My complicated relationship with worship music.

Simple messages. Emotional manipulation. Shaky theology.

These aren't as much my own current critiques of contemporary worship music as they are phrases I heard passed around during my Christian college days. Depending on the circle I was spending time in, I either heard enthusiastic conversations about the latest Hillsong album or cynical commentary on the mega churches capitalizing on the emotions of worshippers. I'm getting ahead of myself, though.

My first 15 or 16 years of life were dominated by worship music. Besides a few cassettes (and later CDs) of kids' music, I mostly just heard the Christian radio rotation of songs and a few albums of Christian artists from the 90s and early 2000s. We broke beans and sweated in the hot kitchen during canning season to the soundtrack of the KLOVE pedge drive. I remember the night I figured out how to play radio stations on my mp3 player and then mastered recording a song on the tiny red device to play back the next day, radio static and all. During middle school, family members began gifting us with CDs of Christian artists that we of course memorized from day one. I was hungry for new music and the limits of my music library were easy to reach. Oof, the slideshows of early digital photos that I made with the first batch of songs I ripped from CDs onto our desktop computer...long ago deleted and forgotten until I dug up that memory just now. I live to embarrass myself, clearly. (We won't discuss my horrifyingly long obsession with a certain a capella Christian kids' music artist...)

When I was 16, I discovered Christian music blogs and, as I'm sure you have already guessed, my obsessive mind latched on immediately. I started to read opinions of CCM artists that were more critical than supportive. At the same time, I found legal, free downloads of Christian music by artists who never got close to playing on KLOVE. It was during this era that I found Heath McNease, Mike Mains & The Branches, Jenny & Tyler, Blood and Water...with varying levels of blatant or subtle worship lyrics, these artists revealed Jesus to me in ways I had never found before. The day I truly processed "Given Up" by Blood and Water for the first time is still one of the most geniune moments of worship in my life. Gradually my satisfaction with the Christian radio hits diminished as I grew to love the indie bands that had smaller followings and deeper lyrics.

College led me into an era of what can only be labeled as saturated worship experiences. Attending a Christian college meant mandatory chapel attendance for at least a portion of every semester, and I committed to showing up at every single one for more than half the time I was at Northwestern. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday...and then Sunday night for Praise and Worship. Not to mention Sunday mornings at a church service. Whether I was crammed into a pew with twenty other people or sitting up in the media booth, the community aspect of chapel never lost its shine for me. But the song selections were predictable, unless it was obscure hymn Wednesday, when we mumbled the words to a song we would never sing again as the organist pumped her way through the seemingly random number from the hymnal. Sunday night P&W fluctuated from semester to semester whether it was meaningful to me or too emotional to justify leaving homework for an hour. If you have ever participated in a 10-minute version of Set A Fire, you might understand.

During my years of cynicism towards the church, worship music carried the torch of most irritating to me. I've never liked Casting Crowns (or Casting Frowns, as my siblings and I used to call them), but more "hip" worship bands like Hillsong weren't much better during that time of my life. Behind the simple verses and repetitive choruses were twenty-somethings who dressed like hipsters while they made thousands of dollars on cookie-cutter lyrics and melodies. I hated it all.

When I started attending a church my first year in Ames, I desperately clung to the hymns we sang 80% of the time. See, these lyrics represented intellectual Christianity in my recovering, bitter mind. I craved depth in worship and at the time, I couldn't find that in the radio hits or Hillsong singles. I needed the authenticity that lyrical complexity brought to my broken heart.

Never fear, this isn't a post about how much I dislike modern worship music. After all, this blog is supposed to be building bridges, not isolating people. While I don't always prefer that genre, my distaste has faded as my bitterness and cynicism has healed. I don't have a better segue into the positive side of this story, so forgive me for an awkward transition that actually fits the nature of my journey through worship in the past 10 years.

One part of worship music, of all types, that never became stagnant during my darkest moments was the element of singing. No matter how much I didn't care for the lyrics in a worship song, if I could sing it with other people, I could forget the words and worship through the way that singing made me feel. I'm a deeply emotional and sentimental person, but a very private worshiper. In college I coaxed myself into a state of more open, physically demonstrative worship, but that was short-lived. While this might be good for some, it distracted me far more than it allowed me to express myself before God. This is actually a topic deserving of a more direct focus, so I'll move back to the broader subject. Singing with others, for me, has always been more worshipful because of the sounds being produced rather than as a result of the words being sung. To be linked to other people in the room by our shared experience is to find community in the presence of God.

So where does this leave me now, in my post-cynical, healing stage of faith? I both run media for and sing on a worship team now. Those two activities imply something about me that I may seem to have contradicted in my words here. After all, I don't actively seek out worship artists or music outside of my time serving at ReNew. My life has been changed by the artists who write out their specific faith experiences and offer opportunities for me to find my own story within those words. Heath McNease's song "This Is How" brings me to tears without fail. Mike Mains & The Branches' "Calm Down, Everything Is Fine" played on a loop during the moments in college when I could barely breathe through the anxiety and darkness in my head.

My experience is not everyone else's and it may not be a common one. All I can speak for is my own story. I have seen Jesus most clearly in two places: the darkest moments of my mind, just before the breaking point, and in the times I have been surrounded by people singing. Whether it was carefully practiced harmony during an Easter choir performance or a spontaneous last chorus I heard from the media booth on a Sunday morning, I have felt the love of Jesus there. The Sunday P&W tradition of joining hands to sing the doxology in a dimly lit chapel with 200 other people...the nightly ritual of singing "Sanctuary" around the campfire at Haven...the moment someone nails a harmony during worship team practice...the face of Jesus is more clear in these times than any other.

I want to leave this rather open-ended. After all, this is merely my own experience. So where do you see Jesus most clearly in worship? Is it in music or somewhere else? Maybe we'll find ways to connect with each other better if we acknowledge the ways in which the differences in our stories become similar.

Love ya, babes. 💜