Stonebrook Music

Jamie Brown recently gave some great suggestions on how to improve the corporate worship of the Church. The suggestions from this short but important blog post are all things that we have worked on at Stonebrook, but we want to continue striving to do them better for the glory of God and the edification of the gathered Church.

Good post by Mark Altrogge (who has written several of the songs we use on Sunday morning) on how we should pick songs to sing in church.

His points: briefly:

• Are doctrinally sound (Is it biblically accurate? Years ago, we sang a song about blowing a trumpet and victory and when I looked up the passage in the Bible it was about God’s judgment on his people)
• Are significant (“Joy is the flag flown from the castle of my heart when the king is in residence there” – wave your handkerchief above your head as you sing – it’s probably true but is it significant?)
• Have creative lyrics (Come on now, we can do better than “You saved my soul and made me whole”), yet “literarily apt and thoughtful” (One man I know once said, “God is so good – he’s like a greasy piece of fried chicken” – creative, but the metaphor doesn’t work too well)
• Have good music (Raise your hand if you want boring music and melodies)
• Have music that’s appropriate for the lyrics (Does a snarling death-growl vocal fit lyrics declaring the holiness and majesty of God? Maybe it could to some, but if possible we should seek to appeal to a wide audience). We should seek music and melodies that highlight the lyrics.

9 Marks has a good blog post about what the new testament says we should do when we gather, adapted from the book Give Praise to God: A Vision for Reforming Worship. The five short points:

1. Read the Bible
2. Preach the Bible
3. Pray the Bible
4. Sing the Bible
5. See the Bible (in the sacraments of Baptism and The Lord’s Supper)

These (and a couple others) are exactly the elements of corporate worship we will be discussing in the first session of our Music Ministry Workshop on October 15.