Worship Leading: Song selection

Here are 3 criteria/lenses that I find helpful when choosing songs for our corporate worship times.

1.       Theological

2 aspects:

-Songs that are God oriented, not “me” focused. The great error in the modern church (I’m generalising here) is getting stuck in an adolescent type phase where everything is all about me. Our Christianity becomes a roller coaster experience based on feelings, circumstances and emotions when we denigrate our worship of God to what Christian Smith (author of “Soul Searching”) calls “Christian Moralistic therapeutic deism.” Worship leaders, we are not attempting to become the soundtrack to our congregations lives! Count the number of times personal pronouns of “me”, “I” and the like crop up in the songs we are singing. Make sure we are not just adding to our prevailing culture of idolatry by presenting them with an Oprah-esque type God who can fit in their pocket.

- Songs that are New Covenant in nature. We need to keep forefront in our minds that worship did not tear the heavens open, the blood of Christ did! Worship does not take us into His presence. The blood does! It is again idolatry of the grandest nature when we elevate our worship to a status that is not biblical. So sing about what Jesus has done! Revel in His goodness. Songs that remind people that we have direct access to The Father. Christ is our mediator, not our corporate worship times!

2.       Congregational

3.       Seasonal

The other two will be outworked in the next couple of blogs.