One of the dilemmas for those involved in organising and designing Sunday services is the lack of variety of content when it comes to contemporary song selections. There are many great contemporary songs, and we should be very thankful for those who compose and write these songs. There are also some excellent reimaginings of old classics that work beautifully with a range of demographics. At the same time, one would have to suggest that there are a disproportionate number of songs that focus on adoration and many others that focus on the death of Jesus. In any worship services we should sing songs of adoration and we should reflect on the death of Jesus. It would be strange if we didn’t. At the same time there are a range of things which we should also sing about and it’s often very hard to find songs that reflect this. I’ve been involved in services where every song seemed to focus, more or less, on the same thing! If we only sing about one area we run the risk of it becoming so familiar that it just washes over us.
My plea is this – can someone somewhere please write some songs about:
- What it means to be God’s people together
- Using our God-given gifts in service
- Living out our faith day to day
- Sharing in God’s mission in the world
- Serving God in all of our life and especially through our work and families
- The wonders of creation and our responsibility to tend and care for it
- Responding to injustice and standing for justice
- Being faithful in prayer and perseverance
- Striving for holiness
- The second coming our Lord and the hope of the new future we will share in together
- Crossing cultures for the sake of the kingdom
- The person and work of the Holy Spirit
Some may dismiss this plea as the rantings of a cranky old man! Perhaps that’s the case. Others may be thinking, well what about such and such a song or a verse in a particular chorus. This may also be true. For others, simply getting enough people together to form a band may be miraculous in itself and one doesn’t have the luxury of thinking too much about the content of what we sing.
Service design is a challenging area but in broad terms I would hope that we would want to choose songs that pick up on what we are preaching so it is a unified whole. This will involve songs of adoration but hopefully also songs that touch on the list above as well as a range of other areas as well. We can all run the danger in our preaching of having a narrow range of ways in which we apply the teaching of God’s word. In the same way we need to sing about the range of doctrines we uphold as well as what it means to live out our faith in all of our life.
Stephen Hale
Chair of EFAC Australia and EFAC Global