Why “Worship” Music Needs Rebranding

Worship leaders, I’m deeply thankful for your investment of talent, hard work, and dedication to celebrating God via music.

But I’m a writer, and if there’s one thing we writers get hung up on, it’s word choice.

So, I hope you’ll permit me a few minutes to explain why we need to rethink the way we verbalize your vital ministry.

Subconscious Messaging

The emergence of the wildly popular genre of CCM has subtly changed what many Christians associate with the word “worship.”

Nowadays, when many of us hear that word, we tend to think of bands, impactful songs, and the few minutes on Sunday when we sing them.

Worship is about full life-orientation towards God, it’s more than just music. 

If we relegate worship to Sunday morning songs, we risk making it into something consumeristic.

This is more of a risk for larger churches but worth mentioning nonetheless. 

If worship is just listening and singing, it can easily turn into a concertlike experience. 

In reality, worship should engage the entire person. It’s not a commodity we receive but a sacrifice of love we give to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Furthermore, conflating music with worship diminishes spiritual practices like prayer, fasting, and Scripture, all of which are vital forms of worship in themselves.

The Song of Worship

Let me make something clear: I’m not diminishing music or the vital ministries that provide it in our places of worship.

All I’m trying to do is get us to rethink how we phrase things.

Instead of worship leaders, let’s have music leaders who lead music ministries (or another more accurate term).

In doing so, let’s also emphasize just how wide-reaching worship is and elevate the place of underrepresented spiritual practices in it.

So, to all the music leaders out there, thank you for all you do in cultivating worship through the age-old Christian art of the song.

And to the Church’s prayer warriors, teachers, deacons, evangelists, pastors, elders, and more, thank you for contributing to worship in your many, diversified ways. 

To quote a writer who was way better at worshiping with words than I am:

One God, one worship, many expressions.

May we have the grace to see it as such.

For now, be blessed.

Jon,

Theophilus Newsletter