Friday, July 22, 2011

Thoughts on Leading Assembly Song

When one is called to be a musician for the church, one might imagine that the task is primarily about aesthetics. “How can I make our worship more beautiful?” one might first ask. While the pursuit of beauty is often the primary task for most visual and acoustic artists, the church musician is first called upon to bring the gift of music to the task of proclaiming – singing a word, narrating a story, giving voice or sound to God’s truth and wisdom. “How will this music I choose/lead/play make the good news of God in Jesus Christ heard in this assembly?” is the church musician’s first question. Will the music be beautiful or have aesthetic qualities? Almost certainly it will, but the beauty shines primarily when rooted in the truth of God’s saving and living word for God’s people.

When one is called to be a musician for the church, one might imagine that the task is primarily about praise. “How can I assist in bringing praise to expression in our church?” one might first ask. While praise is certainly a task assigned to music, the church musician will want to help the assembly express at least also sorrow, prayer, jubilation, disappointment, yearning, and delight. The word worship might lead us to think that Christian assembly is primarily about a group directing praise and honor to one seated on a judge’s bench. However, worship in word and sacrament will be more of a dialogue or dance, where the primary actor is a God of justice and mercy gathering, speaking, feeding, and sending, while the assembly responds with petition, praise, lament, thanksgiving, and going forth in mission to the world. “How will this music I choose/lead/play bring to expression the many emotions, postures, and actions of worship?” is another primary question for the church musician.

When one is called to be a musician for the church, one might imagine the task to be primarily rooted in one style. “How can I make our worship more contemporary or more traditional?” one might first ask. While we all have our own tastes, the rich diversity of the church is brought to expression when we set aside our personal tastes and work to use music in worship that is also richly diverse: from here and there; from now and then, from ours and theirs. Music in worship will be slow and fast, melodic and harmonic, familiar and new, consonant and dissonant, fugal and homophonic, ancient and modern, simple and complex, easy and challenging. While always being sensitive to local context, the music of the church will also link us to the wider church, receive gifts from the churches around the globe, and perhaps even go against the prevailing cultural values to assert a truth about the gospel. “How can this music I choose/lead/play transcend style and invite the assembly to be a local, global, catholic, and prophetic church?” is another primary question for the church musician.

The primary questions for church musicians today are these:

“How will this music I choose/lead/play make the good news of God in Jesus Christ heard in this assembly? Or – “How is our music participant in proclaiming the word of God?”

“How will this music I choose/lead/play bring to expression the many emotions, postures, and actions of worship? Or – “How is our music enabling this assembly to receive and enact sacramental signs?”

“How can this music I choose/lead/play transcend style and invite the assembly to be a local, global, catholic, and prophetic church? Or – “How can the best of all available styles of music be used in worship?”

When these questions are at the heart of the church musician’s task, then the musician becomes a servant of the gospel, called to use the gift of music given them by God in the act of worship rooted in word and sacrament that the world might come to know God’s love.

[Prepared for and published at http://preludemusicplanner.org/]