Most conversations about being a faithful church musician begin with this familiar distinction: normally musicians are all about performance, in church we have to play differently. Performance is about grabbing attention, feeding egos, entertaining people. Church is about humility, service and love.

Of course, much of what goes on at your average pub gig is out of place in church. There is a difference between secular and sacred musicianship. Yet I want to suggest that there might be more to it than the simple performance/service dichotomy suggests.

The performance/service distinction confuses two related, but very distinct, issues. The first is how we play. Not a single bar goes by without a hundred little decisions: what style, how loud, how complicated, which notes, and when. The second is why. Why are we playing? What is our motivation? Are we considering the interests of others above ourselves? Do we want to be respected or do we long for Jesus to be glorified? You’ll notice that these are exactly the same questions which the preacher has probably being struggling with all afternoon. No matter how we serve, it will always be a battle to align our vain, proud hearts with God’s will.

Clearly the issues are related. Our motivations will inevitably influence how we play. If we are seeking our own glory this might be reflected in how we play (ostentatious guitar solos spring to mind), thus giving others convenient occasion to quietly judge us.

Yet that’s not the whole story. I’m reminded here about C.S. Lewis’ distinction between pride and vanity. The vain musician plays too many notes because he’s seeking approval. The prideful musician might play exactly what’s needed – yet still have his or her heart far away from God. The first is immature. The second is something far worse. Something I often struggle with.

We will always struggle to keep our hearts pure at every second. And we can’t always keep our hearts in line by playing more simply (although sometimes I’ve found it to be good discipline). How we play may be a good diagnostic test, but not always. Let’s tackle the two issues individually. Let’s get out hearts sorted out through prayer and a good dose of honesty. Then let’s sit down, work out what is the best way for us to play, and just get on and do our job.

Imagine one week at church we paid five of the best session players we could find to come and accompany our singing. They might not sing along, and they certainly wouldn’t share in our fellowship in the same way. Their motives would have nothing to do with humbly serving the congregation – they’re just doing their job. They would play professionally. Doing exactly their job. No more, no less.

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hat would change if we gave them hearts for God? Probably very little, audibly. And that’s why in working out how we should play I think it’s more helpful to put aside talk of “not performing” and just focus on doing our jobs. With that settled we can start focussing on having hearts in the right places. At least, that’s what I found.

The performance/service distinction is a good starting point, but it doesn’t go far enough. In fact sometimes it goes too far in the wrong direction, and we are left with boring music. Now, I don’t have anything against boring music. But if you are going to be tempted to yawn while singing about Jesus’ death, then please just stop.

Moving forward: Some suggestions

Thanks

“What do you say to a musician who has done a really good job?” someone asked me recently. You don’t want to build their ego’s. But encouragement is a great blessing in a church.

Personally, what I’d find most encouraging after spending hours battling to get everyone in tune and in time is “thanks, I found singing together tonight really encouraging”.

Prayer

If you are not starting your band practices with a time of prayer and sharing you need to. I know music teams who spend 30 mins together talking about their lives and praying for the service every week. Not a second of that is wasted.

Singing along

I remember playing in a band at KCC recently and having Willow (the sound guru) come up to us and thank us for singing along while we played. Apparently everyone found it encouraging. We didn’t notice, because we were so caught up in the words which we’d played a thousand times but never sang past verse 2 until then. Try it! (Flautists are excused, reluctantly).

Policy

Work out how you play before you play. What is most helpful?

Take some time off

Everyone should have at least one week off every month. Our church barely has enough musos to make a full band (let alone two or three), so we just have heaps scaled back music on the fourth Sunday of every month. I’m prepared to have no singing (or use backing tracks/organ) if it means giving the musos a break.

Hitting the road with GH has highlighted to us a strange situation (in many Sydney churches at least): we are sure we want our congregational music to be hip and contemporary- soft rock, pop, R&B, whatever - but we’re also sure that we don’t want to spend any money on an adequate sound system.

Don’t get me wrong - most churches have spent the money to get “a PA” (or public address) system. I’ll wager ten bucks that they got a pair of Bose 802s, or if you’re lucky a discreet pair of EV conference centre speakers. It’s usually great - for what it is designed to do. And that is make sure that (almost) everybody can hear the sermon.

But, to do anything more, you’re going to need to spend a bit more money. It’s as simple as that. There is nothing more discouraging that getting a group of solid musicians together, arranging and rehearsing thoroughly and playing with skill, only to realise as soon as you take a walk around the church mid-song that you needn’t have bothered. Either nobody can hear anything, or all you can hear are the awkward splashes of the mid-range (biting cymbals, twangy distorted guitars and screeching vocals), or the whole band is out of tune and out of time because they don’t have adequate foldback (the speakers pointing at the band so they can hear the things they need to hear to make music).

When I’m not helping to run Garage Hymnal, I work as a professional musician. Every cent I spend on my gear - be it the instruments I buy or the cash I spend on hiring a PA each gig - comes straight out of my weekly wages. I spend it because it is the bare minimum I need to do my job. And it is frustrating to see so many churches where even less experienced players are being asked to do the same job without adequate tools.

Now, I’m not going to even try to wade into the discussion about whether we are better off spending money on sound gear or another MTS worker. But my question is this - how committed are we to having contemporary music? Because if we want it, we’re going to need to set ourselves up with the tools to do the job. There are few shortcuts in this game. (If there were shortcuts then, believe me, I’d rather take home more pay than puff up my PA supplier’s bank account (sorry Jimmy).)

So let me start with some mythbusting…

1. We don’t need a better PA because it’s not a performance.

Sure, and you don’t need a roof on your church because it’s not an aircraft hangar.

The question must be what are you trying to achieve. And if dryness helps your ministry, buy a roof.  Likewise, if a large public gathering on Sundays is part of your ministry model, you’re going to need to find a way for those people to participate in the gathering. More pertinently, if 100 people singing along to a soft rock band is your cup of tea, you’re going to need drums, bass, guitar and a decent PA.

2.  We don’t need a better PA because it’s too loud already

There are a bunch of reasons why a band can sound too loud. Like most musicians who make their living working at weddings and swish corporate functions, I lose my job if I’m too loud. So it might not surprise you that I have an acute interest in the subject.

But when I write my book of my top 100 ways to stop a band being too loud, I certainly won’t include “get a worse PA system”. The reasons are simple.

• The main thing a cheap PA system skimps on is not loudness but the evenness of the frequency response. So when you take your favourite CD and play it through the speakers, the hi pitched cymbals will jump out at you whereas the warm lows of the guitars will sound a little muffled. It might be half as loud as the church next door with a good PA, but people will complain about the loudness because the cymbals are really standing out and hurting their ears.

• Having MORE speakers will REDUCE the loudness of the band (paradoxically). Let me say that again in reverse in case you thought it was a typo: if you don’t get enough speakers for the room, your room will be too loud. The reason is simple - just think of it like lighting. If you have a single halogen bulb to light the room, some people will be caught in the glare and some people will be left in shadows. But if you have the right number of lights distributed around the room, each light can glow a little dimmer and the combined effect is a smoother coverage of the room. It’s almost exactly the same with speakers in a big room. If your coverage is right, everyone will be happy. If it is inadequate, then the poor old ladies down the front will get blasted and the parents with their prams up the back won’t catch the sermon.

• Don’t be fooled - the size of a speaker is no indication of how loud it is. Think of it like a trumpet and a tuba. The bigger ones just make LOWER sound, not louder sound.

3. We can’t afford it

There is a church near mine which I know spent more money on the carpet that it did on the PA. The carpet looks nice, but the PA supports a vital word ministry by allowing 200 people to participate in the service without distraction.

Money on a PA should, rightly, be prioritised well below supporting your minister’s family and certainly below sending bibles to China - but I’ll return you to our original question: what do we want to achieve? Do we want to sing along to a band, or would we be just as well off going acapella?

Personally I’m fine singing acapella. But, if you’re going to ask me to lead a congregation bigger than 50 people with anything more than an acoustic guitar, give me a decent PA to do the job.

Most people don’t take the responsibilities of organising church music seriously enough, and this is reflected in the way we organise our music ministries.

Coming from a sermon-centric Anglican church for a long time I saw my ministry (playing piano) as a strangely irrelevant part of our public meetings. I would do it, but only because I was asked to. If we were going to have music, I decided, we better make damn sure it was tolerable – or at least in tune – but if it were up to me I wouldn’t bother.

Then, finally, it dawned on me that I had completely missed the significance of songs in church.

The way we use music in our meetings places it unmistakable in the category of word-ministry, and with that comes the responsibility of teaching (mill stones and all). Previously I had seen the process of assessing lyrics as a boring but necessary rubber-stamping exercise: the final step of removing manifest heresies from the songs I had already chosen for their overall musical merits. Suddenly I realised that our question should be, not “is there anything terribly wrong in here”, but “are these songs positively going to teach us well”.

At first I assumed that this was just my own strange capacity to mistake the unmistakably obvious. Sadly, however, I regularly see leadership teams built upon one of two disastrous dichotomies.

In the first fatal model, the band puts songs on the repertoire and the preacher takes off the ones which can be shown to be patently heretical. Great! We end up with music which is “not entirely heretical”. Can you imagine if that was the best we could say about our other word ministries?

In the second (and just as silly) model the church appoints a self-confessed musical ignoramus to run the music over the music team (because musicians are prima face unreliable). The result is a repertoire of terrible songs. No, not useful songs with good lyrics though plain melodies. What you get when you separate the words from the music is just straight out terrible songs.

A song which tells the story of Calvary with the laborious drudgery of 8 mindless verses may effectively turn our minds towards our own suffering, but it does nothing to confront us with the cosmic paradoxes of our Saviour’s willing sacrifice. It would be far better not to sing at all, but just to read the appropriate passage. The same is true of a song which marries a serious cause of reflection with a melody which is corny, cheesy or infantile. It would be better if we just didn’t sing!

You see, what any songwriter will tell you is that you separate words from music to your peril. Melodies speak. Words sing. They both communicate with each other.

Instrumental music can bring you to tears, although everybody will be crying about something slightly different. In a song (strictly defined as a piece of music with words) the meaning of the music is focussed more tightly. But in a good song, the melody and words still pull together in harmony divine. Choose a song for church where the semantic content is not supported by the melodic content, and you fail to set people upon the right path of reflection about the truth.

The tune and the words also have a complex interaction at a more artistic level. Most people understand that the number of syllables is dictated by the rhythm of the musical component (although, judging by some of the disastrous alterations to popular hymns, not everybody does). But equally important is the assonance of the words suggested by a particular melodic phrase. I’m not just talking about getting the words to rhyme; I’m talking about the sound of words fitting or not fitting with the melody they are being sung to (see endnote 1 below). Likewise, the sound of words subconsciously influences how we think about their meaning: it is no accident that Bach used lots of “s” words in his cantatas when talking of the devil (see endnote 2 below).

If all this sounds overly complex – it is! Songwriters agonise over matching melodies and words, but often we only work out later why something works or doesn’t work. In the mean time, it takes both a musical ear and a keen eye for truth to spot great church songs. We need to be encouraging a model of musical leadership with the necessary skills to discharge the great responsibility of leading music.

Endnotes:

1. A

trivial example: early in the preparation of Take My Life, someone raised the issue of a line in Murray Bunton’s song “Live In Me” which says “you’re the one that came from heaven”. Should the line be “you’re the one who came from heaven”? Whilst these days it is no longer strictly grammatically incorrect to use an impersonal pronoun (“that”) to refer to the “one” (we do put “the” before it, after all) we probably wouldn’t write it that way in an important essay. It’s too colloquial.
But the reason it had to stay? Try singing “you’re the one who came from heaven” to the chorus melody… The long “w” and “o” sound of “who” is awkward to sing as a short staccato crotchet, and a positive tongue twister after the long “wa” sound of “one”.
2. Indeed, good writers also know instinctively that English words borrowed from Latin give an impersonal or technical connotation, whereas words derived from Old English give a homely feel – so think carefully when you’re choosing between “forgive” and “reconcile”, for instance, because there is more difference than one of definition.