Hi, I’m a born again Christian, (Baptist) and I only listen to Christian music. So I love worship music. I used to love listening to Hillsong, Jesus Culture and Bethel music. For the past year, I know deep down in my spirit, God doesn’t want me to listen to their music anymore. I came across some of their church practices and they looked totally demonic to me, nothing to do with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I felt extremely convicted and decided that I will no longer buy their music or listen to their songs. (Just my personal conviction.) I know they have some of the best Christian songs, but I want to honour God and not my flesh. I don’t agree with what goes on in their churches. Many things are not biblical and their pastors don’t speak the truth when they they are in public like pastor Carl Lentz, when asked about gays in the church and if abortion is sinful or not. He never has biblical answers, although the Bible is very clear. He’s scared not to offend men, and would rather offend God. The way I look at it is this, if an amazing band, mocked my own parents, and didn’t honour my parents in any way, would I still buy their music and listen/sing their songs? Or would I be upset and hurt and want nothing to do with them and just pray for them instead? What these churches/elders are doing is mocking Jesus’ name and then selling music and making millions of dollars and claiming to be Christians just because they “sang” about Jesus yet their works show bad fruit that do not honour the Lord in any way. I am upset because I loved their music and also because I see them using the Lord’s name to make profit while not living a godly Christian lifestyle. (Matthew 7:22-23)
Now my question is this, thankfully my church does not sing any of their songs, but this bothers me so much that I always think what if they sing one of their songs this Sunday?! If my church does, should I say something? Just the thought of it really bothers me.
I more-or-less stopped listening to Christian pop music many years ago, which I include "praise and worship" to be a genre of. My reasons largely had to do with a growing sense that much of the music being produced in the Christian music industry came up extremely shallow; for a variety of reasons. I'll still listen to some stuff, but it's pretty limited.
It kind of boiled down to that if I want music as entertainment, then I can listen to entertaining music, I don't subscribe to the idea that Christians are obligated to have "Christian" entertainment; as that feeds into a culture of tribalistic thinking. Imagine for a moment refusing to eat pizza unless it was "Christian" pizza. On some level it becomes absurd--music is music, pizza is pizza, etc. So if I want music for the sole purpose of the enjoyment of music then I should find music that I enjoy.
Secondly, if I wanted music that intentionally communicates a Christian point, or is intended as sacred song, then such music needs to have something far more substantive about it than simply calling itself "Christian"; it should actually
say something. And if it intended as sacred song then it should be held to a much higher standard, it should be theologically true and be worshipful. I became keenly aware over the years, as I paid attention, that so much of what calls itself "praise and worship" boils down to me singing about my feelings about Jesus, or singing about how Jesus makes me feel. Now declaring the love we have for Christ is certainly not in and of itself wrong, neither is acknowledging the joy we have in Christ wrong--but at what point have we in fact stopped talking about Jesus at all and are simply talking about ourselves? So much of it ultimately degenerates into self-congratulatory worship of self.
Further, spend some time comparing the lyrical composition of such music to the historic songs of the Church, and I don't simply mean "old" 19th and early 20th century hymns, I mean really start looking back to the history of Church music. It's not all great, but it is by and large significantly more substantial in its depth and actually declares and confesses our faith and what we believe. There is an old saying,
lex orandi lex credendi, the law of prayer is the law of belief. What and how we pray (or how we worship) shapes how and what we believe. The average church-goer is going to almost certainly get far more theological teaching and information from the music we sing then from the sermon; it is psychologically factual that human beings retain musical information better than the spoken word (this is why it is much easier to remember the words from a song than to remember words from a speech). If we are singing theologically impoverished music then expect the theology of the congregation to suffer for it.
Conversely, we can expect that if a theologically impoverished person is going to write theologically impoverished music. If we aren't worshiping mindfully then we are unintentionally spreading false religion to one another--and there is no worship in that at all.
-CryptoLutheran
