Worshipful hearts

As anyone who attends Canterbury Vineyard will know, Jim likes to mention why we use music to worship God, and how it "reaches into the deep". I just want to explore why that is. I am not a technically brilliant musician, in truth, I am very poor technically. I can only play one instrument and I can't read music. But God still chooses to use those of us less musically talented by giving us HEARTS FOR WORSHIP. Worship can happen in so many ways, and this blog isn't designed to belittle those methods of worship, but the focus of this blog is to explore the use of music in worship.

Music has always been a very prominent element of my life from a young age, and I suppose that has a lot to do with how important music has been to my parents. My taste has changed greatly over the years, including everything from the Spice Girls, to Led Zeppelin, to Audioslave, to the Fray, to Tiesto, to Sufjan Stevens and Mat Kearney. I can't say why I necessarily found connections with such differing types of music at different stages in my life, but what i can say is that I am SO glad that I did!! I am able to appreciate everything now, and to see how music not just speaks into the deep places, but comes from those deep places in its origin! I love Hip Hop and rap for its lyrical beauty, the rhythm and rhyme of Jay-Z and Eminem is something that I can respect greatly, and is something that I just don't have the skill to do! Granted, an english white girl might look a little silly singing "without me" but it can't be undermined, the sheer skill it takes to write those songs. Trance, techno and electro have a tendency to just be passed off as cheap dance music with bad connatations of what goes with the music, but I think people are missing the appreciation of the music. True, it is synthetic sound, and not from musical instruments, but the pace and the rhythm are what the music is about, it is about the pulse that you feel running through your body when you hear it. It makes you want to dance and move! I have left Rock, blues, Jazz and Singer songwriter music last because it is my favourite collection of genres, and they all share one common element- they arise from the heart.

Blues is completely emotion driven music, and i love it! The beauty of it can only be found in the melodic and lyrical synthesis, the combination of how melancholia and sadness can be combined with a combination of guitar riffs and lumbering beats to portray this whole mood in the music alone. Jazz follows this to an extent but my response with jazz is that it is almost more natural- I cannot say that it COMES naturally, there needs to be a large amount of skill in being able to play jazz, but the fact that it creates its own art with no need for a pattern or set of rules to govern it gives the listener a sense of real freedom to take their own interpretation out of the music!

As for rock and singer songwriter music, these both intertwine with different levels of emotion i think. Anything from "ain't no sunshine when she's gone" to "Syndicate". The stories behind this music are what make so much of it for me, knowing where in the heart it came from, tragedy, frustration or surreal happiness.

The desire that burns in my heart, is that the walls around worship and what worship has to sound like would just be so severely transformed. There are signs that we are beginning to move towards that with bands like Kutless which cover the heavy metal christian influence and Reliant K with the Pop-Rock genre, but I so desire to see all of these genres of music exploding with christian musicians exploding into their styles with worshipful hearts. Worship music is designed to be accessible for praising God, but I think that more hearts will be able to worship when the accessibility is wider than what is in the US christian charts, when people feel like they can create music that won't be frowned upon because it didn't come from Graham Kendrick (I love him by the way, but you catch my drift).

Everyone has a worshipful element of their hearts, and for some people that doesn't mean it coming out through music, but for some it does, and for those people, I would just encourage you, put it all down on paper! Get playing your instruments, begin to play out what God is putting on your heart- a rhythm of worship is going to take place in this nation, we need to be listening out for our part in that!