Two for Worship

When I think of modern worship songs, "cool" rarely comes to my mind. Nor do words like "deep", "profound", or "sublime" spring forth. "Touching", yes. "Mushy", ok. "Excessively sentimental" seems to hit the nail on the head. But I would hardly find them to be "excessively mysterious" or even "profoundly theological" for that matter. I don't wish to be too hard on music whose intention is to give worship and praise to God. But it would be a lie of omission if I didn't at least point out that, for the most part, modern worship songs are hugely disappointing. It is often formulaic. The lyrics tend to be, given the depth of scriptures, shallow. They rarely recognize important concepts like doubt, grief, and worry-- concepts that are no strangers to the scriptures, including David's great book of Psalms. Modern worship is prone to give us a pristine, shiny-happy-people-approach to something so sublime, so mysterious, so inexplicable, that one must be careful when using words. The lyrics often resemble juvenile love letters to your middle school girlfriend. Just exchange the word "God" for, say, "Clarissa", and wallah, you'll be holding hands in the hallway after homeroom.

Of course, it could just boil down to a simple matter of taste, in which I'm snubbing my nose at the music because it just doesn't float my boat. Or even worse, I could be guilty of snobbish pride, looking with disdain on music that I see as beneath my own high standards, in which case I need to repent. But really, I don't think that is the case. If our faith is deeper than deep, if the way of the cross is more profound than any philosophy, any religious doctrine, then perhaps the music should challenge us more, should ease us out of the baby pool of smiling happy faces and towards the penetrating mysteries of the Gospel. Because, as a friend recently put it, Jesus is much cooler than the songs we sing to Him.

Which is why I'm always overjoyed to stumble across the exceptions. Here are two albums that cut deep in their intentions to bring worthy worship to Christ. And they don't require happy faces and clappy handseys, although both can and will occur spontaneously!

The first is Indelible Grace: Hymn Sing, Live in Nashville which showcases an incredible live performance by the Indelible Grace crew. Indelible Grace has put out a number of albums, six to be exact, full of new arrangements of old hymns. The musicianship certainly breathes new life into the old hymns, but it is the lyrics themselves that still speak so powerfully through the years. And this live show is a gem, featuring RUF campus minister Kevin Twit giving background information to a lot of the old hymns and their composers. From the opening "In the Hours", sung by Emily DeLoach, it becomes apparent that this night the walls of the historic Ryman Auditorium (once home of the Grand Ol' Opry) are gonna come crumbling down. Sprawling guitars, organs, piano, and backing vocals reach a frenzied crescendo that nearly reaches face-melting proportions; and yet, it's never far from one's heart that these are Gospel songs, songs sung to the Most High, fervent prayers shouted at times, sung softly and delicately in other places, and crying pleas to the Lord. The album is an intimate experience, often putting the listener right there in the theater, sharing in the Grace that fell on Nashville that special night. I have some favorites: "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah", "Arise My Soul", "Jesus I My Cross Have Taken", just to name a few; but really, each song is a shining pearl.

Grace is the album by Mars Hill Church Seattle worship leader Joe Day. I waited for this album for so long that I missed its drop by a long shot. The album is full of songs that have been part of
the various music ministries of Mars Hill campuses for years, and I have listened over and over to many versions available on-line at the Mars Hill website. The album is a slightly more polished version of these songs usually sung on Sundays, but it doesn't lack in edge and in the honest simplicity of its lyrics, which explore what the Gospel means from all angles: from joy, from despair, from doubt, from death to redemption, from darkness to life and light. The opening lyrics to the first track, "Death to Life", are a good indication that these are deeply personal songs: "I was a prodigal son, I was hellbound on my own/ I was a wondering sheep, til you came and rescued me." Some long time favorites of mine are fine tuned and well-crafted on the album, songs like "I Look at the Cross", "Surrender", and "Christ is Risen" are all hard hitting tunes that belong as equally in a church sanctuary as in a Seattle coffee house.

If these interest you, you can find them both on I-tunes. Even better, you can buy digital downloads directly from the artists' websites, along with materials like sheet music, demos, and tools for worship leaders.


http://indeliblegrace.bandcamp.com/album/the-hymn-sing-live-in-nashville

www.joedaymusic.com

Sheet music for Indelible Grace:
http://www.igracemusic.com/hymnbook/hymns.html

You Shall Know Our Velocity is Dave Egger’s story of two twenty-something men who find themselves with a windfall of cash and a case of wanderlust that carries them across the Atlantic into Africa and Eastern Europe with the hope of giving all the money away. Mutual absurdity seems to be the glue that holds the friendship between the two adventurers together—they are eccentric, immature, irresponsible, juvenile, and largely ignorant of what they are doing. Yet, there is something pure in their intentions. Underneath years of hooliganary, teenage experimentation, sin, and antics, they are idealists searching for true acts of love. What the journey unveils is not just a search for pure action, but also a search for an answer from the heavens, from the universe, from God. The death of a close friend has ravaged the souls of the two often juvenile but sometimes piercingly sensitive men, and each in their own way is trying to sort out what the world will show them. It is a search for the hidden code of a world abroad that may unveil the extent of their loss and the meaning of the gaping absence left by death. In certain flashes there is some light shown through people they meet, often just enough to keep Will, our narrator, just above the madness, despair, and existential crisis that threaten his annihilation. The journey through the pages of Egger’s book is often full of the ridiculous, much like a twenty first century On The Road smashed together with Dumb and Dumber; but its sporadic flashes of ambiguous nudges from something greater is what the novel truly hinges on.