Helping Fix Modern Worship - by Rev. Matthew Littlefield

 I have written about Christian worship from time to time on my blog. One example is this piece from several years ago titled, Modern Worship is Mostly Boring. In this piece I wrote about how limited the range of topics are in modern worship. We often sing about the same small range of topics. These topics are good, necessary and should be part of our worship. But I have long felt that something was missing.

It was not until last year that I put into words what I think is the far bigger problem with worship; that it is inadvertently misleading people. I wrote a piece called, Is Modern Worship Helping Deceive People? In this piece I expanded on my earlier piece, but dove more specifically into the problem with modern worship, we are accidentally catechising people into a shallow, or narrow understanding of the Bible, because of our selective range of worship topics. I even gave an example of how this causes issues,

“One thing that became clear during the covid years is that most Christians had not taken to heart what the Bible says about the corruption of political leaders in this world. This is an incredibly important theme in the Bible. In fact, it is one of the dominant themes of books from Judges, through to 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, all the way through to making up much of the teaching of the minor and major prophets. Yet many Christians thought there was really only one basic passage about government in the Bible, Romans 13, and that we should just inherently trust the powerful. You could not get any further away from the message of the Bible than that. The Bible’s reflections on power and the powerful in this world are far more detailed and intelligent than that, encouraging deep scepticism of the powerful and shrewd dealings with the leaders of this world. But many Christians are unaware of this.....

Full text:

https://revmatthewlittlefield.substack.com/p/helping-fix-modern-worship?publication_id=1182452&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=y7h5a&utm_medium=email 

.....The point of this post is to show that we can now do something about modern worship ourselves. There are many wonderful songs, and some amazing Christian musicians. The church is blessed. I love the worship at my own church, because each musician brings a different flavour to the worship set and they all work hard to broaden the themes that we sing in church. We are blessed at our church. I know many churches also do a great job of worship. But many have a very narrow focus in their worship and it shows in how many Christians think.

Now, we can go even further, we can write lyrics ourselves and turn them into songs and sing them at home. And even better, we can use the very words of scripture to make incredible music. If you have issues with modern worship, or you just want to worship God in a style you prefer that you can’t find elsewhere, you can now do something to help fix it.