The Music Inside Me

“The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.”

J.S Bach

 

When your greatest passions in life are teaching and music, you often times see the world a little differently than others.  Add to that traveling and living in different places all across the world, and I’ve come to learn that I have a view of the world that not a whole lot of people have; through a rose colored artistic lens.

 

When most people hear music, they listen, and hear lyrics, melody, maybe harmony.  They may think “Oh, what a catchy song!” or “Man, this sounds like a sack of dying cats that have laryngitis.”  When I hear music, I don’t just hear melody and harmony. I hear interactions between instruments, musical lines, musical lines and instruments. As a result of this, I don’t really listen to music for fun very often. Whatever I’m doing when I listen to music takes a back seat to listening, breaking down and analyzing a song. This would be great if I was a sound engineer, and when I was a music teacher. My students will attest to the fact that I can pick out an out of tune player among many, because I listen for it. I can’t really help it, I just do. I can usually tell when a song was recorded with real instruments or if the instrument was digitally inserted into a song. I listen differently.

 

When I returned to my hometown of Parker in the summer of 2016, I felt lost. I thought teaching and music had to coincide; my two passions linked together that should never be separated. Thankfully, I was wrong.  I soon found myself playing bass on the worship team at church.  I was a little worried about not having a good way to continue to play music when I moved home, but the invitation to join the worship team came as a welcome relief.  A lot of the songs we play really connect with me at a heart level, and hopefully they connect with the church body at as well. Which really got me thinking; Do other cultures create their own worship music, or do they use translated versions or original version of western songs? And then a step further, do those translated worship songs resonate with the people?

 

The idea of culturally appropriate worship has since become an itching passion of mine. If God is the center of worshiping, I don’t believe that there is a right or wrong way to worship.  If a church’s worship isn’t culturally relevant to its members, is it centered on God? Maybe, but most likely the people of the church are distracted or unengaged, because it’s not THEIR music, THEIR culture. Imagine a hip-hop or rap worship session in amish Pennsylvania. Yeah, I chuckled a bit too.  It would be interesting, but would God be worshipped? Would the focus of attention be on God? We need to avoid the temptation to push our ideas of what are “good” ways to worship and what are good worship songs on other people, other cultures, not because we don’t want to be offensive or pushy or anything like that. But because it needs to be relevant.   Even from church to church within the US, worship needs to look different. There is no one way to do it. As long as doxology and theology coincide and are seen as equal, music will move you.

 

Shai Linne says it best:

 

 

And here lies my passion. I love music, I love teaching, and I love God.  It’s time to combine them. Teaching people the theory of the music of their own culture, and the attributes of God and why we should be worshipping Him and only Him, in light of the Gospel, and encouraging them to write songs for themselves, from their own point of view, for their church and culture, for the glory of God.