How welcome was the call,
And sweet the festal lay,
When Jesus deigned in Cana’s hall
To bless the marriage day!

And happy was the bride,
And glad the bridegroom’s heart,
For He Who tarried at their side
Bade grief and ill depart.

His gracious power divine
The water vessels knew;
And plenteous was the mystic wine
The wondering servants drew.

O Lord of life and love,
Come Thou again today;
And bring a blessing from above
That ne’er shall pass away.

O bless, as erst of old,
The bridegroom and the bride;
Bless with the holier stream that flowed
Forth from Thy piercèd side.

Before Thine altar throne
This mercy we implore;
As Thou dost knit them, Lord, in one,
So bless them evermore.
-Henry Baker

My remedy is that we take what some might consider a negative and make it a positive. Killing your advertising? Tell your congregation that you’re doing it and why you’re doing it. Make it a group rallying cry that you’re going to eschew Madison Avenue and embrace relationships based upon love and respect. There’s a better way to introduce people to our churches.

Here’s another take that I heard while I was in Dallas a few months ago:

Do you know why you can’t get coffee here? Because I’d rather you pick it up on the way in where you know your barista’s name.
-Matt Chandler

That’s what Christians ought to be doing. Go to Starbucks or your local coffee shop of choice and tip well. Don’t sign up for the “church fitness center”; join a real gym and get to know people. Let your kids play sports through the YMCA instead of the church league. Cut the fluff out of the church for the sake of your congregation being involved in their community. Don’t just say, “we don’t do that stuff,” instead, have a reason why you don’t do that. There’s something better than letting our churches turn into yet another hyped-up consumer enclave.

So, I ended up going over to Tommy’s house last night and hanging out with him. Yes, I know he’s got a girlfriend. Anyway, we watched a movie and toward the end, he leaned over and he kissed me! It was so sweet! Yes, I know he’s got a girlfriend. Do you think it means anything? Do you think he’ll break up with her and go out with me? We would be perfect together! I’m going to go back over there tomorrow night. Which dress do you think he’d find the cutest? I look really hot in the blue one. Alright! I know already, he’s got a girlfriend. What do you mean he’ll cheat on me too? It’s totally different. If you knew her, you’d know why he wants to be with me. It is totally different. Totally.

That’s most church marketing.

If we’re honest, we’ll admit that we’re going for the same pool of consumer Christians who want to be impressed by the hippest, newest thing in the religious world. Non-christians and people who have been burned by the church want nothing to do with hype-driven Christianity - and for good reason.

In thinking about hype, one of the ways that we allow hype to get into our churches is in the adjectives we use. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. We have exciting new ministries. We have powerful worship services. We have creative, inspiring, and insightful sermons. We have life-changing songs. Really? Really?

It’s part of the continual push to be newer and better. We might not believe it, but with our rhetoric we’re saying: “Those old ministries are passé, check out these new exciting ministries!” “Those old churches are staid and boring, we’re relevant!” And even if it were true, even if the new things were ten-times more exciting and creative, it doesn’t do us much good in the long run anyway. Why? Because the only people who really care if things are that much more exciting are Christians who already go to other houses of worship who want to be a part of the newest, the latest, the greatest thing.

It’s just too much.

What if we saved the word exciting for things that are truly exciting like the Gospel or a new church being planted or someone returning to the church after years away or a baptism or a first communion? That’s exciting. It is exciting to know that my sins, though they are countless, are not counted against me. It is exciting to know that the Holy Spirit is active in my life, uniting me to Christ. It is exciting to see hearts that were once dead in sin like mine made alive in Christ. The Gospel should be what truly excites us - not a bunch of promotional junk surrounding yet another church program.

The greatest singer in rock and roll
Would have to be Romeo
His vocal chords are made of gold
He just looks a little too old

Wilco, “The Late Greats”

I pray that my church (and I) would never get to the point that the Gospel just “looks a little too old”.

Advertising doesn’t work. None of that stuff really works anymore. Secular people see it as nothing more than hype.

The quote has haunted me because it intersects with where I live. I follow a lot of blogs; most of them are very much pro-advertising the church. They endorse methods like billboards and monthly mailers to the community and TV ads and carnivals and radio spots and, well, you name it. One of the things that I appreciate about most (if not all) of them is their zeal for telling people about their faith and their local congregation. I find a lot that is laudable in their planning and desire to connect people with the local church to connect them to Jesus. The only problem is, I don’t really think it works in all contexts. Though they’re becoming more similar, a college town in the midwest is different than a beachfront community in Florida. A city in the deep south is different than a suburb in the Pacific Northwest. Even here in the Houston area, The Woodlands is very different from the Heights which is itself very different from the Third Ward.

I live in the ruins of the Bible Belt. We’re not a completely secular culture here in Houston. Though there are people from every corner of the globe and every faith under the sun here, there’s also kind of a cultural echo of Christianity. To put it in clearer terms, there are a lot of people here who have been burned out of the Christian church, many of them for reasons quite unrelated to the Christian Gospel. Billboards here don’t call out to people, “Come, see Jesus, the man who told me everything I ever did! Could this be the Messiah?” like the woman at the well in John 4. They scream, “We’ve got something to sell you!” whether it’s the minister or the programs or the lifestyle of contemporary (predominantly white) wealthy evangelicalism.

Maybe the best and most responsible advertising we could do would be to say something like this to our churches:
“We’ve decided to eliminate the line-item for advertising in our budget. That’s right. Not one dollar will go to billboards or commercials or anything like that. That money is for church planting; that’s where lives are changed, not by a slogan on a freeway. Now it’s your job to get to know people around you and bring them with you to church. We’re not looking for people who go to other churches; we want you to get to know people who aren’t Christians and don’t share our beliefs. We want you to bring them here. We promise that this will be a safe place for them to hear about Jesus without all of the extra junk that so often goes along with it. We’re not going to sell ourselves to anybody. We’re not going to treat human beings as mere consumers. We’re going to be respectful; we’re not going to lie and tell people that we’ve got everything figured out. We’re going to worship God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

How’s that for a marketing campaign?

Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.
Colossians 3:16 (TNIV) 

“What about the third category? What about the spiritual songs?”

That’s a great question.

The short answer is that I think that there are enough spiritual songs out there and that the other two categories are neglected (especially the psalms). There are also side issues of simply wanting to write music and not spend hours fine-tuning lyrics when there are perfectly good lyrics out there.

The long answer is that I started writing when I was in college. Every week, I was learning new music. (Or, to put it more accurately, I was playing along with unknown music and figuring it out as I went along. That was a pretty harrowing experience! Thankfully, all of the music was fairly predictable.) There was such a drive for the latest expression of worship, the freshest tune, the newest lyric, that I got burnt out on it all. This isn’t to say that I wasn’t involved with some fine people who were doing a great job leading several hundred college students each week. It was just that the continual drive for what’s new forced me to stop and take a look at what’s old.

What I discovered was a treasury of incredible lyrics that my peers had all but forgotten. Here were words that were not captive to the latest pop metaphors for God but were rich and full of meaning. I found lyrics that had withstood the test of time and were rightfully called “the great hymns of the faith”. (Of course, there are some truly wretched old hymns, just like there are some fantastic spiritual songs being written today. One isn’t better than the other based upon its genre, necessarily. The content is the standard by which it should be judged.)

I found great hymns with some great tunes but also some great hymns with lesser tunes. Different musical settings of the same text can be wonderful counterparts to each other, as long as they both faithfully represent the content of the text. It’s like looking at a diamond from many different perspectives or like reading the bible in several different translations. They all add to each other. “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” is a fabulous hymn whether it’s sung to “Hamburg” or “Gift of Love” (but not when it’s sung to the tune of “Green Acres”). So I began trying to compose tunes that would accurately reflect the content of hymn texts with a musical vocabulary that was more common to my peers.

For centuries, Christians not only sang hymns, but they also had settings of the Psalms to sing (the Psalter). I can’t possibly write everything there is to write on the use of the Psalms right now, but I’ll leave with an observation that we have all but forgotten the Psalms in public worship and it’s to our detriment.

God has given us the gift of music and he has given us a song to sing. Psalms and hymns allow us to sing the same song as the saints of old - the prophets, the apostles, the martyrs and all who have gone before us. We sing along with the “living faith of the dead” (as Jaroslav Pelikan has written) and join in the thunderous chorus praising:

“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
Luke 2:14 (TNIV)

Note: This was a post that I originally wrote on January 28, 2006 but haven’t posted until now. My thoughts on the subject have changed a little but I still agree with the main thrust of what I wrote. Today, I would only qualify that we be vigilant in rejecting any romanticization of the past, thinking that older lyrics (and older theology) must necessarily be better than more modern expressions. We must always be returning to the scriptures as our source for life and our vocabulary for worshiping the living God.

[In the place of robust congregational singing,] we have a lot of songs that a lot of people don’t know, a lot of bad and unknown tunes, a lot of watching the worship team perform (especially if they are female of the right type and dress), a lot of forgettable, narcissistic lyrics, a lot of bad and inexperienced worship leaders, a lot of bone-headed thinking about congregational singing in relation to church growth, a lot of imitation of churches and methods that most congregations can’t imitate, a lot of lay people who simply don’t know how to sing at all, a lot of churches that don’t teach singing, a lot of turning congregations into audiences anyway and whatever else goes into the stew that does away with congregational singing.

It’s unfortunate that the discussion turns into old songs vs. new songs so often. Ultimately, when the songs were written, what kind of beat they have, what instrumentation one uses, etc. are secondary (and even tertiary) issues. The fundamental question that those of us who plan and lead music must wrestle with in terms of our role is “What does it mean to lead in song?” Does it mean that people are supposed to be inspired by the devotion and the passion of the person who sings at the front? Does it mean that we’re to model what the congregation should be ideally doing? Or is it different than that?

For me, leading in song involves a lot more behind the scenes work than overt, up-front action. Leading in song means that we pick keys that are the most comfortable for a congregation to sing in, no matter if they’re good keys for a lead vocalist to “shine” in or not.* (That’s why much, if not most, of the worship music coming out of places like Nashville and Atlanta has to be rekeyed before congregations can even attempt it. In CCM worship recordings, men are usually tenors and women are usually altos, while congregations are typically more oriented toward baritones and mezzo-sopranos. If you’ve been singing along with a worship leader until they reach a high note, at which point your voice cracks and you look around sheepishly to see if anyone noticed, you know what I’m talking about.) Leading in song means eliminating confusion from the musical arrangements so that the congregation feels confident of where to come in. Leading in song means picking accompaniments and arrangements that support the congregation’s singing, rather than allowing them to feel naked and left out to dry.

*Ideally, you shouldn’t need to turn up a lead vocalist’s volume so loud that anyone can hear if he or she is in their best key. And what does it say about our sales-oriented approach to worship that we would care if someone is in their best key or not?

The liturgy does not point us to “the Christ spirit,” “the ground of all being,” “the Universe,” or any other amorphous, abstract spiritual entity. Instead it points us to the one who did not think Pure Spirit a thing to be grasped. He who created flesh and called it very good, put his money where his divine mouth was, and took on bodily life and lived among the embodied. To put it simply: we worship a material Savior.

Mark Galli, Beyond Smells and Bells, p. 85

Arise, my soul, my joyful powers,
And triumph in my God;
Awake, my voice, and loud proclaim
His glorious grace abroad.

He raised me from the deeps of sin,
The gates of gaping hell,
And fixed my standing more secure
Than it was before I fell.

      Arise, my soul; awake, my voice,
      And songs of triumph sing;
      Loud hallelujahs shall address
      My Savior and My King.

The arms of everlasting love
Beneath my soul he placed;
And on the Rock of ages set
My slippery footsteps fast.

I’ve edited one line. In the verse that I’ve used as a chorus, the original second line read “And tunes of pleasure sing”. I thought that “songs of triumph” was both more appropriate and was less liable to be misunderstood in our context today.

Hopefully, I will be able to post a lead sheet soon.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Christianity stands or falls upon who Jesus is. Out of context the above quote may seem a little harsh; I don’t mean to post it as such. What I intend to say is this: read the gospels. Look at the audacious claims that Jesus makes about himself. He can’t be a good teacher if he was a flat-out liar. If Jesus really is who he said he was then we have to live with the idea that he has the right to make claims upon our life. If he really is the resurrected Lord, he is worthy to be worshiped. If he isn’t, if he’s still a tomb in Palestine, then he was one of the most infamous liars in history and should be laughed at as a fraud and a failure.