The Artist and Humility

A friend and I used to joke that when asked in job interviews what our strengths were, we would say ‘My main strength is that I am very humble.’

You can see the irony in this! To say you are very good at being humble seems to prove you are not humble.

But by not wanting to draw attention to humility (fearing that doing so would demonstrate a lack of humility), I wonder if we tend to reflect too little on how we are going at being humble. I wonder if we also miss wonderful opportunities to encourage others who are demonstrating humility.

Crucially, we may also downplay the need to work on being humble. I wonder if instead, we often hope that as we work on other aspects of Christian character – love, kindness, generosity, and so on – humility will just develop in the background.

For the Christian musician, there is considerable work to be done on the spiritual backdrop that sits behind our playing. In fact, this requires more work than the music. We must seek to ensure our hearts and minds are continuing to worship God, and that we are growing in our faith and godliness. Growth in the Christian life requires utter reliance on God but also discipline, focus, and careful attention from us. It’s hard work!

As church musicians – and leaders of our congregations – we are on display. Both our positioning in church services (often on the platform) as well as our task (singing or playing instruments with appropriate expression) can easily lead us to worship ourselves and not God, and to cause others to do the same. The task of pointing others to God through our music is by no means easy. Humility is required – both as a starting point, and as a constant.

We know a humble person when we meet one – but how do we pinpoint exactly what humility is? In his book ‘Humilitas’, John Dickson defines humility as “the noble choice to forgo your status, deploy your resources or use your influence for the good of others before yourself.” (p 24).

We see the ultimate humility in our Lord Jesus, who despite his status, humbled himself to the point of death on a cross. By contrast, we are often self-focused and proud.

So how do we develop humility? Of course, for the Christian, we must dedicate ourselves to reading God’s Word and prayer for greater humility, and seek accountability and encouragement from trusted friends.

But in addition, Dickson suggests some profoundly simple and practical approaches to developing humility (pp 174-183):

1. Recognise the inherent beauty of humility – We are shaped by what we love. If we love humility, we will be shaped by it.
2. Reflect on the lives of the humble – Find humble people in your life and study them.
3. Conduct thought experiments – Imagine yourself in certain scenarios and consider humble courses of action you could take.
4. Act humbly – “develop the humility muscle by exercising it.” (p 178)
5. Invite criticism – Within a culture of thoughtful critique, humility will be fostered.
6. Forget about being humble – “The very first step in the pursuit of humility is to recognize that I am not humble.” (p 183) Humility requires recognising our pride first, and working to reduce that. Humility will be a by-product of that process.

What a wonderful thing it would be for us to encourage a brother or sister in their humility this week, and to prayerfully consider steps we can take to grow in humility ourselves. 

GC

Making church boring is emotional manipulation

Chris Green has been giving the Annual Moore College lectures this year. In his talk today on preaching he pointed out that there are two ways of being emotionally manipulative.

The first is to whip people up into a frenzy, which is not motivated by the gospel but by the sheer emotional experience of the event.

But another group of people are guilty of manipulation in a different way. Chris recalls church experiences where a hugely powerful song has concluded and the service leader has failed to even note the emotional response which it has produced, saying "well done...and now the notices". This is deliberately quenching the emotional impact of the gospel, trying to make sure people don't respond as they would otherwise. It is manipulation.

I haven't thought about it this way before, but I think he's right.

I would go so far as to say that to deliberately try to pour cold water on people's whole-person-ed response to the power of God's word is manipulative.

Some examples of this kind of manipulation are
1. Choosing songs which are so bad that they take our attention away (if it were possible) from God's grace to us in Jesus Christ.

2. Planning services with no space for our response, so that no sooner have we surveyed the wondrous cross than some joker gets up and turns our attention to the location for the church picnic.

3. Being so casual that we are tempted to irreverence.

4. Being so focused on mutual edification that we conduct our entire service as if God were absent, and nobody thinks to actually do business with God.

5. Creating rules, or a culture, where common ways of responding to the emotional power of the gospel is discouraged (such as 'no raising hands in church').

Any others you can think of?

What I love about Darlene Zschech's theology

I’ve never met her, but I have a huge amount of respect for Darlene Zschech. Until 2007 she was a pastor at Hillsong church here in Sydney. She still tours and leads a growing church in Newcastle. Leaving aside the obvious debt we all owe her for bringing worship music to where it has come worldwide, her discipleship and church leadership off stage has benefited some of my dearest friends.

At the same time, I believe it’s often fruitful to compare and contrast our respective theological positions on worship. Our respective traditions may have much to learn from each other. Realising that I don’t have all the answers either, in this brief blog post I also want to provide some friendly critique of her theology of worship as presented in Extravagant Worship.

There is much I love in her theology of worship.

1. Zschech is dead right in pointing out that worship is bigger than merely music. Worship is bigger than music. “Although music is a wonderful expression of worship, it is not in itself the essence of it. The core of worship is when one’s heart and soul, and all that is within, adores and connects with the Spirit of God.”¹
2. She is right to make Christian education a central goal in our music ministry: ‘make the Word memorable and settle the message into our hearts.’²
3. She presents a balanced view of the place of emotional response in music ministry: music is ‘not about stirring ourselves into an emotional frenzy’, but ‘corporate worship’ should help turn the congregation’s ‘eyes to the Lord.’³

Yet, I do want to suggest some possible tensions in her theology of worship which make me reluctant to adopt it wholesale without thinking it over some more. The biggest tension I detect is over the issue of ‘excellence’.

Zschech rightly puts great emphasis on excellence, something which I have often written about and agree on. Yet I’m more cautious about the reasons she gives for seeking excellence: ‘We are to serve God with excellence because we know an excellent God.’⁴ Like the high medievalists, Zschech wants to ‘enter the throne room of God’.⁵

Largely I think this theology is reactive against more mainline traditions (such as Anglicanism), which have been (I’ll freely admit) too afraid of excellence. She thinks this fear has ‘kept almost an entire generation out of the house of God’.⁶

And to her credit, this emphasis on excellence is qualified: we give our finest ‘at whatever stage your finest is.’⁷ We bring our gifts in a context of grace, and Zschech is too experienced a pastor to seek to establish a ‘performance-based Christianity’ on or off the stage.⁸

However I do take issue with some of the arguments she uses to bolster this argument of excellence. “Extravagant worship grabs God’s attention ... Throughout the stories in the Bible, whenever someone demonstrated extravagant worship, God reacted with extravagant blessing. It’s cause and effect. Extravagant worship brings extravagant results.’⁹

My nervousness about this is that I am very unexcellent! I’m not talking about the quality of music, even. The fact is that the excellence of our offerings, as God measures it, is entirely dependent on the heart. As Hebrews 10 points out, God has never been pleased by sacrifices or burnt offerings. Zschech obviously knows this, and so concludes that ‘the only thing God wants from you is your heart.’¹⁰

I don’t think I’m being too nitpicking to say that there is a tension here. Is God impressed by musical excellence, or does he just want us to serve with the right attitude?

What is missing, I think, is a bridge between the Old Testament passages and the New Testament hope. In the Old Testament even our most righteous works are considered as dirty rags (Isaiah 64:6). In the New Testament, we are given the incredible invitation to continually ‘through Jesus … offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess his name’ (Hebrews 13:15). What is missing from Zschech’s worship theology, therefore, is the very important concept of a priest: not one who wears robes, but Jesus our great high priest. With Jesus standing as our representative before God, the excellence of our worship is guaranteed.

As much as it pains me to say it, therefore, the excellence (in a musical sense) of our worship, and the strength of our good intentions, becomes much less relevant to how acceptable our worship is. Don’t get me wrong, I want excellent music as much as the next music snob. But I’m not sure that we want to tie that excellence to its suitability for worshipping God.

1 Darlene Zschech, Extravagant Worship (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2002)., 27.

2 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 196.

3 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 169.

4 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 127.

5 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 155.

6 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 128.

7 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 127.

8 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 148.

9 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 34-35.

10 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 46.

Why the methodists had all the good music

Have you ever noticed how many of the great hymns in the English language were written by non-conformists like Isaac Watts and the Wesleys? These were people who stood apart (sometimes at great personal cost) from the mainline Anglican church of their day. This was a time where uniformity in worship was highly valued above everything. Edward VI and Elizbeth I had both laid down guidelines for worship, insiting on a ‘plain and modest song’. Nothing to flash. Thomas Sternhold supplied a boring but competent translation of the Psalter into English, and this was the basis of worship inside the mainline official Anglian church.¹

Not so for the non-conformists. John Wesley wrote to a friend criticising this style of worship, insisting that Christians should:

“sing praise to God ... with the spirit, and with the understanding also: not in the miserable, scandalous doggerel of Hopkins and Sternhold [i.e. the English Psalter], but in psalms and hymns which are both sense and poetry.”²

He thought the style should be whatever would ‘best raise the soul to God’, and that meant he was not confined to using simple boring arrangements of the Psalms.³

But the reason why Wesley ended up with such a stress on emotion was not accidental. I think it flowed from his theology. The reason why he wanted music to help people in ‘praising [God] lustily and with a good courage’ was so that their hearts could be changed.⁴ I suspect that John Wesley’s Arminianism – his overemphasis on human responsibility while forgetting that only God can soften or harden hearts – set him on this trajectory.

My hunch is, too, that this set much of methodism (and later Pentecostalism) onto this path of emotional music. If you believe that people turning to Jesus is a wholly human decision, not a miracle, then you’re going to do all you can to make sure they make the right decision.

The challenge, then, for those of us who believe that a decision to turn to Christ is both a human choice and a miracle that only God can bring about is to still write incredible songs which move the heart. A belief in divine sovereignty in conversion doesn’t stop us from engaging in apologetics, clear preaching, or trying to live the gospel in an attractive way. So it shouldn’t stop us from having poignant music either.

1 Evans, Music in the Modern Church, 31.

2 John Wesley, ‘To A Friend, On Public Worship’, in The Works of the Rev John Wesley: Tracts and Letters on Various Subjects (1st ed.; New York: J & J Harper, 1827), 233.

3 John Wesley, ‘To A Friend, On Public Worship’, in The Works of the Rev John Wesley: Tracts and Letters on Various Subjects (1st ed.; New York: J & J Harper, 1827), 233.

4 John Wesley, ‘To A Friend, On Public Worship’, in The Works of the Rev John Wesley: Tracts and Letters on Various Subjects (1st ed.; New York: J & J Harper, 1827), 233.

Please manipulate my emotions

There is a great deal of suspicion of emotional manipulation. Sometimes I think that suspicion is justified. A friend told me a story about a church where the keyboard was hooked up to an electric shock machine, and just at the right moment the keyboard player would hit the button and people in the front row would be brought to their knees by the ‘electrifying’ power of the sermon.

But sometimes I wonder whether we are oversensitive to the power of music on our emotions, as if being moved emotionally by a song is less ‘worthy’ of us than to be moved intellectually by a sermon.

Consider the tension felt by the great father of the faith, Augustine. His conversion story was marked by an emotional musical encounter:

“I wept at your [God’s] hymns and canticles, deeply moved by the voices of your sweetly singing church. Those voices flowed into my ears, and the truth was poured out in my heart, whence a feeling of piety surged up and my tears ran down. And these things were good for me.”¹

Yet at the same time, the Platonism which Augustine’s culture had subscribed to made him suspicious of such animal attraction merely based on music:

“the gratification of my flesh – to which I ought not to surrender my mind to be enervated – frequently leads my astray ... when it happens to me that the song moves me more than the thing which is sung, I confess that I have sinned blamefully and then prefer not to hear the singer.²

For similar reasons, another thinker, Athanasius, decided that it would be better not to sing at all. For him it was important that the Psalms were recited not ‘from a desire for pleasing sound’, but as a more spiritual ‘manifestation of harmony among the thoughts of the soul’.³ Augustine, to his credit, didn’t go that far. But he did look down on the role of music, saying it merely enabled a ‘weaker soul’ to ‘be elevated to an attitude of devotion’.⁴

But I don’t think it is an admission of weakness in our soul to recognise that we are embodied: our thoughts and actions are influenced by what we eat, whether we have slept enough recently, and whether our brain chemicals are balanced. To recognise that music can have a non-rational effect on our souls is simply to recognise that we are human. Rather than be afraid of any emotional effect, we should seek out music which draws us closer to God and honours Jesus. Provided there is no deception, and the emotional power of the music is anchored in the truth, and we aren’t trying to substitute for the Spirit’s work in changing hearts, I can’t see the danger. If ‘manipulation’ means simply helping me to feel the weight of Jesus’ glory then please, go ahead: some days I could do with a bit of musical manipulation.

1 Augustine, Confessiones IX, vi, 14 in James McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 154.

2 Augustine, Confessiones X, xxxiii, 49-50 in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 154.

3 Athanasius, Epistula ad Marcellinum 29, PG XXVII, 40-1 in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 53.

4 Augustine, Confessiones X, xxxiii, 49-50 in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 154.