Just got back from TWIST Music Conference in Sydney. It was an awesome time to gather with fellow church musicians from all over the country for some excellent teaching and hands-on music training. Mike Raiter - preach it how it is, brother! I’m sure his message will be available to order soon at the TWIST site.

I was greatly blessed with some lively and encouraging dialogue in my Music in the Smaller Church workshop, and I took away a lot of wisdom from people who have lived in smaller churches far longer that me. Thanks guys! I plan to post on a few of the topics we discussed in the coming days. If any of you who attended the workshop have questions / comments / feedback please feel free to email me.

I printed a 90-page booklet for the seminar which contains all the music training material here at www.reason.mu, bundled together in one handy reference. If you’d like more copies for your church, we’re more than happy to mail you some. Details for ordering are here.

How important are the preferences of the congregation when choosing songs for church?

Recently at TWIST I advocated the use of “song surveys” at church, as a way of getting feedback from the congregation about the choice of songs. Catherine has just posted some helpful questions about surveys:

Hey here’s a question…the song survey is a great idea, but it started me thinking - should the song choice and musical culture of a church be driven by the congregation, or by the music team/senior minister etc? ie how much should we be responding to what the congregation wants, and how much should we be trying to lead and grow what and how the church sings? I guess it’s a mixture of both - what do other people think? I’d be interested to hear where people think the balance should lie…

Catherine’s question has implications for any kind of ministry at church. At the end of the day, who is responsible for what goes on at church, and how important are the preferences of the congregation when decisions are made?

Scripture is strong on the “pastoral model” of church, and (as far as I can see) not particularly strong on the democratic model. That is, there’s always a shepherd who is responsible, under God, for the good of the flock. He tends to its needs, leading it where it needs to go for its own good. Unlike a democracy, the flock does not dictate the shepherd’s decisions (the Big Shepherd upstairs does). However, it would be a very poor shepherd who did not observe the flock and respond to the needs of sheep who are hungry, thirsty, or tired.

And so, in choosing songs for church, what’s good for the flock?

As I’ve discussed in the section on a well-balanced song selection, I think there are five essential aspects of song selection (click on the links to read more):

» 1. Faithful to scripture
» 2. Emotive
» 3. Fresh and varied
» 4. Relevant to the service
» 5. Singable (and playable)

The responsibility of the music director (or whoever is given responsibility) is to ensure that the lyrical content of songs faithfully represents the truths of Scripture, growing people both in their relationship with God and with one another as His people. That has always been what the flock needs most.

But the purpose for music is for the flock to express the emotions of those things! So it is crucial for the music director to choose emotive songs that actually express those truths powerfully, both in the poetry of the words and in the musical setting. It’s no use singing about the sacrifice of Christ to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”! The music has to lift those lyrics off the song sheet and into our hearts!

In a creative and emotive area like music, the reality is that each song will affect different people in different ways. What one person finds uplifting, another will find uninspiring. What one person finds overly simplistic, another will find insightful and profound. And just because a song is your favourite as a church musician doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll do anything for your church. So you have to know your flock.

“In Christ Alone” has been in the top 10 in the international CCLI charts for the last four years. It is sung in every church I have visited in that time. When we first ran a song survey at church, we included that song and asked people to comment on how helpful they found it. The response was overwhelmingly positive, but there were a handful of people who commented that it didn’t do anything for them at all.

There are very personal factors that go into song preference, and we have complete freedom in Christ to prefer one song or style of music over another (see my previous post). But there are other factors that influence how a song affects people, such as:

1. how well the song has been taught,
2. whether it is easy to sing,
3. whether it has been well-played by the band,
4. whether it has been under or over-used, and
5. whether it has been used well in the context of church services.

The reality is, for all these reasons, music directors sometimes find it hard to be in touch with what songs are actually working “on the ground” (as opposed to “it has great theology”, “it sounds good on the CD”, or “the church band loves it”).

The disastrous scenario where the senior pastor or the music director’s own personal preferences are expressed in the song selection each week is all too common. I’ve been in one church where an audible groan ran through the congregation as a particular song came up on the overhead. (And no, I won’t tell you which one it was!)

Smaller churches often seem to have greater cultural and age diversity than mega-churches (which are often streamed for particular groups). And so a song survey is a very helpful tool that will give music directors some indication of what songs are working. It’s also a way for people to suggest great new songs that the music director may not have heard. My experience has been that people have appreciated the opportunity to give feedback, and found the activity of filling out the survey a lot of fun.

If you use the results, it will lead to some songs being added to your repertoire, others graciously “retired” from duty, and others tried again but taught more carefully or with a more skilled band.

My habit has been not to publish the results of surveys, or for the results to dictate the selection of songs each week. In fact, once you have the results, you should play the most popular songs less! (If you overplay your church’s all-time favourites it won’t be long before they start to lose their impact, or worse, start to aggravate people.) I have always let people know that the results help the music director choose appropriate and helpful songs, along with other factors such as the message of the service and what else is going on at church.

Whether you end up using a survey or not, if you are a senior pastor, music director or church musician, you owe it to your church to listen to how people feel about the choice of songs. It’s not enough that the songs chosen are gospel-centred (although this is essential). The purpose of singing is that people are emotionally moved – moved to know their God better as they sing about Him, moved to express their thanks and praise, and moved to encourage their brothers and sisters to live for Him.

Our God is an immensely creative God. We often give him credit for the physically amazing – the galaxies and stars, the mountains and the oceans – but we rarely credit him with the awesome creative power that he has worked through the human mind, to create art and music.

All musical styles are a gift from God to enhance our human ability to express ourselves. And when used at church, music is a powerful Spiritual gift that helps us express the things of God, and our own emotional response to Him. Classical hymns, choral oratorios, pop rock, punk rock, emo, hip-hop, you name it – it’s from God and can be used for good at church.

For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving. (1Timothy 4:4)

God has blessed us all differently in our appreciation of different musical styles. And through historical, denominational and cultural forces, there are many types of churches with various “worship” styles. Each style is equally valid, provided it is being used to build up the body of Christ.

Even within a church, there’s always a range of preferences for certain styles and songs over others. The emotive nature of music means that those preferences are usually held fairly strongly. While we should be thankful that we’re not all alike (how boring church would be if we were!), in our sinfulness we often believe our own preferences are somehow the most important. And so we create musical tensions at church – within the congregation, and between the congregation and music team.

There are three important points to make about this:

1. Our unity at church, as expressed in our singing, should come from the gospel of Christ (and not a musical style).

2. We have complete freedom in Christ to express our faith through any musical style.

3. Our freedom is moderated by love for others, and their preference of musical style.

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. (Galatians 5:13)

In applying those three points, it’s a powerful expression of unity in the gospel when we participate in singing songs that come from styles or traditions that we may not prefer. For this reason, I think it’s helpful if young people are encouraged to sing hymns from time to time, and older people encouraged to participate in contemporary praise songs. It’s testimony to the power of the Spirit when we put aside superficial differences in musical taste and join in praise of the Lord Jesus!

In response to a helpful comment from Catherine on the post below, in the coming days I hope to post some more thoughts on the responsibility of the music director in choosing songs, and the place of a tool such as a song survey.

It’s been great to hear you guys have already using our songs at church - particularly in the New England area (surprise, surprise)!

This is what it’s all about for us - so keep letting us know how you’re finding the songs at church. What’s working? What’s not working? Need any extra parts made available (e.g. guitar tabs, piano parts, transposed parts…).

Don’t forget to browse the Teaching new songs page in our Church Music Resources section for helpful tips in this area.

Make a comment below or send us an an e-mail if you’ve used any of our songs.

Till Your Time
Man Of Sorrows
Oh How Dark The Night
Here Is Love

To access the free sheet music and mp3s for these songs hit www.reason.mu/music.php

Alex

It’s finally up! The “Music in the Small or Under-Resourced Church” material from TWIST Conference 2006 is now available on our new Church Music Resources page.

The page is essentially a re-worked version of the seminar handout but is a lot more readable/browsable in online format. All the pages are hypertext cross-linked and you can go directly to places of interest from a couple of index pages FAQs about church music and Solutions to common music problems.

Two specific downloads you might find useful - the Musicians’ Questionnaire and the Church Song Survey.

The Musicians’ Questionnaire is a hand-out to give to anyone interested in serving with music at church - it’ll help you find out more about people’s individual gifts, and what areas of training you might focus on.

Assuming you already have given thought and prayer in choosing great biblical songs to sing at church each week, you should find the Church Song Survey a great tool for keeping that weekly song selection enjoyable and fresh. People at church get to fill it in and let you know which songs they like (and which ones they don’t). There’s also room for them to suggest new songs you could use at church.

We’ve done this one at Unichurch for the last couple of years and the results are often surprising - the first time we did it there were two songs from our regular repertoire that most people disliked! Nothing wrong with the lyrics, but the music had done its time.

The song survey is an excel file that allows you to plug in your song list, and will spit out a printable survey you can hand round at church. Then you come back with the completed surveys, plug in the data to the worksheet, and it’ll generate a summary of results … all your songs in order of popularity. That summary is a fantastic tool for choosing songs each week - you can use your solid songs judiciously, not overplay the favourites and avoid the ones that few people enjoy.

Hope you find it all helpful! Let us know if you have any comments or questions at all (or find any bad links).

Alex