Worship Music

A couple of nights ago, it was raining very hard - hard enough to wake me. And the cat seemed to be high on something because it was running around crazynuts in the apartment at 5:00 am. At any rate, the combination woke me up, and while I was awake, I had an interesting thought. When will "praise and worship" go out of style?

Hymns were the standard in worship for more than a few years. They are a timeless music that we still turn to today, as long as we jazz things up a bit with guitars and skip out on the organ, the key change, and the final verse being sung at a tempo not unlike a funeral march. But when you look at "praise and worship," there's an interesting phenomenon: it's already old. Dependant of the progressiveness (is that a word?) of your church, the songs that you sang 10 years ago that were cutting edge are no longer good enough to sing. The content hasn't changed. There's a good chance that the songs are biblically sound - or at least as sound as the current crop of songs that you are singing. So what's different? The music. Possibly how the words are layed out.

Remember the term 7-11 music? Songs with 7 words sung eleven times? The current group of worship leaders/writers I think have become more aware of this stigma, and are making an conscious effort to keep from writing such songs. But even still - our music today is dated. If we are basing our music in church on what goes on in the public music arena, then we may be writing ourselves out of the possiblity of creating "classic" tunes or songs that will be sung hundreds - or even thirty - years from now. Should our music be "of the moment" at the expense of the prospect of timelessness like the "old" stuff?

I'm not saying that we should only sing hymns - look at my set list for this week - but I worry that congregations will not be able to remember the great songs of their youth if the songs that are being sung are only sung for two years and then rotated out. Surely, there is a balance between culturally relevant music and the ability to create timeless songs.