed, Jesus quoted verse 22 in his temple discourse to confirm a parable of judgment: “Jesus looked directly at them and asked, Then what is the meaning of that which is written: “The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone”? Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed’” (Luke 20:17, 18).
Yes! This is the day that the Lord has made. And, yes, we will rejoice and be glad in it. But not when or as the popular tune suggests.
We must be aware that many popular new songs come from a hermeneutical environment that disconnects individual passages of Scripture from their contextual meaning. In a similar way, even a socalled “Scripture song” (that is, it is all Scripture) can be unscriptural because it is sung as a repetitious sound-bite and thus conveys a sense far from its biblical intent. The singing of Psalm 46:10a, “Be still and know that I am God” (three times) to a sweet, bucolic melody suggests a relaxed idyll with God. That is hardly consistent with its martial context (Ps 46:8–11). Better not to use a hymn or song at all if it misrepresents the textual meaning.
Tune. Next, the tune must support the meaning of the text. It is inevitable that a sentimental melody attached to a hortatory text will deflate the force of the text. Thus, the essentials for evaluating a tune are answered by the questions: Does its character fit the text? Does it have a melody capable of standing alone? These are not esoteric questions that can only be answered by the “experts.” Anyone with some musical understanding, some common sense, and a willingness to think about it can make good decisions.
Here we must also note that the musical meter must be appropriate for the text. For example, a 3/4 meter, which is a waltz or skating meter, is not appropriate for certain theological truths. For example, the gospel song “Jesus Is Coming Again” has a big band waltz melody in a style popular in the 1940s; and while the Second Advent is certainly the Christian’s “Blessed Hope,” it will not be a waltz or an “All Skate.”
Fit. Lastly, the task of hymn selection must be in the context of knowing the congregation. There is a cultural appropriateness that cannot be ignored in this matter. A hymn or song may be textually sound, its tune may be consistent with the text, but it may be either too formal or too informal for a certain congregation in its particular setting. Those leading worship must be attuned both to the Word and to the people who are served.
After selection comes the need for spiritual preparation. Musicians must see themselves as fellow laborers in the Word and must lead with understanding and an engaged heart. Those who minister in worship services must be healthy Christians who have confessed their sins and by God’s grace are living their lives consistently with the music they lead. The sobering fact is that over time the congregation tends to become like those who lead.
Musicians are also called to render their very best to God. Qualitative standards can be expressed classically (unity, clarity, proportion), and biblically (creativity, beauty, craft). In Christian worship, where music is a servant of the Word of God, musical standards are a requisite to clear communication. Church music must be judged by universal standards of musicianship: it must be good music, well performed, with due attention paid to intonation, rhythmic accuracy, articulation, and tone. Happy is the congregation led by godly, competent musicians!
The congregation must also be prepared for its ministry of music because the congregation is the chief instrument of praise, the one indispensable choir! Musicians and choirs serve a questionable function (entertainment?) if the congregation does not sing. At College Church our choirs understand that first among their ministry responsibilities is leading the congregation in singing. This is foremost a heart matter, then one of earnest example. Whenever we introduce new music, we make sure the choirs have it down first. This makes new hymns and songs less daunting. Great singing builds up God’s people in his Word and also draws unbelievers to consider both the reality and the substance of the faith.
We have found that thoughtful exposure to new songs (timing, placement, pastoral considerations) and intentional training will build a congregation in its capacity for praise. In our own particular context, we begin instructing our children in the essentials of worship during the years of kindergarten through second grade with a program entitled Wonders of Worship (W.O.W.) in which an entire year is given to focusing on the who, where, when, why, and how of worship. (See Appendix B.)
The ministry of music is not ministry of a different sort. It is first, last, and always a ministry of the Word of God.