I remember standing in a Christian bookstore, looking at the labeled dividers in the CD bins and trying to process the meaning of a new genre: worship music.
Around the same time, in 2005, I joined the worship team at my church, and our worship leader arranged for all of us to attend some worship seminars where we learned more about playing and singing worship songs.
In 2010, I started attending a different church. There, I served as a volunteer in worship ministries under the direction of a worship pastor. That church often repeated that people in the congregation should set aside their worship preferences and accept other people’s worship styles during the worship time.
While attending another church in the early 2020s, I received a list of prayer requests and came across this phrase: worship experience. I was perplexed — even more than I had been while standing in the Christian bookstore years earlier — by its meaning. In fact, that worship-as-an-adjective phrase led me to create this blog in 2024.
I don’t take issue with the people I’ve known or the places I’ve been. Quite the opposite, I’m thankful for them.
It’s the terminology that concerns me.
Examining our lexicon
Now, you may wonder why I care about worship being used as an adjective, let alone why I’m troubled by it.
After all, worship is Biblical, you may say.
True.
However, in the Bible, worship is almost always a verb, sometimes a noun but never an adjective.
In today’s Christian circles, by contrast, it’s a go-to modifier.
Also, oddly, the adjective has been attached to a single style of music. The result, whether intended or not, is that worship music has been elevated above all other styles.
That makes honest conversations difficult.
Think about the members of the body of Christ who prefer to sing traditional music or another style of music that’s not worship music.
If they articulate objections to singing worship music, they’re perceived as objecting to worship itself.
That’s clear when you compare these two statements:
- Worship music generally doesn’t resonate with me.
- Church pop music generally doesn’t resonate with me.
And these two:
- The lyrics in that worship song are questionable.
- The lyrics in that church pop song are questionable.
Choosing to say church pop music and church pop song would be a good start to revise the language. I could go on, offering suggestions for replacement terms, but here’s just one more example along the same lines: Instead of saying the worship team, shouldn’t we say the church pop team? Or to be more exact, the church pop band?
It’s a weakness of our lexicon that we use worship as an adjective, especially in connection with any style of music.
For the sake of open dialogue in our churches, it’s time we changed that.
Copyright 2024