Worship music
From Neoredemptive
See Worship for some context.
Worship music is the hot trend in the christian ghetto's media industry right now. A lot of what's out there stinks, and most of it is no better than mediocre.
The psalmist's voice is strangely absent from most popular mass-marketed "worship music". A breed of music which fails to ask, "why are you downcast, o my soul?" is a failure both as art and as worship because it fails to engage with among the most poignantly real of human experiences, one Christ Himself has shared with us.
Strangely, such songs do better in the "secular" market than in the evangelical cultural ghetto.
We're also pretty unhappy about commercials on TV selling CDs and promising us that we'll "feel God's presence"... especially considering that we are far more likely to meet with God listening to the latest tracks from P.O.D., Evanescence, Lifehouse, or U2 than to the exercises in predictable mediocrity that fill such "worship" CDs.
In short, we like some "Tourniquet" with our "Trading my Sorrows".
Some Thoughts on the Matter from People Smarter Than Us
The praise of God which constitutes the community and its assemblies seeks to bind and commit and therefore to be expressed, to well up and be sung in concert. The Christian community sings. It is not a choral society. Its singing is not a concert. But from inner, material necessity it sings… What we can and must say quite confidently is that the community which does not sing is not the community. And where it cannot sing in living speech, or only archaically in repetition of the modes and texts of the past; where it doesn’t really sing but sighs and mumbles spasmodically, shamefacedly and with an ill grace, it can be at best only a troubled community which is not sure of its cause and of whose ministry and witness there can be no great expectation. In these circumstances it has every reason to pray that this gift which is obviously lacking or enjoyed only in sparing measure will be granted afresh and more generously lest all the other members suffer. The praise of God which finds its concrete culmination in the singing of the community is one of the indispensable basic forms of ministry in the community. (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4.3ii, p.866-867.)
