All of us have personal preferences. Some prefer blue over green. Some prefer a trip to the beach over a trip to the mountains. Some favor grits over hash browns, country music over rock. And almost everyone favors the home team over the visitors.
But while we smile at some of our preferences, our religious preferences are often quite a different matter. For some reason, our own particular religious traditions and experiences tend to color our ideas of what God’s preferences are and aren’t. Nowhere is this more true than in the area of worship styles. How quickly our preferences become biases. And how easily our biases become walls that keep us from the larger body of Christ and from fuller expressions of worship.
The sum total of these distinctives and preferences is termed culture. Every individual and group is part of a culture. Worship and culture are closely related. It is interesting that the root word for culture is cult, which is, in its simplest definition, a system of worship or devotion. You could say our culture reflects our worship. We should neither despise nor deny our culture, for it helps to give us the initial parameters for personal identity, but we must thoughtfully evaluate all our ways in light of God’s ways. When God says that His ways are higher than our ways (Isa. 55:9) he is saying that his divine culture is higher than our human culture. The Lausanne Covenant of 1974 appeals for churches to be “deeply rooted in Christ and closely related to their culture.”
Culture must always be tested and judged by Scripture.… The gospel does not presuppose the superiority of any culture to another, but evaluates all cultures according to its own criteria of truth and righteousness.… Churches have sometimes been in bondage to culture rather than to the Scripture.”
Denominations within the church are typically cultural divisions before they are theological. They have to do with conflicting folkways. A Presbyterian pastor made this observation: “Part of the problem in coming into unity is that we have recruited people into personality distinctives of our own congregations and traditions, rather than into Christ. As a result, their loyalties are more to these distinctives than to Christ’s Kingdom.” In the spirit of Lausanne, we need to evaluate our traditions of worship—whether historic traditions or more recent renewal traditions—in light of Scripture to see if we are adherents of an approach to Christ or of Christ himself.
Toward Understanding Divine Preferences
Music powerfully communicates culture. That’s why the church’s music is so vital in communicating its life. Even the effects of a vibrant sermon can be canceled out by lifeless music. Some would observe that the music more accurately reflects the life of the congregation than do the words spoken.
What are we communicating culturally? What kinds of songs should we be singing? What are the parameters of biblical worship? Do our biases keep us from a fuller expression of worship? The easy answer to these kinds of questions goes something like this: “God is only concerned with the attitude of our hearts, not the forms of our expressions.” Granted, the heart’s disposition is primary, but should we not allow God to transform and enlarge our forms as well as our hearts? It’s not that our worship traditions are intrinsically wrong … just incomplete.
Consider these three statements as beginning points in this discussion of biblical patterns of worship:
- True worship is both spiritual and intellectual. “True worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24).
- Heavenly worshipers worship the God of the past, present, and future. “Day and night they never stop saying: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come” (Rev. 4:8, see also Rev. 1:4, 8).
- In the New Testament, God endorses three primary song forms: psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you … sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16, see also Eph. 5:19–20).
Spirit and Truth
Today some segments of the church specialize primarily in spirit. Favorite teaching topics in the churches would likely include “Hearing God” and “Being Led by the Spirit.” Leaders encourage followers to develop intuitive skills. Worship is generally spontaneous and Spirit-led.
Other segments of the church specialize primarily in truth. Among these groups, biblical scholarship and critical thinking are held in high esteem. Here worship is more orderly and structured.
Each tradition is suspicious of the other and often reinforces its own uniqueness to justify its existence. Facing these tendencies is very difficult but very necessary. But Jesus said that true worshipers must worship in spirit and truth … not one or the other. If we love to “flow in the Spirit” but are impatient with the process of making careful observations, we are not yet the kind of worshipers God is looking for. If we are diligent students and yet we can’t make room for someone to base a claim on revelation, we are not yet the worshipers that please God.
If the worship in our congregation only attracts critical thinkers, it’s time to do some critical thinking about our own cultural preferences. If our congregation is attracting only the intuitive or feeling types, it’s time to ask the Spirit to lead us into all truth. Biblical worship is to be spiritual and thoughtful. These two components are implied in Romans 12:1 in the phrase logikos latreia, which is translated in the NIV as either “spiritual act of worship” or “reasonable act of worship.”
Past, Present, and Future
Some of us are more familiar with what God is saying than what God has said, to the point that we disdain any reference to history. I have heard this referred to as “the cult of contemporaneity.” Others are well versed in what has gone on before us and yet out of touch with what is going on now. One pastor confidently told me that nothing of any significance has happened in the church in the last 250 years. Most likely the church he pastors will be populated with those who are friendly to that point of view.
Still others of us are so future-oriented that we fail to worship the God of the past and the present. We must not try to confine God’s kingdom exclusively to past, present, or future reality. Each is only partial reflections of God’s glory.
Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs
Some charismatic churches tend to sing choruses to the exclusion of hymns. Some traditional churches sing hymns to the exclusion of choruses. And a very small percentage of churches have any significant experience with spiritual songs. In contrast, God’s Word invites us all to express our gratitude through all three song forms.
To sing a psalm is not necessarily the equivalent of singing from the book of Psalms. A psalm is a song. The term psalm, like song, can be used in a general or a specific sense. In general usage, it would include a hymn, just as there are hymns included in the book of Psalms.
In the specific sense, however, a psalm would contrast with a hymn. Similar to what we today call choruses, a psalm, or song, is generally simpler, shorter, more testimonial, and less theological than a hymn. A hymn would usually carry a greater sense of reverence; a song would be more personal. The psalm is more contemporary and has a shorter life span.
The spiritual song is even more of a song-of-the-moment. The spiritual song that consists of spontaneous melodies around a chord or a slowly moving chord progression, has been referred to as the “song of angels” because of its mystical, otherworldly quality. Even as the Spirit is the believer’s down payment on the future age, the spiritual song must be a foretaste of heavenly worship itself.
The genius of these three song forms is that each is uniquely appropriate to express a dimension of God’s nature and each will speak for a different kind of personality, as well as the different facets of the individual. The hymn corresponds to the God who was—the God of history; the psalm corresponds to the God who is—the God of the now, and the spiritual song corresponds to the God who is to come—the God of the future. The hymn will satisfy our hunger for truth and depth of understanding; the psalm will speak to our need for encounter and experience, and the spiritual song will stimulate the prophet and visionary in us.
The command to employ psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs requires greater cultural flexibility than we have had in order to enjoy the variety of worship expressions. For instance, the youth of the church will probably prefer a more contemporary style of worship than the older members. The common solution to this cultural problem is to segregate the youth church from the adult church. But the psalms-hymns-and-spiritual-songs paradigm begs for a different solution: diversity within unity. This new paradigm allows the contemporary and the historic to stand side by side and challenges our hearts to greater love. It means being both reverent and celebrative, objective and subjective, structured and spontaneous, testimonial and theological.
Instead of affirming our own strengths and acknowledging the limitations of other traditions, we must begin to recognize the limitations of our own traditions and affirm the strengths of others. The result will be that our own preferences will be enjoyed by others, as well as enlarged by others. Like an onion in the stew, we will both flavor the other ingredients and be flavored by them—all the while, remaining an onion.
Paradigm for the Future
The church of the future must become transcultural. The evangelical church must learn to sing spiritual songs; the charismatic church must rediscover the hymns, and the traditional church must begin to sing a new psalm. The young church must respect the older church and vise versa. Bridges of cooperation and counsel must be built between black and white churches. The stagnating pools of our cultural prejudices must be flooded by the river of God’s divine purposes. Accepting and practicing God’s standard of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs in our worship is a simple but challenging exercise designed to break us loose from our idols of ethnocentrism.
Where will all of this lead us? To the most exciting celebration imaginable: the international, interdenominational, multilingual, multiethnic celebration of Christ Jesus, the Son of God! After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. (Rev. 7:9)
Dare we look upon what John saw: representatives from every culture, nation, tribe, people, and language, declaring their praises together with a loud voice, overwhelmed with gratitude for this majestic King who has made them into one people (Rev. 5:9–10)? If we can see that, we can see our destination. The heavenly vision is that of worshipers of many different stripes who are more conscious of the greatness of Jesus Christ than of their cultural distinctions.
If worship styles have been the source of divisions among us, let’s turn the tables and allow God’s design for worship to be a source of unity among us. Let’s pray that heaven’s worship will overtake earth as we sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.