It's All About Me

Worship music is a close subject to my heart.  I feel very connected to God when I'm singing to Him, as music runs strongly in my genes and influences my life significantly.  To me, singing worship is a two-way street of glorifying Him and telling Him things as He speaks back to me, convicting me of sin and the truth.  I sometimes close my eyes, I often use my hands, and I always move my feet.  It's like a subtle dance that I do with God, involuntary, but energizing.  I dedicated my life to God during a worship music set, on 7/27/98, and on 9/17/11 I married a worship leader.  Worship music is a close subject to my heart.

I feel a bit like I've been lined into this approach to worship music, however, by a prevailing American cultural artifact.  We tend to think ideally that our approach to God is informed solely by the Bible, but I generally find that it's informed far more significantly by our culture.  The American cultural artifact I'm talking about is individualism.  I began to notice it a couple of years ago.  It seemed like a lot of popular worship songs were focused on a "personal relationship" with Jesus, just like a lot of our preaching talks about.  Worship songs use "I" and "me" a lot.  They often talk about what I'm going to do, or what He's done for me, or what my emotions are.  Nothing really wrong with that, unless it becomes the predominant message.

I've started to think about the richness of a community coming to God.  Sometimes worship music makes me feel like we are a bunch of individuals who happen to be in the same place singing to God at once.  My personal theology has a lot more to do with God restoring creation than with God merely restoring me.  I'm grateful for my salvation, of course, but I'm pretty interested in God saving others, and God lifting people out of poverty, and God saving us from our own ecological destruction, God restoring marriages, and so on.  There aren't a lot of worship songs about these topics.  Sometimes I just sing different lyrics.  I absolutely love the song You Hold Me Now by Hillsong United, but I love it even more when I sing "You hold us now" and "For eternity, all the earth will give all the glory to Your name."  Suddenly the song doesn't seem to be about God wiping away my pain, but the pain of all creation!  Wow!

I'm hardly the first to talk about excessive individualism or a me-focus in worship music, but I hope to see more church music about the things that God's heart is about!