In this episode of the podcast. Bill Giovannetti continues sharing new book, CHAOS:As Goes the Church, So Goes the World.

Chapter 3 - The Song That Never Ends
If you wish to rant about the state of affairs in the contemporary church, worship music is low-hanging fruit, I know. God help us. 

The burden of this book is that God’s people have welcomed chaos into the church and our lives. Sometimes, our worship music is both a symptom and a contributing factor. 

And let me say right away it’s not just the repetition that’s to blame. 

In the worship song commonly called “Psalm 136,” you will find the words “his mercy endures forever” 26 times in 26 verses. I’d call that repetitious. Repetition per se is not the problem. 

Arguably the greatest extra-biblical worship song of all time – one that the church has stood up for ever since King George II launched the tradition at its 1742 debut – is Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. This chorus repeats the word Hallelujah at least 36 times, King of kings 8 times, Lord of lords 8 times, and for ever and ever 12 times. And I’m not even counting the echoes. The finale is nothing but repetition: 

King of Kings
And Lord of Lords
King of Kings
And Lord of Lords
And He shall reign for ever and ever
King of Kings
And Lord of Lords
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Repetition is not the core problem in contemporary worship music. 

The core problem is that worship music is written all too often by worship leaders who can strum a guitar and sing decently and have never swum to the deep end of theology’s pool.

They don’t even know it’s there.

The deepest thing they can say about God is, “He’s a good, good, good, good God,” like a good, good dog, so we can demand he fetch us a blessing. 

Yes, God is good. In theology, this is called the Benevolence of God, and is a doctrine rich in meaning. Yet I suspect not one worship leader in a hundred has bothered to crack open the theology books and launch a voyage into the wonders of this theology before they pen their ditties. They cannot deliver the depths of divine benevolence because they haven’t even heard the word, much less studied it out. 

We get the impression that the primary method of writing a contemporary worship hit is to first run the lyrics through the Random Phrase Generator, to produce a collection of Twitter-sized fragments assembled into a series of non-sequiturs, colored by mixed-metaphors to be sung at gradually swelling volume with maximum pathos. Little concern logos, or for cadence, and even less for the poetry’s beauty. 

So the church hums along in the theological shallows. There is little content to make our hearts skip a beat. All too many songwriters are incapable of painting a picture of a God so grand he takes our breath away, because they have rarely gone there themselves. So the church stands and watches while song leaders do their thing and the people on stage have their own little worship moment, eyes closed, bodies swaying, congregation forgotten. 

The hymns I learned as a boy in church, I still sing today when I walk my dog in the early morning hours. I doubt that anybody will be singing many of today’s praise songs thirty years from now as they walk along. There’s no “there” there. 

As all the church grandparents are nodding their heads in self-righteous disapproval, let me say that the fat, old hymnal has had the benefit of centuries of culling. There were plenty of horrible hymns composed back in the day. The large majority of them, no doubt. They just didn’t stand the test of time, so the church spit them out. Don’t be so smug, fellow Curmudgeons. 

And please don’t complain it’s too loud.