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Worship or War?

Handling Church Conflict Before it Becomes a Crisis

An Interview with Pastor Jim Bradford

As a pastor and church leader, you are familiar with what some have called the “Worship War.” How do you view this tension?

I don’t like the term “worship war.” Usually this idea refers to the polarizing question, “Are the old hymns better for worship, or should we go with the newer choruses?”

I view music as a “language.” Different generations speak different languages. Today we need multiple music languages in the church. One of my roles as a pastor is to help people understand this.

How do you help your people come together on an issue that can be so divisive?

In my experience, seniors and young adults are the two groups that tend to complain the most, and their ideas of meaningful worship appear to come from opposite directions.

When we experience times of tension, I may say to the seniors, “I probably cannot give you all you want in a primary service—hymns and older choruses from beginning to end. The worship service may not completely satisfy you, but don’t you want a church where your kids and grandkids want to come and worship?” In this way I talk to seniors about worship in a language they understand. Seniors want their children and grandchildren—the younger generation—to enjoy coming to their church and worshipping the Lord. So I ask them for tolerance, encouraging them to grow with us in this. At Central Assembly, we have a large number of senior adults, so we have hymn-sing nights and encourage the singing of hymns in our Sunday School classes.

But if music is a language for each generation, we cannot build a church using only one language. When I talk to the younger generation, I tell them we need the hymns. I might do a message where I intertwine worship with the preaching of the Word. I will illustrate with hymns or talk about the Scripture behind certain hymns, and then sing them. But more importantly, I instruct them and walk them through what worship really is.

We need to have our own kind of worship. We need to be able to worship in our own musical language. But we also need tolerance, living with generosity toward one another. In my opinion, the older generations have a greater responsibility to defer to the younger generation than vice versa. As those who are more mature, they should be quicker to default to the needs of the younger, much like a parent to the child.

What can we understand about the changes in worship that might help us dialogue with multiple generations?

Most of us are aware of a change in worship style, but we should also understand that worship has changed in focus or direction. Hymns of the past were mostly declarative. We would speak to each other about the goodness of God. Now we talk directly to God.

Interestingly, a criticism of today’s worship music is that it is too “me-centered” and repetitive. But when early Pentecostals used to sing around the altar, they sang songs much like we sing today! The altar time was about adoration. We used to do it all the time!

What has happened, then, is that we’ve moved the altar time right up to the beginning of the service. We used to look at the service as a time of declaration. Back then the worship and the preaching declared the glories of God. The altar time was the expected time of adoration and response to the message. But now, the musical content of this response has become our worship.

Out of a hunger for God, we have moved some of the altar to the song service. Our worship time is longer, repetitive, and experiential. Many churches today do not have a response or altar time after a message, so this kind of worship fills a vital role in helping people adore God.

What about volume? What do you say to groups in your church who think the music is too loud, or not loud enough?

Volume is an issue. When I pastored in Canada, it was in an evangelical church just outside the city. Even though it wasn’t Pentecostal, our worship was very similar to Pentecostal worship.

We dealt with the volume issue by having a different volume level in each of our Sunday morning services. We actually measured it with a decibel meter! The first service had a lower volume, the second was a little louder, and the third was the loudest. Even though the song services were the same, the perception was that our first service was the most conservative.

What are some things to keep in mind when trying to strike a balance?

Even in contemporary worship we need to be careful to have balance and substance. Some contemporary songs are very narrow. Others, however, are much like hymns, having several verses that are full of content. Many are hymns, and this needs to be pointed out.

While many are quick to criticize contemporary worship, few give traditional music the same scrutiny. If we applied some of the same standards we use to judge contemporary music to traditional hymns, I believe many times the contemporary would come out on top. For example, when we sing “And he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own,” we use “I” or “me” seven times in the first two phrases. Also in that hymn are the words, “And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.” That’s nice, but how can we know no one else has had as great an encounter with God as we have had? In this hymn, the world revolves around me and that is exactly what is criticized in contemporary music. If we want to evaluate today’s music on these terms, we need to hold traditional music to the same standard.

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Jim Bradford, Ph.D., is the senior pastor of Central Assembly of God in Springfield, Missouri.

 

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