Tell Us How You Really Feel, Don…

I was just read­ing an essay by D. A. Car­son, “Wor­ship Under The Word”.

Car­son is, in my esti­ma­tion, one of the great­est bib­li­cal schol­ars in the world today. And I don’t just say that because he loves uni­ver­si­ty min­istry. 🙂 Approx­i­mate­ly one gazil­lion (round­ing up from three hun­dred and forty-four) of his writ­ings are avail­able for free online. They’re worth read­ing. Or at least sav­ing to your hard dri­ve so you can find them when you search your com­put­er using Google Desk­top…

Any­way, in foot­note 39 on page 47 of this essay, he makes a rather point­ed obser­va­tion. I have bold­ed my favorite line.

Per­haps this is the place to reflect on the fact that many con­tem­po­rary “wor­ship lead­ers” have train­ing in music but none in Bible, the­ol­o­gy, his­to­ry, or the like. When pressed as to the cri­te­ria by which they choose their music, many of these lead­ers final­ly admit that their cri­te­ria oscil­late between per­son­al pref­er­ence and keep­ing the con­gre­ga­tion rea­son­ably happy—scarcely the most pro­found cri­te­ria in the world. They give lit­tle or no thought to cov­er­ing the great themes of Scrip­ture, or the great events of Scrip­ture, or the range of per­son­al response to God found in the Psalms (as opposed to cov­er­ing the nar­row themes of being upbeat and in the midst of “wor­ship”), or the nature of bib­li­cal locu­tions (in one cho­rus the con­gre­ga­tion man­ages to sing “holy” thir­ty-six times, while three are enough for Isa­iah and John of the Apoc­a­lypse), or the cen­tral his­tor­i­cal tra­di­tions of the church, or any­thing else of weight. If such lead­ers oper­ate on their own with lit­tle guid­ance or train­ing or input from senior pas­tors, the sit­u­a­tion com­mon­ly degen­er­ates from the painful to the piti­ful.

Heh. Heh. Heh.

I would “heh” more, but appar­ent­ly three times is enough. 🙂