I read something which struck me today. In the cover notes of Paul Baloche’s album A Greater Song the president of Integrity music, Michael Coleman, has written an introduction to this CD (which is an excellent CD I might add). Something he said really hit me:
“There is one thing we do on earth that we will continue to do in Heaven. That is to praise and worship God. That is why we view life on earth, for those who live Jesus, as choir practise for Heaven. To say that praise and worship is the most important category of music is an understatement. In light of that fact, there is no more important activity of the human heart that to praise and worship God.”
I often get quite bogged down with how many Christian worship leaders there are out there - wondering if in fact they are just doing it because they really just want to be a pop-star or in a famous band; there are so many worship songs out there - and I wonder if the authors of those songs are just doing it to be amongst the top Christian artists. And yet when I read the snippet above it makes me see that perhaps I am being overly cynical about the whole worship music movement.
Michael Coleman is right: there is no more important music than music that honours and worships God. So isn’t it right then that there are stacks of people out there wanting to write Christian songs? And isn’t it also right that there are stacks of bands out there wanting to play Christian music? The devil really has his way when it comes to music most of the time and it is about time we stood up to that and used this most powerful tool even more to praise and worship our God in heaven.
Yes of course - if you write or play Christian music then do it with the heart that wants God to be lifted up more than anything else. But shouldn’t people like me be encouraging others more to get out there and lift up the name of the Lord with music? I think I should. I think I should be flexing my writing muscle even more. So what if there are a million others doing it - the most important music on earth is music that lifts God up and if I can contribute to that and get in on that, even in a small way, then I want in.
I’ve actually got a couple of songs on the way that I’ve been working on. As soon as I get chance to whack them down, I’ll pump them up here…
DetailsGareth Matthews
December 10th, 2007
2 Responses to “The most important music”
Leave a Reply
April 25th, 2008 at 10:34 am
This post jsut got flagged up on my feed reader, strange as it’s an old post. Anyway, it raised a question for me. If “praise and worship is the most important category of music ” then can you help me in defining what that category actually is?
Can it include ’secular’ music? Does it have to be ‘
congregational’ music that is sung in a church? Does it have to have been written by ‘Christian’ artist?
As the worship leader guru of threedays I’d be interested in your thoughts *smile*
April 25th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
“As the worship leader guru of threedays I’d be interested in your thoughts…”
Sounds like I’m being set up here
Perhaps category is a bad word - perhaps it isn’t. I guess the type of music I am thinking about here is music that is directly bringing glory to His name and were written for that expressed purpose. This could include both ‘churcy’ songs as well as ’secular’ songs that don’t explicitly use complicated words that we love to crank out in church songs.
Now I know this makes me a sitting duck because you are going to start on questions such as ‘what about songs that sound like they are glorifying God but actually weren’t intended to’ or what about songs that are very discrete in the language and perhaps only mean something to the author. Those are good questions - but not really what I was getting at with this post. For starters, I think any music can bring glory to God depending on who is playing / listening to it and probably most songs can be seen through Christian beer goggles and made to fit around some part of our faith. However, what I was trying to get at here is that while it seems like we are saturated with ‘Christian’ music (everyone wants to be the next Matt Redman etc) that can causes me to wonder what the point is of trying to write worship music when there is so much good (and bad) stuff already out there. I guess what I was trying to get at is that I’ve viewed that market saturation as a bad thing - when in fact we should be inundated with songs that glorify God as that was what music was created to do!
So in conclusion, probably any music can be viewed as ‘praise and worship’ but I am saying specifically that we should spend time and energy on writing songs that are from the outset songs set apart to honour God.