Let me warn you ahead of time: say the word “worship” in a lot of evangelical churches these days and you might find yourself stumbling unaware into the crossfire of a topical theological debate. Here's our take on the situation.

On the one hand we have mega-churches where you could be excused for thinking that “worship” simply means “church music”. The implication sometimes seems to be that by singing songs in E major we simultaneously bring ourselves closer to God, crown Jesus King (apparently God forgot to do that already) and even propitiate God’s wrath against Sin (if only there had been an acoustic guitar handy in Gethsemane).

In response to this confusion, some faithful and intelligent people have been pushing to remove “worship” from our vocabulary almost entirely - let’s call a spade a spade, they say: “singing” is what we do at church, and “service” is what we do with our lives.

Most vocal on this front have been people like Tony Payne (a writer and EMU Music board member). They point out that the New Testament doesn’t really use the word ‘Worship’ when talking about church services – because the temple (a particular place where the Israelites used to go and worship) has been replaced in the new covenant with something much cooler (Jesus Christ).

As you can see, the main game here is not really a theological dispute. It’s about being shrewd. Nobody is seriously disputing that music is part of worship (in the broadest sense of what we do with our lives), nor is anyone seriously disputing that worship is more than music. What we do on Sunday is a corporate expression of what we do every other day of the week in the way we live.
What is being debated is how to respond to the misunderstanding that worship is nothing more than church music (or, for that matter, church services or “religious activities”).

A brief foray into words
Bear with me for a paragraph or two, because I love words - I’ve spent four years at uni studying them! But you don’t need to be a semiotician to realise that words are slippery critters. It’s often far from crystal clear what we mean, all the more so when we plonk two of them together into a phrase like “worship music”. Is “worship” a genre, like “jazz music”? Or is worship a much bigger thing which happens to have its own music, like “American music”?

More specifically, is it right to talk about music as “worship” when it is biblically such a loaded term – incorporating a myriad of terms and concepts into one embarrassingly clumsy English word? Is there a danger that we might confuse our worship of praise and thanksgiving with the Old Testament worship of sacrifice for justification? It would be a terrible tragedy indeed if we convinced ourselves or others that music is a way of making God accept us.

I don’t want to dismiss the very real dangers here. But I think it’s worth making an observation about the way language works.

Meaning is always up for grabs. Our English word “god” was once a neuter Teutonic expression for any old object of worship. The first missionaries to English speaking people chose to retain this word (rather than teach them the Latin dues) but change what they meant by it into the masculine, personal, supreme God we know today. The reason is simple. It is possible to teach people new ideas, and change the way they think about existing ones. But it is nigh on impossible to remove words from the language completely, particularly when the subject matter is central to the spiritual life of the speakers.

You say worship, I say worship
Likewise what Christians mean when they say “worship” is up for grabs. The broadest, non-Christian definition:

To honour or revere as a supernatural being or power, or as a holy thing; to regard or approach with veneration; to adore with appropriate acts, rites, or ceremonies: (Oxford English Dictionary)

is essentially a blank slate: what those “appropriate acts” are is up for grabs. It is an invitation for us to teach people how to worship, much as those first missionaries taught the first English speaking people exactly who the object of their worship should be. There are any number of ways of translating logike latreia in Romans 12:1:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. (AV)

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. (NIV)

 

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (ESV)

But ultimately picking the right words is not going to do our job for us. Picking the right word doesn’t encapsulate the whole of the intended meaning forever. If it did, there would be no need for the next verse, which begins to flesh out what our “worship” or “service” will look like: being transformed, not conforming to the world, and so on. Regardless of which word is chosen, the concept will never be understood in its fullness unless the gospel is understood in its fullness. As D.G. Peterson puts it, the only real way to define “worship” is the “service rendered by those who truly understand the gospel and its implications”.[1]

As for confusion with Old Testament cultic ideas of worship, the New Testament is robust enough to cope. The New Testament itself speaks of the new realities of life in Christ in the transformed terminology of the old covenant: Hebrews 13:15 “Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess his name.” Good teaching and an understanding of the whole story of the bible will ensure we don’t fall into error.
So what is the shrewd response?

As you might have guessed, I think it is a mistake to respond to a misunderstanding of “worship” by abandoning the word completely. Why cede ground? The best way to correct a misuse of a word is by using it well. Confiscate the word, and we lose the opportunity to teach people how to use it responsibly.

We’d be better off spending our energy teaching people what worship really is under Christ, rather than searching in vain for a ready-made word to save us the hassle. Our message is quite simple. As Rob Smith puts it: “Worship is bigger than church”, but “Worship includes church”, and while “Worship must not be reduced to singing praise to God”, nevertheless “Worship includes singing praise”. [2]

I’d go so far as to suggest that the popular, secular misunderstandings about worship (i.e. it’s just something we do on Sunday) can work in our favour as a teaching tool: You understand what it is to come and focus on God for 50 minutes on Sunday morning? Good. Now do that every day!

The 2005 Sovereign Grace release Worship God LIVE is a good example. Don’t be fooled by its title; this American family of churches is suffering from no misunderstanding about what worship is. Open the cover, and wham:

What is worship? Certainly, it’s all these [singing, teaching etc] – the things that take place in churches every week all across the globe. But it’s so much more.

Worship is a life lived in grateful response to God, who sent His Son to save us from our sins.

So take it outside the church doors. Everywhere you go (into all the world). In everything you do (all to the glory of God).

For a world that needs Him. For the joy of living for Him. For the glory of the Savior. Worship God. Live.[3]

A soundtrack for worship

So how do I like to think about music at church?

The soundtrack to a movie is as much part of the movie as it is an accompaniment to the action on screen, reinforcing the drama and encouraging appropriate emotional responses to the story.

I like to think of “Worship music” as the soundtrack of a particular type of people. People who worship. People who know which way is up. People who boldly say, each and every day, in each and every decision they make, “GOD, TAKE MY LIFE”. They worship in a particular, focussed, corporate and self-conscious way through music on Sunday, but it is no less worship when they live our their faith at work the next morning. The songs they sing together in church (and alone in the car) are both a part of that devotion, and an accompaniment to it: reinforcing the truth, and encouraging an appropriate emotional response to it.

Besides, ringing musicians up on Sunday afternoon and saying “hey wanna come and not perform music which is not really about the music for people who aren’t really an audience, singing songs which aren’t actually worship but which talk about, meditate over, teach on, exhort to and everyone else calls worship?” is a bit of a mouthful.

[2] TWIST 2005 Seminar on “Worship in the Bible” handout.

[3] www.sovereignGraceMinistries.org. Should be distributed in Australia by EMU Music Australia in mid 2006.