Blended worship
From Neoredemptive
(Originally posted by Doc as "Blending Worship and Mixing Messages" on zealforyourhouse.com, http://www.zealforyourhouse.com/wp/?p=598)
“Blended worship”, in which the stylistically divergent elements of different kinds of church services are integrated into a single event, seems to be gaining some popularity (in print and in practice, if what I’ve been reading is to be believed). 18th century hymns stand side-by-side with Amy Grant oldies and the latest Passion songs; the preacher wears traditional robes as stained glass windows cast colored light onto the LED video screen and high-end sound system; incense burns as congregants IM each other.
I’m not a big fan of the “blended” model (also called “convergence” or “ancient-future” worship). It’s not without merit, and has been deployed quite successfully to good effect in some places, and I’m quite willing to be convinced that I’m wrong about it, but there’s something about it that doesn’t sit right with me.
This write-up gives air to a few of my theological, sociological, and artistic critiques. Maybe someone out there can point out how full of it I am, and I’ll change my mind.
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What exactly do I mean by “blended worship”?
Let’s start with the word “worship”. Many books and articles (perhaps deliberately) do a poor job of pinning down what they do and do not mean by that word. On one end of the spectrum are definitions like “a complete liturgical event for which the people of a church regularly gather”: greeting, singing, preaching, praying, the kid’s moment, it’s all part of “worship”. On the other end of the spectrum is “participation in the singing of a particular type of song of adoration towards God, usually to soft, melodic, contemplative music”. While we all agree that “worship is important”, we have wildly different notions of what is and is not a part of that important thing.
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to use “worship” to refer to those times when the gathered church sings and prays aloud together (whether en masse or one-at-a-time). An alternate definition which will work just as well is those things in which the gathered church participates in perceptible ways with the intent of engaging with the presence of God in and among them.
So what is “blended worship”? Simply put, it is the use of songs and prayers from radically different streams of the church and cultural eras, in their conventional forms, within a single worship event. Imagine a choir-sung Lutheran hymn, a neo-punk chorus, and a Gregorian chant as back-to-back songs within a single service and you’re starting to get the idea.
Notice that an otherwise-traditional church service in which a single “contemporary” song is performed by a singer (”special music”) is not blended, and neither is a rock-ensemble worship band covering a hymn; each of these is an example of one style co-opting the other, but using it on its own terms.
Is this “Just about Musical Styles”?
A lot of people operate under the mistaken assumption that the “worship wars” are all about one group of people preferring the sound of music which was written in one era and another group preferring the sound of music written in a different era.
Were that really the heart of the issue, then the fact that we call this disagreement a “war” (even as a hyperbole) is a damning condemnation of the pettiness of the church’s arguments. Not that such criticism may not be warranted, but I believe the worship question is much weightier than that.
Here, in a nutshell, is why framing the question as a matter of stylistic preferences is wrong-headed: Musical styles neither form nor are performed in a cultural vacuum.
What we sing is born out of our experience of God and our understanding and relationship with Him; that applies not only to the words, chords, and rhythms we use, but to the sound and energy we use to express them and participate in their performance. The “classic” hymnody and its performance is rooted in the modern era’s mostly static, rational, structured experience of God; this is bolstered by doctrinal declarations interwoven with precisely structured music. To sing those hymns as written in their original styles communicates an impression of God driven by the worldview that the most important thing is to understand God correctly, and that God is stable, predictable, and well-documented. Contrast this with a church which never uses songs more than a few years old; their hymnody is rooted in the postmodern and millennial era’s experience of a dynamic, relational, creatively unpredictable God; the focus is not upon communicating s correct set of facts about Him, but rather upon drawing a group of participants into the songwriter’s experience of God; a more aggressive, energetic, spontaneous, participation-demanding approach to delivering those songs makes this statement even more clearly than the lyrics do.
Style is not superfluous. It flows from the values of a culture, both identifying and encouraging those values. The modern era’s values of certainty, science, and the printed word gave us the laws of SATB harmony and hymnals in every pew; the postmodern values of experience and spontaneity drew us back toward the oral tradition in which the melody is learned by hearing and doing while words (loosely followed) are projected on the screen only moments before they are sung (if at all). Worship “styles” are not just a matter of taste; they are a compass, indicating the orientation of our values and our faith.
A Case Study
If you understand what I said above, you also understand how easy it could be to “do” contemporary worship without “getting” contemporary worship, and thus, without reaping the harvest it has produced elsewhere. There is a danger in blending the forms of two cultures without authentically engaging the cultures themselves; the result can be perceptibly inauthentic, and may even come across as insincere. Not good.
A few years ago, I spent a Sunday morning and evening attending two services at a large church in the Boston area. The morning service was a traditional, liturgical event, while the evening service was the “contemporary” service.
Naturally, I felt far less out-of-my-element in the evening service than the morning. The band was full of Berklee-trained musicians. None of the songs were more than 10 years old (and most were less than 5). The arrangements were tight and the band was cooking. On a technical level, very little (except perhaps the lighting) could have been done better to pull off “doing” contemporary worship.
In spite of this, the whole evening service still felt foreign to me; as a (then) early-20-something and a decade-old believer, I felt out of place and in the midst of something alien to myself. As I considered why this might be, two observations came to mind.
First, I noticed that the structure and flow of the evening service was virtually the same as that of the morning service, as if blocks of contemporary songs and poetry readings were being used as drop-in replacements for hymns and recitations. The service planners had taken the traditional modern-era liturgy and simply re-dressed it in post-modern-like clothes, leaving a traditional taste in my mouth despite the excellent post-Gen-X trappings.
Second, as I watched the two congregations, I could see very little difference between how morning congregants interacted with their hymns and how evening congregants interacted with their songs and choruses. In the morning they wore ties, in the evening, shorts; but neither moved, jumped, grinned, or showed any appreciable outward sign of really enjoying and engaging with the experience of the presence of God. The evening crowd clapped in time with the music, but with the kind of timid uncertainty that comes from one who is unsure what to do with one’s hands without a hymnal in them, not with the vitality of a people whose very flesh is buzzing with the rhythms of Heaven; they applauded after songs because it covered what would otherwise be an awkward silence, but there were no thundering ovations for the Living God about whom they sang.
Only in a church could a band of that quality and skill receive such luke-warm reception and participation from its listeners, and it broke my heart to see it.
In reflection, what is especially troubling is that (despite the underlying similarities) the creation of an alternative “contemporary” evening service was probably a contentious issue for church leadership. Many churches go down this road, and many spill blood (figuratively, at least) along the way; who knows how much blood was spilt, how many friendships wounded, over what wound up being an almost entirely cosmetic redressing of a service?
If you’re going to have a good-old-fashioned knock-down drag-out, let it at least be over a question of substance; if you’re going to adopt a “contemporary” service, don’t just drop current-looking show pieces in places of the most dated parts of your liturgy; embrace the fact that speaking into postmodern and millennial culture demands we move beyond the classical “modern” worldview and the ways of doing church which it produced, and start at least trying to approach things in radically different ways. Outreach vs. Mission
I worry about pastors who want “younger music” in their churches in order to better reach “young people”, especially when the style they ask for isn’t a style they personally like. The pastor will wind up resenting his congregation for forcing him to listen to crummy music, and the congregation will wonder what’s wrong with the pastor since he says he wants the music there but can’t stand anything about the culture and worldview that produced it.
You cannot redeem a world which you have not inhabited. Jesus redeemed our humanity not by simply telling us to forsake it, but by Himself becoming fully human.
Redemption always involves a crucifixion, and it is not possible for you to nail someone else’s values and worldview to a tree for them.
Your best resources for interfacing faith with present-day college student culture is present-day college students. Find some thoroughly immersed in that world while securely connected to the umbilical cord of Heaven; they are your best chance to get into that world yourself and begin to understand it, begin to know it, begin to play a part in redeeming it. This demands that you go beyond the mindset of “outreach” and into the mindset of “mission”: taking on the language, dress, and culture of another to win them to Christ.
“Outreach” (as it is usually practiced) is inviting people to come to you; “mission” is bringing the gospel to them. Outreach is rooted in passivity, mission in the aggressive and proactive love of Christ. Outreach is born out of self-importance; mission is birthed out of servanthood. Is it any wonder that mission (whether oversees, cross-town, or across the street) consistently bears more and better fruit for the Kingdom?
The Ethics of Blending
One argument for blended/convergence/ancient-future/alternative worship reveal a crummy approach to ethics in the American church. It goes like this: “the blended approach as a way to give everyone a little bit of what they want, so a wider range of people will be happy.” Some even couch this in very theological language, speaking of the oneness of the Church and the unity of saints from diverse backgrounds.
Since when has the object of church been to make its members happy by giving them what they want? As the church, it seems to me that we are called first to love, and to forego our preferences to serve one another (internal) and reach the world (external).
On the “internal” side, the choice of musical styles and which “hymnody” to draw from has strong theological implications: it says something about God and about how we relate to Him. A consistent approach to style and culture portrays a consistent view and vision of God, around which the congregation can unite (unity with agreement); piecemeal stylistic menageries, by their very nature, sow at least one seed of theological and cultural divisions within a congregation.
On the “external” side, it seems to me there’s no real question which direction makes the church more indigenous (and missional) to not-yet-believers who have spent decades immersed in 20th/21st century American pop culture; if anything, I would suggest that all but the very “edgiest” of worship music produced in any given year still falls way short of being truly “contemporary” with what’s going out over the radio and going on in the music clubs and concert halls, and the best of the best is often noticeably dated within 2 years of its release. Most of what passes for “contemporary” worship music has more to do with a “christian” musical ghetto than really speaking today’s musical vernacular.
Are Truly Distinct Musical Cultures Really “Blendable”?
Ultimately, “blending” is rarely as broad an exercise as it pretends to be. I’ve heard of blending hymns with “nice” easy listening adult-contemporary worship, but not of blending Bach and honest-to-goodness Punk. (I have heard Gregorian chant blended with house/trance, but only because those styles were being blended already “in the wild” without the church’s help.) I would wager that most blended-worship congregations almost exclusively use music palatable to baby boomers (classical through adult contemporary/soft rock), simply because those who love Bach’s hymns will often be repulsed by the 3-piece neo-punk ensemble’s God-song, but not by music that sounds like the soft-rock hits of Foreigner.
And let’s not forget the vivid contrast in approaches to participating in different styles of music. The indigenous form for participating in the singing of a punk song includes a mosh pit, slam-dancing, and crowd-surfing. The indigenous form for participating in a Bach hymn involves standing still with good posture and singing from your diaphragm. Call me crazy, but I have a hard time imagining even the most skilled leader navigating a congregation through both directions of that transition within a single hour-long event. Even the gap between participating in Bach hymns (as I just described them) and full-on gospel hymns (in which there is a great deal of clapping, repetition, hand-waving, shouting, and bouncing) seems pretty intimidating!
My Experience Shortage
Frankly, I’ve never witnessed a really compelling “blended worship” experience. I’ve seen post-Gen-X churches successfully incorporate artifacts of previous generations while maintaining their own identity (e.g., rock arrangements of hymns); I’ve seen traditional churches successfully incorporate some contemporary stylistic elements while keeping them within their own framework of practice and propriety (e.g., the video screen, limited use of choruses). But when it comes to truly “blended” events, those I’ve witnessed have been awkward at best and failures at worst. Is a compelling blended event impossible? No, at least not if the many authors writing on the subject are to be believed. But the challenges to successfully envisioning, planning, and executing one are clearly non-trivial.
Conclusions
So there it is, a little bit of a brain dump. If you’ve witnessed a really successful one of these events, I would love to hear about it, both in terms of the technical details and how it affected you personally. And, as I said, I’m more than willing to be proven wrong about this whole thing; so far I'm simply not convinced that blended worship isn’t yet another stylistic taste (rooted in the “sampler platter” culture) trying to pass itself off as a theologically superior alternative.
