Broadly speaking, a pop song is heard on three levels: the motion, the emotion and finally the notion. The motion is how it moves rhythmically, to which we respond physically, tapping our feet or moving our limbs.

The emotion is how it moves the heart or the mood of the listener. Finally, often much later, the notion is received - in other words, the information and ideas contained in the song.

It is a common experience to re-visit an old pop song you knew word for word years ago and realise that you never really understood what it meant. Mostly, the ‘notions’ of pop songs are such that this doesn’t matter very much.

There are exceptions. But many are essentially items of light entertainment, ‘ear-candy’, and by the very nature of the music industry, fairly disposable - after they’ve been re-sold in several compilations, that is!

Having said that, there is without doubt a powerful communication of ideas and attitudes on a subliminal level when the cumulative effect of years of listening is taken into consideration.

When all this does begin to matter a lot, however, is if the situation were to arise where most of the praise and worship repertoire of thousands of churches was not only in the pop song genre but also at a similar depth in the ‘notion’ department.

It would be potentially a double-whammy. The dominance of a genre which
- though good at touching the body and the emotions - is limited in delivering very much to the intellect, is wedded to content that fails to stand up to closer scrutiny as worthy biblical teaching.

This might not be of great concern where the worshippers are receiving good Bible teaching by other means. But that’s not often the case. Then again, it could be that the most influential theologian in your church is the person who chooses the songs.

MILK OR MEAT

These concerns are nothing new. And for some time now I have detected a growing hunger among church leaders and worship leaders for richer content - for spiritual meat in the songs rather than a diet of milk.

Many have found they have to go back in time to find what they are looking for, and are reviving or revising old hymns and becoming more discerning in their choice of contemporary repertoire.

One example of a revived hymn which has recently come back into use by virtue of a new melody is Before The Throne Of God Above. This late 19th century composition succeeds brilliantly in engaging the worshipper with the truths of Christ’s priesthood.

As it teaches this often neglected doctrine, it facilitates our response to it. It also happens to have been re-presented in the style of a traditional hymn, albeit a more rhythmic one. And guess what? People love it. In my experience, that includes young people, who can mistakenly be assumed to appreciate only the rock-pop genre.

Other generations have encountered ‘down-side’ when they’ve borrowed contemporary pop genres. One example is Sanke/s Sacred Songs & Solos, a collection of revivalist songs popularised by the evangelistic ministry of D L Moody and his songleader Ira Sankey in the USA in the late 19th century - and which reputedly sold a staggering 80 million copies in its long commercial lifetime.

It succeeded marvellously in enfranchising ordinary people to a revivalist movement by using popular music. But its popularist appeal also contained the seeds of its weakness.

It has been said that 19th century frontier culture was one of the most sentimental the world has ever known. That’s painfully evident from leafing through that collection, which in other respects has much to commend it.

What will future generations put their finger on when they leaf through a dusty copy of one of our songbooks?

'I' or 'J' SONGS

Some months ago I was at the first selection session in the process of compiling a songbook collection designed to be a broadly based resource of worship songs and hymns.

About 600 songs had been collected from all around the world - mostly written in the last ten or 20 years, many brand new. They’d been separated out into alphabetical heaps.

Someone said, ‘Graham, you’ll never guess which letter of the alphabet has the tallest heap’. It was, of course, the letter ‘I’. It turned out that around 100 of the 600 songs under consideration started with the letter ‘I’.

Now of course that’s absolutely fine if you’re talking about the first line of Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise. But predictably, in a large number of these songs the ‘I’ was the writer themselves, and many continued to focus more upon the subjective experience of worship.

There were a number of good songs, each one no doubt genuine expressions of the writer’s heart. But my frustration was not so much with the songs before us, as with the songs that were not being written.

The next letter in the alphabet of course is ‘J’. Up came several beautiful Jesus-focused songs. There was a marked contrast between the ‘I’ songs and the ‘J’ songs. The flavour of angst gave way to self-forgetfulness as the person of Jesus filled our vision.

In the same way that I have just cited the 19th century frontier culture as being overly sentimental, I wonder if our future commentators will look down our index of ‘I’s and say, ‘Ah-ha! It’s well known that during the late 20th and early 21st centuries western culture was notable for its pre-occupation with self and personal comfort and happiness’.

A-Z SONGS

There is a whole related discussion here. What about the importance of honesty and reality? Don’t the psalmists frequently express their personal joys, fears, struggles, emotions and - dare I say it - angst?!

Of course they do, and of course we must be real, and of course we don’t need the unreality of triumphalism. In fact, the power of the ‘I’ psalms is that having begun with the personal experience of danger or depression, in most cases the psalmist takes the worshipper on a radical shift of focus -to meditate on and celebrate the God who delivers, forgives, judges justly and so on.

Let’s have the honest psalms of today’s ‘David’s’ - but let them lift us just as effectively on the way into God. ‘For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses.. .Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence’ (Hebrews 4:15,16). Our honest struggles can take us directly to meditate on and worship the God who has shared our humanity and is himself the answer to our needs.

The other part of the issue is about proportion and appropriateness. My view is that the proportion of personal songs is far too high and it is at the expense of songs that are actually about God, who he is and what he has done.

If the Bible taught that corporate worship is all about expressing our feelings, this might be OK. But that’s just not the case. Also, what might be perfectly fine as an individual’s expression of their personal experiences and walk with God may not necessarily be appropriate to put into the mouths of a congregation.

If we continually expect people to sing about experiences and feelings that they are not necessarily having, we will empty the act of worship of reality and de-value its content to the level of a borrowed personal perspective.

It is also common to find lyrics which, though sincerely meant, are muddled or inaccurate - or which seem to have been chosen for their sound rather than their meaning. The vocabulary of romantic love songs has also become very prevalent, but that has its down side as well.

Contemporary culture tries to place self-expression much higher than any concept of truth. Man is put in the centre of the universe and God is there to serve his needs.

Some of the popular success of Sankey’s music must surely be down to the way it rode on the wave of sentimentality prevalent at the time. And although it felt good to the people, it was not always good for the truth.

We must be open to the possibility that some worship material today is accepted uncritically because it resonates with our taste and sounds like the music we like. But the emphases it carries, albeit subtly in many cases, may be closer to the spirit of the age than we realise.

Sometimes it takes a song coming out of a completely different environment to show
us, by contrast, a bias of our song content. A song which is used among the persecuted believers in China is based on Acts 20:22-24 and translates as follows:

And see, now I go bound in the spirit to Jerusalem,
not knowing the things that will happen to me there,
except that the Holy Spirit testifies in every city,
saying that chains and tribulations await me.
But none of these things move me;
nor do I count my life dear to myself,
so that I may finish my race with joy,
and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus,
to testify to the Gospel of the grace of God.
(Lilies Among Thorns, Sovereign World 1991)

It is striking that though songs like these are rooted in personal experience, they are not about personal comfort - but about forsaking it!

As a ‘recovering melancholic’ whose early singer-songwriter material carried more than a little introspection, I know something about the tendency to focus on the subjective and personal.

There is a place for it - a very valuable place. But when it comes to corporate worship, the dynamic I believe we need to employ much more is what I call the two ‘Rs’ - revelation and response.

Our worship can only ever be our response to what God has done for us in Christ. And the more we see of God’s character and deeds as revealed in Christ, the more our worship will overflow.

Sometimes it seems that we enter a time of sung worship and almost immediately we are conjuring up an emotional response before we’ve actually taken time to focus on who we are worshipping. why, and on what basis.

Our songs are sometimes only the response part of the equation. In isolation from revelation, they can become little more than sincere enthusiasm.

In pop songs the medium is the message. But that’s not all. The medium is also the massage: the self-selected soundtrack that provides aural therapy to our existence, a switchable feel-good factor. Perhaps I should add ‘lotion’ to motion emotion and notion!

You don’t have to believe what the song says. Its message can be worn or discarded as required - not ‘Is it true?’ but ‘Does it feel good?’ We’d be naive to think these are not potential dangers as generations soaked from our earliest years in pop and rock compose and sing worship songs in the same genre.