Don’t get me wrong; I prefer the newer music. I enjoy the mix of instruments. But I spend many church services and functions wondering where worship leaders got the idea that worshipping God means repeating the same few words over and over and over and over again. For some reason this grates on my nerves and prevents me from worshipping. It doesn’t seem to affect most other Christians, but it set me to pondering the subject. I used to think I don’t relate to God emotionally, but I realized that’s not true. I’ve learned from conversations that some people pay more attention to the music than the lyrics. I’m the opposite. I hear the music, but the words have to mean something to me. When I was in the Navy in the 90’s, there was a song on the radio that I couldn’t stand because of the lyrics. My friend only heard the beat, which I admit was good, but I couldn’t tolerate the whole song because the lyrics annoyed me. It is probably the same for me with worship.
Many of the great old hymns didn’t even have a chorus. Joy To The World, Amazing Grace, A Mighty Fortress, and other great hymns were made up of verses. I’ve never heard A Mighty Fortress sung in the evangelical churches I’ve been to, but other greats have been modified. Now when we sing Joy To The World, at most it’s two verses of the original four combined with a repetitive chorus. Same for Amazing Grace. At some point, a worship leader (I heard it was Chris Tomlin) thought “You know, I really like Amazing Grace, but it doesn’t have a chorus I can sing 25 times. Oh, I know, I’ll write one!” But in the version we usually sing in church, my favorite verse often gets cut out of the song. Like John Newton, I was a sailor and also like him, I almost got swept overboard by a wave, so I really like “Through many dangers, toils, and snares, I have already come. Twas grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.” But now the chorus gets repeated instead of that verse, which has special meaning to me because I’ve experienced God’s grace through dangers of my own.
I was impressed to learn that so far, the version of Be Thou My Vision we sing has not yet been modified with a chorus. But the last time it came up in a worship set, we sang the last verse twice, because I guess worship leaders don’t think we’re honoring God if we don’t repeat SOMETHING.
I have a theory about how this happened. I think it was during one of those phases where the church started thinking about becoming more relevant to younger generations, so they took how the world makes music and baptized it. Now our songs are just like what you hear on the radio, but they’re about Jesus!
One of my favorite bands currently is Skillet. I don’t think they license their music for worship, even though I would love to sing some of their songs. (I know, we’re not going to be singing Burn It Down in church but Lions, Refuge, and Stars would be nice additions.) On a Sunday a few weeks ago, I realized I would love to hear a Skillet cover of King of Kings. Their songs are usually structured like this:
Verse 1
Chorus
Verse 2
Chorus
Bridge
Chorus
done.
A typical contemporary worship song will do the first verse and chorus, but after the second verse, the chorus and bridge get repeated several times. I have quite a few contemporary worships songs in my Apple Music library, and many of them just sing through the song, while others repeat the chorus so much I have to skip to the next song.
I’ve asked a few people about this. We used to have a student pastor with a music degree, so I talked to him about it. But people take it so much for granted it feels like I’m the only one to ask “Why?” So far, the only answer I have is my theory that during a period when the church sought relevance to younger generations, they baptized the way the world makes music.
I know there are practical considerations. Many worship teams rely on volunteers who have limited rehearsal time. But I wonder whether we’ve also gotten accustomed to stretching three songs into twenty minutes when we could simply sing four or five songs without all the repetition.
A Possible Explanation
A possible answer came to me after one church service ended with the worship leader beating the chorus to the final song to death and me trying very hard not to groan out loud.
I suspect the desire to make church more relevant helped bring contemporary music into worship. But somewhere along the way, the commercial worship industry developed its own conventions, and churches began adopting those conventions without necessarily asking whether they improved congregational worship.
Now, I don’t know how and why worship leaders became convinced that worshipping God requires constant repetition of an already repetitive chorus, and I’m going to continue exploring this subject. Maybe there’s a good reason for all the repetition, but so far nobody has been able to explain it to me. And I can’t help wondering what would happen if we simply sang the songs as written, moved on to the next one, and let the words do the work.
Granted, this could just be how my mind interacts with the world, which often seems unique from how other people experience it. I generally don’t accept “We’ve always done it this way” as an explanation. I never have. I’ve often heard a quote attributed to Socrates “The unexamined life is not worth living” and I’ve developed a practice of examining life. When I look around the Sanctuary, other people seem to be really into the worship, lifting their hands and showing facial expressions indicating it really moves them. I’m the one sitting there mumbling “We’ve already sung this chorus three times. I get the point. Can we please move on?”
What Is Worship Supposed to Accomplish?
Colossians 3:16 connects singing with teaching and admonishing one another. When repetition displaces substantive lyrics, we may be sacrificing opportunities to teach and reinforce biblical truth in favor of prolonging an emotional experience.
I know repetition itself isn’t unbiblical. Psalm 136 repeats the same refrain 26 times. But there’s a difference between repetition that reinforces truth and repetition that replaces substantive lyrics. Repetition can reinforce meaning.
But repetition can also displace meaning. Consider two situations.
A congregation sings a refrain several times because its words express a central theological truth that deserves emphasis. That’s not necessarily a problem. But suppose a congregation sings the same relatively simple chorus repeatedly while omitting verses containing substantial theological content, like we now do with Joy To The World and Amazing Grace. Now repetition isn’t reinforcing the content. It’s replacing it. And this is how I often experience repetition in congregational worship. We’re leaving substantial theology in two verses of Joy To The World on the table so we can keep repeating “Joy! Unspeakable joy!”
Matthew 6:7 warns against using vain repetition as the heathens do. Every time I hear an Evangelical accuse Catholics of vain repetition in their Rosary prayers, I want to ask “Have you heard our worship music?”
