I love ice cream.
I would eat ice cream all the time if I could. But, if I did… I’d likely live a pretty short life.
I love the book of Hebrews.
I would just read the book of Hebrews all the time if I could. But, if I did… I’d miss out on so much of the character of God from the rest of the Bible.
I’ll combine the next 2 criteria on my list; Topic and Diet.
These are very similar, but here’s how I differentiate the two: Topic is the primary idea that the song is about and how does it match up with Scripture. Diet is about the gap in our theological consumption the song fills.
Years ago, I went through a study of the Psalms in order to label the topic of each Psalm. I then took the catalogue of music we were using at my church and compared the list of topics I came up with from Psalms. It made sense to me to look at the song book of the people of God and compare it to our “song book” to make sure the topics we were singing aligned. The results of this study were a bit startling. We were regularly using some songs that didn’t align with the topics in Psalms, and I felt convicted that we shouldn’t use those songs any longer.
It may be a bit unnecessary to go to those lengths, but to me, it’s important to get it right based on some sort of Scriptural comparison. Why not try to get it right? Just because it takes time to do so? When putting words in people’s mouths like we do as worship leaders, we should take it seriously enough to measure the substance.
When considering the theological diet, I like to look at the topics we have uncovered in our catalogue, and see if there’s a balance. We could have 40 songs, and 30 of them are about God’s love. Is this wrong?! I’d say no, it isn’t wrong. but 75% of our songs being based on a single topic means that we are going to be heavy in our understanding of one area of the character of God, and anemic in other areas of our understanding.
I’ve stumbled upon an old stack of hymnals recently at my current church. It reminded me that the history of God’s people singing when they get together for worship is fascinating. From just singing Psalms, to canticles, to liturgical books like Psalters, to the written hymns we have seen used for centuries, to the more modern worship used with lyrics projected on screens, every period of in history involved some form of organized singing.
However, there is a huge difference in each of these different time periods and the one we find ourselves in when it comes to determining the songs we sing. We are currently living in the only time period in church singing where the determination of what is being sung in a local church is left up to a single person (or a few people in some cases). In all other periods, councils and committees of biblical scholars spent so much time and energy into compiling the right songs into the song books being used across Christian sects and denominations, and now the onus is entirely on the worship leader, who, in most cases, decides alone.
What’s unfortunate to me, and I’ve been guilty of this at times, is that the average church worship leader isn’t taking it nearly seriously enough to ensure that everything compiled into our music catalogues is helping create theologically nourished Christians. There is so much formation happening in our singing that we owe it to God and His people to be sure what we are singing is building up the right spiritual muscles.
We ought to both be sure that the topics we are singing about align with what God desires us to sing about, which we can see in Scripture, and that the theological diet of our songs is healthy and balanced. There are so many great songs out there, but we don’t need to phone it in and just use any song. Take the time to pour over these decisions and bathe them in prayer and Scripture to be sure that what we are singing isn’t just good, but is the best that we could be using!
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