The song selection process

Planning a church’s song selection is a process which I’ve never had the pleasure of doing before now. I’m finding it a fun process to be involved in, but it’s also highlighting how it can make a lot of impact on both your church’s approach to music as well as the resulting culture that emerges.

In many senses our song selection process doesn’t differ all that much from most other churches. There has, however, been some minor confusion over how it relates to the type of music we’re doing, so I thought I’d briefly spend some time highlighting our thinking and approach.

The songs

Let’s get the biggest point out of the way: we’re singing normal church songs.

We don’t have a special source of songs that already cater to our genres of choice, and we’re not writing new material just for our church to make Soma Music happen. We want music that people can connect with easily, and there is already a huge number of talented writers creating music for churches: we definitely intend to use their gifts!

While getting my head around the first stages of music for Soma, I began to build a master list of songs that I thought would function well as a staple selection for our meetings. It is by no means a list of the only songs we’ll be singing, but it represents the material we’ll draw from most frequently.

In keeping with Soma’s hopes to be doing something new, I set out to create a list that consisted of around 60% material that was at least new to most of our core group. In the end this probably became about 50%. Keep in mind that the new material is often by writers that have written other songs that we sing – it’s not completely new.

The kinds of songs we want to sing

What are the attributes of a great church song? Here are a few beginning thoughts:

• Lyrics that reflect accurately something of:
  • who we are as God’s people
  • who God is
  • who Jesus is
  • what God has done
  • what God is doing
• Lyrics that don’t just focus on the results of the above, but also the broader concepts behind them
• Interesting, engaging melodies
• Inventive yet accessible music
• Ability to be sung by a church full of people both with and without musical abilities
• Lyrics that can be backed up by scripture
• A realness tying the lyrical and musical content together. If it’s reflective, it should be really reflective. If it’s excited, it should be really excited.
  • Obviously this varies from person to person – in particular it varies by generation and cultural background. My idea of excitement might not end up being future generations’ ideas of excitement (I hope that I’ll still be able to relate to it though!)

What we’re leaving out

One of the most frequent comments I get about some church music from people outside the environment (often people that would identify themselves as non-Christians) is that the songs just aren’t that engaging, nor do feel like they’re getting a sense of “realness” from them. I think they may well have a point. Sometimes this might be simply due to execution – a lack of enthusiasm or energy coming from the musicians themselves (sometimes because social norms or constraints) – but often it can be the music itself as well. As a result, I’ve tended to apply a fairly heavy filter on songs that simply don’t musically and lyrically feel like they connect with people. This is subjective to some extent, but hopefully with enough feedback from our church we’ll be able to gradually get an accurate idea of how different people perceive different songs.

To put this another way: we don’t want to sing bad music just because it has great words (in the same way that we don’t want to sing bad content just because it has great music). If you think that’s heretical, why do you think hymn rewrites are so popular?

Generally speaking, I’m finding it very difficult to justify including songs that lyrically only deal with concepts at the surface level without fleshing them out. I haven’t made a hard and fast rule to exclude songs like this, but generally they get ranked lower if they don’t actually provide some substance with the content (if you don’t understand what I’m talking about, go find the lyrics for Neverending by David Crowder Band. there, I’ve slagged a song. that will be the only one!)

What about Hillsong?

Please, let’s find another war to fight! If the songs have great lyrics and music, why wouldn’t we sing them?

Some thoughts about content, directionally speaking

We’ve had some great discussions lately about the nature of the content in church songs, and in particular the ways we tend to favor certain lyrical outlooks over others. As I see it right at the moment, there are three main relational “directions” that church song content is usually written to represent: (there are probably more, but these are the main ones)

1. Songs written for us to sing to God
   • Prayer (e.g. for us, our church or the world around us)
   • Praise (e.g. thanking God for what he’s done)
2. Songs written for us to sing to each other
   • Declaring truth (e.g. proclamation)
   • Preaching to one another (again, often proclamation)
3. Songs written for us to sing to ourselves
   • Preaching to ourselves (e.g. exhortation)
   • Emphasizing personal resolve (e.g. indicating that we desire to change)

Generally speaking, I think the churches that many of us come from emphasize the second category, and lessen the attention given to the other two. It’s not that we only sing songs that address the second category, it seems to lie more within the attitude that manifests itself through the culture and execution of our church music. Why is that?

Let’s try and get some biblical perspective on this issue. References to music in the New Testament aren’t that frequent, but the ones that are there are worth pondering.

• It seems apparent that singing songs to each other is something we should do (Eph 5:19, Col 3:16), but…
• Paul and Silas also sang hymns to God (Acts 16:25)
• We’re encouraged to sing songs of praise (James 5:13), obviously about God, but it doesn’t specify who we should sing them to.
• 1 Cor 14 has some helpful discussion on prophecy vs tongues, which is relevant in that it discusses how we should hope to encourage each other rather than focusing on our direct line to God. Paul relates this to singing in verse 15.
• In the OT, the Psalms cover all of the above-mentioned territories. Some are deeply personal reflections, some are written to encourage the writer’s soul, some are intended to rally people to recognize God’s work, while still others are pure God-directed praise. A whole blog post could be written on this book and the ways it could be relevant to our perspective on church music, but I’ll save that for another time.

Attempting to put all this together

Most of the above passages don’t give a neat, prescriptive answer to the question of who our content should be directed towards – the Corinthians one probably gets the closest. What I’d take from that for church music is that it’s helpful to get amongst content that doesn’t have the effect of including some but excluding others.

For example, I think it’s less valuable to sing songs that assert where we are at emotionally. If a song said “I’m so happy because I’m praising you”, is that alienating to someone who is really having a hard time seeing God’s goodness? I suspect so.

Much has been said on this subject before, so let me get to where I’ve ended up in my thinking.

Teaching through words, encouragement through singing

My thinking at this point in time is that from a content standpoint, it’s best to sing songs that focus on absolute, objective truth. It’s fitting, right and proper to sing of God’s goodness irrespective of how we feel. It’s harder to sing about our emotions the lyrics don’t actually follow how we feel right at a given point in time.

Who we’re singing the words to is less of an issue. I think we’re staying true to the 1 Corinthians 14 model even when we sing content directly to God or to ourselves, providing we don’t intend to lose focus on the fact that we are all singing the same words. That means that as a community, we gain encouragement from the fact that the truth we are singing is true for all of us.

Fin.

This has ended up being a lengthier post than I originally intended. It’s a subject that I’m still getting my head around, and one that I’d love any thoughts on. Feel free to contribute them either by leaving a comment or getting in touch directly!