Introducing Soma Music

To properly get this blog started, I thought I’d give a quick summary of where the Soma Music project is at in concept right now to give you a bit of idea of what our intentions and hopes for it are. Much of our thinking is still in formation so we’d love to get your feedback on the cultural, theological and even logistical implications of what we’re trying to do.

There are three core aspects to our music project that I’d like to discuss in detail, these being:

• The goals of Soma Music
• How we hope to realise these goals
• Why it’s worth bothering about

First, a backgrounder

I’m conscious that there may end up being people from a diverse range of backgrounds reading this, so let me quickly give you an idea of where the Soma core team’s collective cultural background comes from (generally speaking).

Our team is made up of people from a variety of theologically Bible-based, Christ-centred churches – many of these being within the Sydney Anglican network (note that the Sydney Anglican bit wasn’t a criteria for people joining the team!) As a result, we’ve been influenced by the culture of the churches we’ve grown within and built networks around, so I’m going to be largely writing with this context in mind.

As a result, various bits of content on this blog may seem new to some and perfectly normal to others. That will depend on your background – but hopefully the content will still be relevant and encouraging nonetheless!

The goals of Soma Music

When describing Soma as a church, there have been two recurrent one-liners that keep coming up for the type of church we want to plant:

• “theologically conservative, but culturally progressive and adaptive”
• “a church for the people that our current churches aren’t connecting with”

One of the goals of Soma (the church as a whole) is, in effect, to encourage people to worship God in ways that reflect these two concepts (broad though they may be). Applying this idea to Soma Music, we’ve come up with the following goals:

• We want to be singing content that is biblically sound
• We want music that is compatible with our current cultural context – a reflection of the musical palette and styles of expression that your average person in 2009 has and exhibits.
• We want to aim to do music in a way that isn’t being done anywhere else.
  • Our most basic rationale for this is that it serves as a defining way to reinforce that we’re approaching church differently, for people that aren’t connecting with existing churches.
  • More crucially, however, creating unique music is something we want to be a key expression and example of using our God-given creativity to create compelling, engaging music that people really dig.
  • As a result, we hope that all of this serves to encourage people to be expressive, excited and creative as they worship their creator.

How we hope to realise these goals

To address the above three goals, here are three practical things that Soma Music is planning to do:

• Pick music that gives insight to a solid, biblically-informed Christian worldview – in particular that which is focused on God, his attributes, his work and his church.
• Experiment with ways to create music that is culturally-savvy.
• Follow our creative instincts and seek to not merely “ape” existing genres and their cliches, but instead aim to have our music projects to sound unique and innovative on their own terms – not only as compared to other churches but within the music world as a whole.

In a nutshell: we want great music. We’re hoping to be able to foster a creative community that give birth to fantastic, compelling, God-glorifying music that will in turn also encourage his church and hold its own – regardless of the environment – as great music.

Why it’s worth bothering about

In some senses, we don’t need to do a lot of arguing in defense of whether we should have music in church at all. For a start, it’s a normal part of expression in most church services – and there’s plenty of biblical evidence for music being a normal part of the early church’s everyday life, and that’s before we factor in the huge number of ways that music was intrinsic to Israel’s culture in the Old Testament.

But why is it worth bothering about what we’re talking about in this blog? Why try and do something new? Why such a big deal about doing it well? There’s not such a great amount of biblical backing that can stand for or against this, but at the very least we should intend to build each other up with what we’re doing (1 Cor 14:26). Our hope for this approach is that it will serve to revitalise and give people a chance to re-evaluate how they express love and adoration for God – “shaking things up”, if you will.

Really, though, we’re hoping it will have a longer lasting impact of giving people another channel to express more fully what they believe in ways that might not be possible through words alone.

One criticism I hear time and time again from non-Christian friends and acquaintances is that they wish churches would just “get real”. There are many things that they could mean by this, but hopefully by is actually spending significant time caring about something that they can connect with, it will serve to give them a sense of just how “real” Christians can be.

In conclusion

You managed to read all that? Nice work! There’s not much that’s practical about this post and, as such, it’s a little dense and largely theoretical but also valuable as groundwork laid down for us to build on top of in future posts.

If you’ve got thoughts, questions, concerns or recipe ideas, feel free to drop them in the comments below.