What is the role of music in worship?

Question 11094

Ask ten Christians what music in worship is for and you will get ten answers, several of them contradictory and at least two delivered with some heat. Some treat the singing as a warm-up act before the sermon. Others treat it as the point of the whole service and everything else as an interruption. Both are wide of the mark, and the arguments that follow from them have split more congregations than most doctrinal disputes ever managed.

Scripture has a great deal to say about singing, rather less about style, and almost nothing about the questions we tend to argue over. That imbalance is instructive, and I think it points us towards a healthier way of thinking about the whole subject.

God commands his people to sing

The first thing to establish is that singing is not optional. It is commanded, repeatedly, across both Testaments. The Psalms alone contain dozens of imperatives to sing, and the Hebrew verb zamar, to make music or to sing praise, runs through the psalter like a heartbeat. Israel sang at the Red Sea, sang in the temple, and sang on the road up to Jerusalem.

The New Testament carries the practice straight over. Jesus and the disciples sang a hymn at the close of the Last Supper. Paul and Silas sang in a Philippian prison at midnight with their feet in the stocks, which tells you something about what music in worship is capable of doing in the worst circumstances imaginable. The book of Revelation is full of singing, and if the new creation opens with song then this is not a temporary arrangement.

So the question is never whether we should have music in worship. That is settled. The question is what it is for, and it is at that point that most of our confusion begins.

Music in worship carries the word

The two clearest instructions in the letters are worth putting side by side. In Ephesians 5:19 Paul tells believers to address one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with the heart. In Colossians 3:16 he tells them to let the word of Christ dwell in them richly, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.

Notice what he says the singing does. It teaches. It admonishes. It is one of the ways the word of Christ takes up residence in a congregation. That is a startlingly high view of music in worship, and it is a long way from treating the songs as emotional preparation for the real content later on. The songs are content.

This has an obvious practical consequence. If music in worship teaches, then the words we sing are doing theological work whether we notice or not. People forget sermons within the week. They remember hymns for fifty years, and they will still be able to sing them when dementia has taken almost everything else. What we put into people’s mouths on a Sunday will shape what they believe about God for the rest of their lives.

Singing is horizontal as well as vertical

Both of those passages contain a phrase we tend to skip over. We are to address one another, and teach and admonish one another. Congregational singing is not a private transaction between you and God that happens to take place in a room with other people in it. You are singing to your brothers and sisters as well as to the Lord.

I find that thought reframes the whole experience. The person two rows behind you may have buried a parent this month. When you sing about the faithfulness of God with conviction, you are preaching to them. Music in worship is a means by which a congregation holds one another up, and it works even when the individual singer feels nothing at all.

That is also why I am uneasy about arrangements that make congregational participation difficult. If the volume, the key or the complexity means most people cannot join in, something has gone wrong, whatever the musical quality. A performance the congregation watches is not the same thing as a congregation singing. I say more about this in my answer on worship styles.

Emotion is welcome, manipulation is not

Music moves us, and there is nothing suspect about that. God made us with bodies and feelings, and the Psalms range across grief, rage, terror, delight and everything between. Anyone who wants a purely cerebral faith has not read the psalter with their eyes open. Music in worship engages the whole person, and that is a gift.

The danger comes when the emotional effect is engineered and then interpreted as the presence of God. A well-played minor chord under a repeated line will produce a lump in the throat in almost anyone, believer or not. That feeling is a physiological response to music, and treating it as evidence that the Spirit has descended is a category mistake with real pastoral consequences. People conclude they are spiritually cold when the truth is that the band was quieter that week.

I am not arguing for flat, joyless singing. I am arguing that music in worship should serve truth rather than substitute for it, and that we should be honest about the difference between being moved and being fed. Both can happen together, and when the words are rich they usually do. On the related question of song sources, see my answer on music from Bethel, Elevation and Hillsong.

Old hymns, new songs, and the false choice

Psalm 96 tells us to sing to the Lord a new song. Psalm 78 tells us to pass down to the next generation what our fathers have told us. Both are Scripture, and a congregation that only ever does one of them is impoverished. The church that sings nothing written after 1900 is cutting itself off from what God is doing now. The church that sings nothing written before 1990 has cut itself off from nineteen centuries of accumulated wisdom.

The real test is not the date on the copyright line. It is whether the song is true, whether it is about God rather than chiefly about how I feel, and whether a congregation can actually sing it. Some ancient hymns fail those tests and some recent songs pass them handsomely.

I would add one more test, which is theological weight over time. If every song a congregation sings is written in the same emotional register, the diet is unbalanced however good the individual items are. Where are the songs of lament? Where are the songs that teach the doctrine of the atonement rather than gesture at it? A steady diet of music in worship that never goes deeper than adoration will produce Christians who cannot sing their way through suffering.

Who should lead, and how

Musical skill matters. The Chronicler tells us the temple musicians were trained and skilful, and there is no virtue in doing badly for God what could be done well. But skill is not the first qualification. Those leading music in worship are leading the congregation in an act of teaching, and character and doctrine matter more than technique.

Practically, this means the songs should be chosen with the same care as the sermon text, ideally by people who understand what the congregation is being taught that morning. It means the person at the front should be pointing away from themselves. And it means the elders carry responsibility for what is sung, because they carry responsibility for what is taught. For the wider frame, see my answer to what is worship.

One further point that rarely gets made. A congregation is not obliged to sing everything that is popular, and it is not obliged to sing nothing that is popular either. The eldership of a local church has both the right and the duty to make judgements here, and those judgements will look different in a rural chapel of thirty people and a city congregation of four hundred. Freedom on style within faithfulness on substance is not a compromise position. It is the position Scripture actually leaves us in, and pretending otherwise has caused a great deal of needless division over music in worship.

So, now what?

Start by paying attention next Sunday to the words rather than the tune. Ask yourself what the songs actually taught you about God, and whether you could summarise it afterwards. If you could not, that is worth raising gently with those who choose them.

And if you are one of the many people who has decided they cannot sing, I would encourage you to reconsider. Nobody is auditioning. The command is to sing, not to sing well, and your voice is part of how the person beside you hears the truth this week. What would change in your congregation if everyone actually opened their mouth?

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. (Colossians 3:16, ESV)