The church is rife with worship wars. The wars are causing a segmentation of the church that we can not afford in our time. Larry Osborne in Vista CA has come up with the best solution. He prescribes going with the tendency of going segmental and develop several venues within the same church. He has been bold in developing this and successfully. This concept goes way beyond having a service for the old people and then one a bit more snazzy for the others.
I have a couple other thoughts on worship that have been floating around my mind. I find most of the “newer” worship choruses are often working against worship. They are songs made for the radio not congregations. If you check it out as me and my worship leader did last week 99% of them are written for the tempo radio listeners prefer. Congregational worship requires varied tempos and a little faster pace than radio worship.
And most of the choruses are not choruses. They are songs. I call them lyrical worship songs. Lyrics aren’t bad and the great hymns of old have a great deal of similarity to the shape of contemporary worship songs. The issue is most of the population can’t learn nor sing many of them. And where as hymns of old labored to have strong theology and lyric skill today lyrical worship songs are trite and so horizontal in their focus that its like standing around in a circle and singing to one another about ourselves and how hard life is.
Outside much of Hillsong’s music and a few others commercialism has trumped simple singable worship.
And our range is getting narrower all the time.
